[OAI-general] Report on Applications for Automated Metadata Generation

[Timothy W. Cole]

The final report described below (and issued last week) is an outgrowth of
the Library of Congress Bibliographic Control Action Plan. Though not
specific to OAI-PMH, I thought it might be of interest since so many of us
are involved in metadata generation and processing.

Tim Cole
University of Illinois at UC  

FORWARDED MESSAGE:
>>> From John D Byrum 03/28/05 12:08 PM >>>
The Library of Congress is pleased to announce publications of the final
report for the AMeGA (Automatic Metadata Generation Applications) project.

	Greenberg, J., Spurgin, K., and Crystal, A.  (2005).
	Final Report for the AMeGA (Automatic Metadata Generation
	Applications) Project.  Submitted to the Library of Congress
	February, 17, 2005. Available at:
	http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/lc_amega_final_report.pdf

The final report can also be found on the Library of Congress Web site for
the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium
at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/actionplan.html, which seeks to
provide leadership to libraries and other information centers in confronting
the challenges of networked resources and the Web.

Dr. Greenberg served as Principal Investigator (PI) for the AMeGA project, a
research grant which lasted a full year. AMeGA stands for _A_utomatic
_Me_tadata _G_eneration _A_pplications project and the project had for goal
to identify and recommend functionalities for applications supporting
automatic metadata generation in the library/bibliographic control
community. The project was conducted in connection Section 4.2 of the
Library of Congress Bibliographic Control Action Plan.  The Action Plan's
charge for section 4.2 is to "Develop specifications for a tool that will
enable libraries to extract [and harvest] metadata from Web-based resources
in order to create catalog records and that will detect and report changes
in resource content and bibliographic data in order to maintain those
records. Communicate the specifications to the vendor community and
encourage their adoption."

The AMeGA research project pursed three main goals:

1) Evaluate the current automatic metadata generation applications (in the
following categories: document presentation software, tools created
specifically for metadata generation, and online library cataloging modules
for creating metadata);

2) Survey metadata professionals to get a consensus on which aspects of
metadata generation are most amenable to automation and semi-automation; and

3) Compile a final report of recommended functionalities for automatic
metadata generation applications. The final report was reviewed and endorsed
by the Metadata Generation Task Force (MGTF).

The report acknowledges the contributions of the MGTF members for their
participation and their expert advice.  In addition, since the final report
was based partially on survey data gathered from a variety of participants
that were recruited via a number of listservs, Dr. Greenberg also expressed
her gratitude for input of the survey participants, both for the quality and
depth of their responses.

To find out more about the AMeGA project, please go to AMeGA Project Web
site:  http://ils.unc.edu/mrc/amega.htm

Apologies for cross-posting that may occur.