Post-Meeting Thoughts

Meeting with - Paul Johnson (Subject & Learning Support Librarian) / Ian Haydock (Information Systems Manager)

Overview of the meeting: a general open meeting about metadata and the concepts of the project. There was an element of scoping the project with some input from their experiences from their own work with metadata.

They agreed that the following approaches may prove useful:

• Organising a database structure for the documents in HIVE (see image) - representing the collection (e.g. folder and sub-folder structure that reflects faculties and depts.)
  
• Using Dublin Core Schema (simple) for top level searching of docs.
  
• For 'value' and textual searches - developing a tagging cloud for the document (entered in the 'Subject and Keywords' meta tag element - see image below)
• Using the relation meta tag to link 'process' documents
  

Searchable Tag Clouds (see image left)
Tagging has a a few issues, not least that tagging can be person and context specific. It was suggested that it may be necessary ask validation authors to enter keywords on the documents (aiding data entry for future documents). This solution is useful - especially if you ask users to select keywords from a library (similar to a category list). This challenges the issues associated with tagging synonyms - where 2 users may enter 2 different words but describing the same attribute - for example- Blue vs. Azure. One additional concern is that recommended tag 'keywords' must be developed as extensively as possible at the start of the project - as retrospective tagging will be resource intensive.

Findability
It was discussed that some work may be necessary to develop a search form that allows users to interrogate the HIVE database - for example offering a series of 'keywords' to search against (known tag cloud) - or allow them to 'drill-down' using the faculty school structure.

Additional comment
It was mentioned that documents could have an expiry date - so it may be worth investigating whether validation documents have a 'use-by' date in respect of them reflecting current validation policies and procedures.

What next?

• Speak to current or experienced members of staff who have been involved in the validation process - asking them about how their experiences of it.
• Examine historic validation documents to build up a picture of categories and associated keywords that could be used to reflect the value of the documents (for example - common issues that validation panels encounter) - this has been started and is on-going