Dr. Swain and MIS student Jill Wagy will present a poster session at the 2006 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in June 2006.
Authors: Deborah Swain, Ph.D.; Jill Wagy, MLS.; Marilyn McClelland, Ph.D.; and Patricia Jacobs,Shodor Foundation
The presentation traces ongoing efforts to develop and refine a metadata schema for the Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD). Design and development is informed by evolving metadata standards for educational resources, usability studies, audience analysis, and interoperability guidelines for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), NSDL Metadata Registry, and digital libraries, such as Merlot. A poster will illustrate and define each of these as "facets" of metadata structures.
The CSERD metadata schema was first developed utilizing a subset of the simple Dublin Core metadata element set to describe computational science learning resources. Although this allowed smooth OAI integration of CSERD to share basic metadata with NSDL, the schema was inadequate to support user requests for richer browsing, targeted searches, and federated searches with other digital libraries. In addition, there were no metadata elements to support the quality review process of verification, validation and accreditation (VV&A) of learning materials
CSERD enlisted a team from the graduate School of Library and Information Sciences (SLIS) at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) to research possible metadata schemas and classification systems, conduct usability tests, analyze the results and make recommendations for the new CSERD metadata standards. One perspective the study contributed was the Student User, which resulted in a proposal for new Audience and Education Level tags.