Best Practices in Geospatial Metadata

Notes: View the community notes Google doc for this session.

Session Type: Working Session

Materials: Session slides, working materials, documentation, and other info can be found here.

Session Description

Is it Mount McKinley or is it Denali?

Or is it 63.0695, -151.0074?

Maybe it is http://viaf.org/viaf/241195889?

In 1866, was it in Russia or in the United States?

Just how do you record geospatial data in your digital library?

The Utah Academic Library Consortium Digitization Committee and the Mountain West Digital Library have developed the Geospatial Discovery Task Force to examine that very question. The 39 member team comprised of contributors from around the country have spent the last year investigating a variety of geospatial controlled vocabularies, comparing their current practices, and evaluating geospatial tools and interfaces.

Considerations that informed the collaborative work of the task force included:

  • The needs of multiple digital library platforms
  • Variety of digital content and descriptive metadata
  • Possibilities for geospatial metadata enhancement in a harvested environment, particularly for aggregations such as the Digital Public Library of America
  • Existing and future training needs of digital library staff

This working session will provide an opportunity for feedback on proposed geospatial recommendations and open a discussion on the next steps and best practices for recording geospatial information in the digital library community. Participants will have an opportunity to test out the newly developed geospatial metadata decision tree with scenarios from their own digital collections, and refine this tool for use in their libraries and institutions.

Session Leaders Liz Woolcott, Utah State University Anna Neatrour, Mountain West Digital Library Rachel Wittmann, Clemson University Sandra McIntyre, Mountain West Digital Library Kristen Jensen, Utah Department of Heritage and Arts Dustin Olson, Utah State University Greta Bahnemann, University of Minnesota