Metadata Revisited: Updating Metadata Profiles and Practices in a Vendor-Hosted Repository

Implemented as a way to host open-access journals, the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries institutional repository (IR) expanded into collecting other researcher-created materials, a process that did not always include clear metadata and descriptive guidelines. Series-specific settings, unclear field definitions, and other varying practices created an inconsistent bibliographic database, however, and the unclear field definitions and lack of thorough internal documentation pointed to issues that would need to be addressed if the Libraries wanted to reliably share its IR metadata with its discovery layer and external harvesters and aggregators. To resolve this problem, UNLV undertook a metadata review intended to reconcile the fields used and provide recommendations on vocabularies and standards for capturing metadata. Through a collaborative, iterative process, the Metadata Review Team suggested and implemented changes to the IR’s metadata structures, in consultation with vendor support, resulting in improved descriptive policies for IR resources.