Building the Picture Behind a Dataset

As part of the European Commission funded FREYA project The British Library wanted to explore the possibility of developing provenance information in datasets derived from the British Library’s collections, the data.bl.uk collection. Provenance information is defined in this context as ‘information relating to the origin, source and curation of the datasets’. Provenance information is also identified within the FAIR principles as an important aspect of being able to reuse and understand research datasets. According to the FAIR principles, the aim is to understand how to cite and acknowledge the dataset as well as understanding how the dataset was created and has been processed. There is also reference to the importance of this metadata being machine readable. By enhancing the metadata of these datasets with additional persistent identifiers and metadata a fuller picture of the datasets and their content could be understood. This also adds to the veracity and understanding the dataset by end users of data.bl.uk.