Time to Change the Culture
The precise extent of the work and the
amount of metadata collected will depend on the resources
available. We do not consider that a culture of sustained
metadata creation can be established in less than one
year. The minimum effective time is estimated at 18
months. Ideally, however, we would like to see the position
maintained for a period of two years. This should be
done alongside the roll out and first year of operation
of the Go-Geo! portal. This would cover the initial
period of generating enthusiasm for, and an understanding
of, the importance and relevance of metadata creation;
a support period for 'bedding in' the process during
which we would focus on the quality of new material;
and then a period of six months during which the ongoing
metadata content provision for the portal service would
be assessed, and recommendations made about the future
level of support and maintenance, including for example,
version control and metadata needs for data provision
as opposed to resource discovery.
After this 2-year period by which time
the creation of metadata is viewed as a normal part
of the work of creating or hosting a data set, we foresee
the possibility of using automatic mechanisms to collect
geo-spatial metadata. A scenario in which academic institutions
or departments host software that allows compliant geo-spatial
metadata to be ‘harvested’ seems a sensible one to aim
for but will take time to put into place. (We also recognise
that for individual researchers there may still be a
need for a mechanism by which they can publish (upload)
their metadata to compliant metadata service providers
run by organisations such as the UKDA, EDINA, MIMAS
etc.) A study to investigate what these mechanisms might
be forms part of the work package in the accompanying
Go-Geo! project plan looking at data distribution mechanisms.
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