Out of the Woods: Charting Metadata with Digital Tools

In the fall of 2021, a metadata working group was created and charged to streamline the process of evaluating and refining metadata for a retrospective thesis and dissertations digitization (TDD) project at the University of Houston Libraries. The group took to their task by improving existing workflows and reworking scalability through the introduction of an updated automated tool kit created for the team by another member involved with the TDD project. Using MARC records as an existing foundation, metadata was transformed into Dublin Core formatted records with MARCEdit and OpenRefine. Group members then evaluate each Dublin Core metadata record and edit and enhance metadata as needed. As part of the workflow, copyright status is also evaluated and noted in the metadata record. The automated tool kit aids in scaling production by allowing for batch metadata verification, file sorting, and writing EXIF data to the PDF files. This poster highlights the MARC to Dublin Core metadata transformation and the use of the automation tool kit to streamline the metadata process, a necessary step in a large-scale digitization project that promotes accessibility to scholarly materials.