Answering the Call for more Accountability: Applying Data Profiling to Museum Metadata

Abstract

Although the issue of metadata quality has attracted quite some attention within the metadata research community, the cultural heritage sector is still waiting for the development of methodologies, guidelines and tools to tackle this topic in practice. Research has mainly focused its attention on the library community and aggregated content projects. This article concentrates on the specificity of metadata quality within the museum sector, and describes the possibilities of data-profiling techniques regarding metadata quality evaluation, by applying a general-purpose data-profiling tool on a large collection of metadata records of an ethnographic collection. Based on the results of this case study, we propose further steps in our research, and present the implementation of a metadata quality tool within an open-source collection management software.