Building a Disciplinary Metadata Standards Directory

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Metadata Standards Directory Working Group (MSDWG) is building a directory of descriptive, discipline-specific metadata standards. The purpose of the directory is to promote the discovery, access and use of such standards, thereby improving the state of research data interoperability and reducing duplicative standards development work. This work builds upon the UK Digital Curation Centre’s Disciplinary Metadata Catalogue, a resource created with much the same aim in mind. The first stage of the MSDWG’s work was to update and extend the information contained in the catalogue. In the current, second stage, a new platform is being developed in order to extend the functionality of the directory beyond that of the catalogue, and to make it easier to maintain and sustain. Future work will include making the directory more amenable to use by automated tools. Received 24 October 2013 | Accepted 26 February 2014 Correspondence should be addressed to Alexander Ball, UKOLN Informatics, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY. Email: [email protected] An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 9th International Digital Curation Conference. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. The IJDC is published by the University of Edinburgh on behalf of the Digital Curation Centre. ISSN: 1746-8256. URL: http://www.ijdc.net/ Copyright rests with the authors. This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. For details please see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ International Journal of Digital Curation 2014, Vol. 9, Iss. 1, 142–151. 142 http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.308 DOI: 10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.308 doi:10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.308 Alexander Ball et al. | 143