ALIA 2001 TAFE libraries conference

Influencing the future: Metadata and TAFE libraries

Irvin Flack and Judy Ryan

Open Training & Education Network - Distance Education (OTEN-DE), Sydney

Biographies

Judy Ryan

Having had a previous life as a teacher, Judy began her career in academic libraries as a temporary librarian at Riverina-Murray Institute of Higher Education (now Charles Sturt University) at Wagga Wagga where she was later appointed Acquisitions Librarian. Judy moved to Sydney in 1988 and worked in two TAFE NSW libraries before becoming Senior Librarian at TAFE's Technical Services Branch. Judy held several senior positions and is now Manager, TAFE Library Collection Services. TLCS has a staff of 31 people providing acquisitions and cataloguing services to the 130 TAFE NSW libraries. Judy says her job is never boring, constantly moving as a reflection of the ever-changing TAFE environment. She has enjoyed being part of the progressive TAFE NSW Online initiative as joint Manager of the Metadata Project.

Irvin Flack

Irvin Flack began his library career as Assistant Librarian at the Australian College of Physical Education in 1993. In 1997, he was appointed Cataloguing Librarian at the NSW Department of Education and Training Library. With the marriage of TAFE NSW and the NSW Department of Education and Training in 1998, Irvin became Cataloguing Librarian at TAFE Library Collection Services. Since 1999, he has been acting Senior Librarian, Cataloguing. Irvin has been the Senior Project Officer on the TAFENSW Online Metadata Project since its commencement in October 2000. Throughout his career, Irvin has had an interest in enhancing access to information. He has a special interest in the use of metadata in educational environments.

Abstract

How can TAFE librarians, as knowledge managers, help students and staff to navigate their way through the oceans of online information? Metadata is emerging as a ray of hope in relation to the growth and availability of online resources, ineffective search engines and multiple search hits. This paper describes the TAFENSW Online Metadata Project, a project to metadata tag TAFE Online learningware and formulate metadata standards and procedures for TAFENSW. The paper describes the rationale behind the standards and guidelines adopted by the Project, including the element set, subject/name control, deployment and creation tools.

The Project recommended that librarians should create metadata records. Librarians from TAFENSW Institute libraries with little or no cataloguing or indexing background were provided with training to assess their potential to successfully create quality metadata. Under the selected operational model, librarians from TAFENSW Institutes will create metadata for learningware in "low volume" courses, while "high volume" courses will be tagged by TAFE Library Collection Services in liaison with Institute librarians. The Project has now been extended to further investigate and implement metadata for TAFENSW and contribute to metadata activities across the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET).

Introduction

The NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) co-ordinates the delivery of education and training services across New South Wales. TAFENSW, part of this Department, is the largest provider of vocational education and training in Australia and consists of twelve Institutes supported by seven Divisions, which provide educational and curriculum services.

TAFE NSW Online (TOL) was established in response to the demand for flexibility in service delivery that is an increasing feature of the changing patterns of work, study and living in the information age. TAFE NSW Online is creating an information and communications rich electronic environment where students are supported and guided by teachers in their learning wherever they may be - in the home, the workplace, a classroom or a library. The TOL Project Unit is working with Institutes, Divisions and other TAFENSW and DET Directorates and specialist units to support the development and implementation of a flexible and responsive online learning environment. Successful Project implementation relies on stakeholders throughout the organisation contributing to whatever aspect of the Project falls into their field of responsibility.

The TOL Project recognised the vital role of metadata as an infrastructure underpinning the effective use of online technologies and resource development to enhance flexible learning. The correlation between the creation of metadata and cataloguing library resource materials had been of interest to TAFENSW library staff for several years. TOL provided an opportunity to progress online content management, including metadata, for TAFENSW.

TAFENSW has a network of over one hundred libraries of varying size, spread across the twelve Institutes, to support students and staff in teaching and learning. Three statewide units provide infrastructure support services for the operation of the TAFENSW libraries: TAFE Library Systems (TLS) supports the Online Library Information System; TAFE Library Collection Services (TLCS) provides acquisitions and cataloguing and the Education and Training Information Service (ETIS) provides research and information services to DET, excluding TAFENSW Institute staff. In mid 2000, TLCS submitted a project proposal to TOL to assume primary responsibility for an investigation of metadata for TAFENSW.

The TOL Metadata Project is one of eleven initiatives associated with TOL. It commenced in October 2000 with a project deadline of 31st July 2001. All deliverables were met in that timeframe and the Project has now been extended to further investigate, develop and implement metadata for TAFENSW and play a prominent role in DET-wide metadata activities.

What is Metadata?

Definition

Metadata is structured data about data. A library catalogue record is an example of metadata familiar to librarians: the structure is in the form of MARC fields and subfields, and it is about data, such as a book or AV item. In other words, cataloguers have been creating metadata for years without knowing it! It is important to keep in mind that librarians are familiar with many of the issues involved in metadata because we are used to tackling them in relation to "physical" items. The term "metadata" derives from the computer sciences and is therefore generally used in reference to the management of digital information, but metadata can certainly describe non-digital objects as well.

Applications

Because metadata records can contain just about any sort of information, metadata can be put to a very wide range of purposes. Applications include rights management, content evaluation, version control, archiving, security and privacy protection. Two applications of particular relevance to the TOL Metadata Project are described here in more detail:

Resource discovery. This is the most familiar use for metadata and a principal focus of this project. The TOL Project involves the creation of online learning resource material - learningware. Students and staff need to be able to effectively find and retrieve the resources if the efforts of the developers are to be fully exploited.

The alternative to using metadata for discovery is free-text searching - where every word in a resource becomes a search term. Free-text searching, at first sight, appears to offer an effective solution to resource discovery. However, it tends to give large numbers of "hits" with low levels of both relevance and recall. Metadata can assist in both these areas (Cathro, 1997):

1. Relevance. Irrelevant terms in a resource can be excluded from the search set. Metadata taggers can distinguish between words in a resource that are significant and those that are merely incidental. Secondly, the structured nature of metadata allows targeted searches, for example, searching for a particular word in a title or in the subject field. Finally, the use of controlled vocabularies can avoid the problem of synonyms and variant spellings.
2. Recall. Many electronic resources are not textual in nature. The content of such resources has to be expressed in words for a search engine to be able to index it. Metadata provides a convenient carrier for such information.

Relationships with other resources. Many online resources are related to other resources or have supporting resources, both physical and online. The user often cannot learn all these relationships by looking at the resource itself. For example, TAFE NSW learning modules may be common to multiple courses. They may require the use of an accompanying CD-ROM or print textbook. They may relate to a particular Training Package and Competency Standard Unit. The metadata record can be used to record these relationships and present them to the user in a systematic and consistent fashion.

Aims of the project

The Project aimed to progress online content management in TAFENSW. The primary deliverable was to metadata tag the learningware developed in the first two rounds of the TAFE Online Project. However, another important objective was the formulation of metadata standards for TAFENSW. This included procedures, guidelines and a technical framework for metadata creation, storage and searching. A selection of TAFE corporate documents was also tagged to determine if the chosen standards could also be applied to non-learningware materials.

Initially, DET staff will be able to search for existing TOL learningware using a search engine on the DET Intranet site. In the longer term, it is anticipated that users will also include current and potential students via the DET Internet site.

Project progress

The Project began with a Best Practice Study to locate and assess the latest and tested best practice in metadata at other institutions, focussing on the Australian education sector. On the basis of this research, a report was written with recommendations to guide the remainder of the Project.

The Project Team developed metadata tagging guidelines and specifications for a metadata template and database. Seven librarians from TAFENSW Institute libraries were then trained by the Project Team in metadata tagging procedures. These librarians created the metadata records under the supervision of two Project Team members.

On the basis of the Best Practice Study and the subsequent experience in training and metadata tagging, a Report and Recommendations were written.

Standards and guidelines established

Standards

Element set

The definition of the metadata elements has been the focus of much attention in the metadata community. A number of element sets (schemas) have been developed; the best known and most widely adopted being the Dublin Core (DC) set (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, 1999). The DC set aims for simplicity, interoperability and extensibility. The EdNA (Education Network Australia) schema is an example of a set that extends the Dublin Core elements to cover Australian education materials by adding extra elements and controlled vocabularies (EdNA Metadata Standard Working Group, 2001). Other educational sets, such as the IEEE LOM (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Learning Object Metadata) were developed independently and specifically for educational resources (IEEE Learning Object Metadata Working Group, 2001). The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS), which defines and promotes technical specifications in distributed learning, uses the IEEE LOM scheme as its metadata standard (IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2001).

The Project recommended a hybrid element set (application profile) built on the EdNA standard with selected elements of the IEEE LOM set and two elements developed by DET. This amalgamation aimed to combine the "best of both worlds". The EdNA set has been recommended as the preferred metadata standard within the VET community by ANTA (Australian National Training Authority), and DET has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with education.au ltd to harvest metadata using the EdNA standard. IEEE LOM is designed specifically for learning resources and has elements that cover areas not addressed by the EdNA elements. Only those IEEE LOM elements that did not have an equivalent EdNA element were included in the application profile.

The elements were divided into mandatory and non-mandatory elements. The mandatory elements constitute a minimum level of description for TOL learningware.

Subject Access/Control

Subject access was a difficult area to address. The Best Practice Study found that a combination of free-text and controlled terms offered the best combination of consistency and coverage of subject content. The question remained, however, of what was the best thesaurus to use. A number of thesauri were evaluated during the project. They were assessed on such criteria as the breadth and depth of subject coverage, ease of application, and online availability. Three thesauri emerged as potential candidates: the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Australian Thesaurus of Educational Descriptors (ATED) and the Vocational Education and Training Research Database thesaurus (VOCED). While LCSH has the widest subject coverage it has the disadvantage of a US bias and a pre-coordinated heading structure that requires more training of taggers than a post-coordinated system. In addition, descriptor based systems such as VOCED and ATED are better suited to database manipulation and searching. ATED was found to cover the subject content of the learningware better than VOCED and had the advantage of also covering school and higher education sectors. This will be important if the metadata guidelines are adopted across DET.

Name Control

Name control has not yet received the same attention as subject control in metadata literature. However, the Project considered the investment of time in controlling name headings would pay off in terms of database quality and improved retrieval. An authority file of records for each person and organisation on the database was maintained to ensure consistency in naming.

Deployment

Metadata records can be deployed as a database repository, separated from the resources they describe, or embedded in the resource itself. A repository approach was adopted for the Project metadata to allow easy maintenance, the facility for global changes, and creation of metadata for non-textual and non-electronic resources.

The option of creating and storing metadata within a learningware platform was examined and rejected. This was because the TOL learningware platform may change in the future or learningware may be produced on a number of platforms. Instead, the metadata database will be separate from the learningware platform. Metadata-resource linkage is provided by a URL in the Identifier element of the metadata record.

Metadata Creation

Metadata will be created using a template on the DET content management system (Interwoven's TeamSite), which is currently being implemented by another TOL Project Team. A number of "off-the-shelf" metadata editors were examined as part of the Best Practice Study to assess their suitability in the project. Unfortunately these editors did not provide the level of functionality required by the Project. In particular they could not accommodate the element structure of the selected hybrid metadata element set.

The metadata template and database are currently undergoing development. An MS Access version of the database was used to create and store the metadata in the interim. To fulfill DET's obligation to provide metadata for EdNA harvesting, the final database will have the facility to export metadata in RDF (Resource Description Framework) format.

Granularity of Description

TOL learningware is delivered as courses, which are in turn made up of modules. Modules are well-defined, discrete components of learning content and were therefore an obvious choice as the level of metadata description in the Project. However, it was recognised that a more granular approach would be a likely future development.

Traditional computer based instruction has involved presenting "stand-alone" sequences of learning. Content elements were not designed for re-use in other sequences. This is the model that has been used for existing TOL learningware development. However, current trends in web based learning delivery are moving away from such stand-alone learning sequences and towards a learning object approach (Porter, 2001). In this model, elements of content (learning objects) can be held in a repository and re-assembled in different aggregations. It is essential that content is accurately labeled and described so that it can be effectively tracked and reassembled. Here, metadata plays a critical role. The learning object rather than the module becomes the primary object of description, with metadata also created for aggregated units of content.

Therefore, the Project metadata standards were chosen with an eye to a future learning object approach to learningware description. In particular, the IEEE LOM elements are designed to accommodate such a model.

Skilling of institute staff

By involving staff from TAFENSW Institute Libraries, the Project aimed to engage a key potential stakeholder from the outset, to augment the skills of the Project team members drawn from TLCS, and to ensure a suitable breadth and depth of experience. These staff were all librarians but did not have significant cataloguing backgrounds. One of the key project objectives was to assess the implications of and requirements for skilling and training librarians with little or no cataloguing expertise, but with an information delivery background, in metadata tagging. This activity was essential for the formulation of final recommendations, particularly, defining the potential role of Institute library staff and TOL development teams in the metadata tagging process.

This process allowed the Project team to test training approaches and to determine the issues involved in training librarians from a non-cataloguing background. The librarians provided valuable feedback on the template and tagging process, highlighting specific issues and difficulties.

Despite the excellent standard of the librarians selected, it was found that training librarians with little or no background in cataloguing was an extremely intensive exercise for both the trainers and the taggers. Subject analysis and the correct application of thesaurus terms were the most difficult skills to develop. It takes long periods to successfully train librarians in cataloguing and metadata was found to be no different. To train them in all aspects of metadata procedures and processes would be an intensive and expensive exercise, even if one-on-one training were available. To do this in the field, with no ongoing support, would be extremely difficult.

Proposed operational model

The Project recommended that TAFENSW librarians create metadata records for TOL learningware. It was identified that the specialist information management skills possessed by librarians were essential to ensure high quality metadata records are created.

The question remained as to what role Institute and TLCS librarians would respectively play in the metadata creation process. A model was selected that strikes a balance between a completely centralised model, where TLCS would create all metadata, and a completely distributed model, where metadata would be the responsibility of learningware development teams.

The chosen model distinguishes between TOL courses on the basis of their enrolments. For low volume courses and locally developed resources, librarians from TAFENSW Institutes will create the metadata. Mandatory elements must be entered as a minimum for these resources, with other elements entered at the discretion of the librarian. A training framework will be developed by TLCS to assist librarians in the Institutes with metadata tagging. For high volume courses, a TAFENSW Institute librarian, as a member of the learningware development team, will gather information and enter the mandatory elements. TLCS librarians will then liaise with the librarian to select and complete the appropriate non-mandatory elements, including controlled subject analysis.

This model will allow Institute librarians to develop skills and knowledge in basic metadata techniques. However, training overheads will be lower than in a completely distributed model. Wider management issues, quality control and the overall direction of metadata will be coordinated by metadata specialists. TLCS has the expertise and experience to take a leading and active part in this role.

Each TOL learningware team will include a librarian from a TAFENSW Institute library. The librarian will provide input on the information literacy components of learningware and links to relevant information. In addition, the librarian will provide vital liaison between the learningware development team and the creation of metadata.

The future

The Project Report and Recommendations have been endorsed by the TOL Metadata Project Steering Committee. One of these recommendations was to extend the Project from its original completion date of the end of July 2001 to the end of December 2001 (Phase 2). This time will be used to tag learningware that had not been completed, to further research issues raised by the Project and to implement the selected metadata model.

A large number of learningware modules had not been completed and signed-off by the end of the tagging period. The extension will allow these modules to be tagged as they are completed and signed-off. These modules will also be used to research the implications of using a learning object approach to metadata description. A proportion of the untagged learningware will be tagged to the learning object level to identify and document the implications of the widespread adoption of tagging to this level.

The metadata template and database on the TeamSite content management system will also be developed and tested during phase 2 of the Project. A search engine has been developed to search the interim metadata database until the TeamSite system is operational.

A recommendation of the Project Steering Committee was that metadata should be part of a department wide knowledge management strategy. DET has involvement in a number of metadata related projects, including the SOCCI (Schools Online Curriculum Content Initiative). A departmental Metadata Working Group is being formed to coordinate the various metadata initiatives. This Working Group will also have responsibility for the review of metadata elements and thesauri.

The TAFENSW Metadata Project has completed a comprehensive study of all aspects and issues associated with metadata in the TAFE environment. As knowledge managers, librarians have a major role to play in the development and control of online information. It is becoming increasingly recognised that metadata is providing a means to assist us through the oceans of online information. It is now vital that the development, creation and management of metadata become part of the core business of libraries.

References

Cathro, W, 1997, Metadata: An Overview, http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/cathro3.html.

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, 1999, Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.

EdNA Metadata Standard Working Group, 2001, EdNA Metadata Standard, http://standards.edna.edu.au/metadata/.

IEEE Learning Object Metadata Working Group, 2001, Draft Standard for Learning Object Metadata, http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/.

IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2001, IMS Learning Resource Meta-data Specification, http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata/index.cfm.

Porter, D., 2001, Object Lessons from the Web: Implications for Instructional Development. In: Farrell, G. (Ed.), The Changing Faces of Virtual Education, Vancouver, The Commonwealth of Learning, http://www.col.org/virtualed/virtual2pdfs/V2_chapter4.pdf.