DESIGNING METADATA FOR GEOLOGIC GEOSPATIAL DATA: A LIBRARIAN’S PERSPECTIVE OF USER NEEDS

Metadata. It’s not every GIS user’s favorite activity. In fact, all too often GIS users create minimal metadata. Alternatively, metadata may be so detailed that it is useless to people seeking data for work related to a specific area. While standards exist that describe the parts of a metadata record and whether they are mandatory or optional, there are no rules that describe how information in each field of the record, much less keywords, should be supplied.

Librarians have been describing resources in their collections for hundreds of years, and have developed standards on how to enter information about those resources into machine-readable cataloging records. Those standards could be useful if applied in developing metadata to describe geospatial data.

Keywords in metadata records are commonly used terms that describe the resource. They can be related to a discipline, place, stratum, time period or theme. Assigning place names as keywords can be the most confusing, both from the perspective of the GIS data producer and the potential GIS data user. Users seeking information on a specific area, such as a county, parish or national park do not need data that deal with an entire state or even larger area. However, data dealing with a physiographic region, such as a river basin, might be useful to people looking for information on a county. While some people may search both physiographic and political keyword terms, others may just search for information by searching for common political terms. People developing metadata need to put themselves in the place of the person looking for GIS data and add terms that will best describe the potential use of the data that they are describing.