Aug
13Never met a data scheme we didn't like

On the Georgetown Law Library website, we have a collection of research guides ranging from Accounting Research to Wyoming Resources. As noted in an earlier post, we've enhanced these guides by adding links to related resources.

Now we are also adding metadata to the guides, in the form of Dublin Core. This is descriptive information embedded in each guide used to uniformly describe its contents. This may help with search engine optimization, but we're mostly doing this to help researchers find and cite our materials. To view the metadata, you can install the Dublin Core Viewer, a handy Firefox extension. Here's a view of the embedded data for one of our guides using this viewer.

Also, you can take advantage of this metadata automatically if you use a program called Zotero to collect and manage your research citations. Zotero allows you to capture information directly from web pages to store in a local research database. By using Dublin Core metadata on our guides, Zotero recognizes this and provides a way to directly store citations to our guides in their database.

In the near future, we hope to add metadata to include abstracts for our guides, as well as usage information. If there are other ways we can help enhance the guides, please let us know.