JISC

Providing data about online content, whether that content be freely available, available to subscribers, or available via pay-per-view, can increase that content’s visibility. So says a new advocacy document published by the JISC-funded PerX project.

'Marketing' with Metadata - How Metadata Can Increase Exposure and Visibility of Online Content is aimed at content providers of various kinds - for example, journal publishers, professional societies and database providers and owners - who may have such data, or metadata, available for the content they produce.

Introducing the various benefits of sharing metadata with other websites in standardised and reusable ways, the document is intended primarily for a non-technical audience who may require an overview for decisions regarding the best means of exposing metadata. It may also be of interest to anyone with an interest in digital repositories.

The publication looks at exposing metadata via harvesting (OAI Repositories, Static Repositories), via distributed searching (Z39.50, SRU/SRW, other emerging standards), and exposing content for syndication (RSS). llustrative case studies and links to technical specifications provide useful starting points for those tasked with actually implementing the exposure of standardised metadata. 

The publication has been developed by the PerX project, based at Heriot-Watt University and part of JISC’s Digital Repositories programme project, which is developing a pilot service to provide subject resource discovery across a series of repositories of interest to the engineering learning and research community. This pilot will then be used as a test-bed to explore the practical issues that would be encountered when considering the possibility of a full scale subject resource discovery service.

For further information please go to: PerX