On 17 and 24 November 2020 the InvenioRDM project partners met in two telecons to discuss the Metadata Reference document.

These conversations were a follow-up to the community's review of the document. Feedback and questions were collected in a Google Doc prior to the conversations. The conversations helped to confirm many answers to questions about the data model that had been posed in the Doc, such as: whether ‘role’ is required for Creators (no - only for Contributors), are Resource Types customizable (yes), and which file is shown in the previewer when a record has multiple files (the first, unless otherwise specified). See the Doc for responses to additional questions.

Use Cases Requested

For some fields, further feedback is needed in order to make them as useful for the community as possible. In particular, your use cases are requested for the following scenarios:

  1. Adding a Language tag to Titles
  2. Records with more than one Publisher (making Publisher a repeatable field)
  3. Having a built-in “Unknown” option for Contributor type and/or role
  4. Having more than one Identifier per Affiliation

Please post your use cases back to the top of the original Google Doc or to the new Metadata Interest Group topic at: https://invenio-talk.web.cern.ch (more on this below).

Subjects

In addition, the topic of Subjects was brought up for further discussion. The Subjects example in the Metadata Reference document shows the incorporation of one controlled vocabulary, the Medical Subject Headings, into the schema.

However, there are many controlled vocabularies that we can potentially map to the Subjects field. Which will be most useful to incorporate for the wider community, and what are potential use cases?

This is one of the first issues we would like to discuss in the Metadata Interest Group, which is set to launch in January 2021. This group welcomes the contributions and insights of developers, users, administrators, decision-makers, and anyone else at participating organizations with metadata experience, interest, and insights. Through the end of 2020 we will work to publicize the group and recruit members. If you’re interested in joining, please either sign up here: https://invenio-talk.web.cern.ch/t/metadata-interest-group/144 or DM me on Discord (see the Welcome channel).

Community Outreach

We are committed to serving the entire InvenioRDM community as our family of adopters continues to grow and thrive. This is the first, we hope, of many blog posts that will address topics of interest to the community at large, including developers, administrators, curators, and decision-makers. If there is a topic you would like us to explore, or perhaps even contribute a post on yourself, we’d like to know. If the topic would be best covered at a community-focused telecon (also on the horizon for the coming months!), we’d like to know that as well. Please contribute any and all ideas at my contact listed above.

Take care and stay safe!