Use Case Description
Activity – Data owner uploads record to aggregation, and is able to download an enhanced record with additional data and/or higher quality data. This could be done for individual records or for batches of records. In the simplest case, a data owner could upload a record consisting solely of an identifier, and get a full record back – in this case the aggregator acts as a catalogue record provider.
Records could be descriptions for entities such as people/places as well as metadata resources for items in a collection. In this case enhanced records might contain additional information such as additional biographical information for people etc. (e.g. birth/death dates)
Actors – Data owners; Aggregation service
Data involved – Metadata records describing items in a collection, or related entities such as people or places
Workflows – Multiple data owners contribute records to the aggregation, where records describe the same item or entity, metadata is merged across records and any improvements, corrections or additional information is offered back to all those contributing to the aggregation.
Using the aggregation, a data owner can look up metadata based on records they have, and use the results to enhance their records where appropriate; It would be possible to lookup single records or multiple records via a machine interface
Current Examples – Cataloguing cooperatives and similar services provide examples – OCLC, Biblios.net, RLUK etc. Authority files such as Library of Congress Name Authorities may be seen as examples of enhancing entity records, although their current use differs from the activity described in this use case
Benefits – What is the business case?
Data owner – Improved metadata, reduced local metadata creation, effective sharing of metadata creation resources across institutions
End Users – Richer metadata for searching and display
Aggregators – Aggregator gains use from institutions which could potentially be monetized (e.g. via subscription)
