In our previous instalments of the blog series about matching (see part 1 and part 2), we explained what metadata matching is, why it is important and described its basic terminology. In this entry, we will discuss a few common beliefs about metadata matching that are often encountered when interacting with users, developers, integrators, and other stakeholders. Spoiler alert: we are calling them myths because these beliefs are not true! Read on to learn why.
We’ve just released an update to our participation report, which provides a view for our members into how they are each working towards best practices in open metadata. Prompted by some of the signatories and organizers of the Barcelona Declaration, which Crossref supports, and with the help of our friends at CWTS Leiden, we have fast-tracked the work to include an updated set of metadata best practices in participation reports for our members.
It’s been a while, here’s a metadata update and request for feedback In Spring 2023 we sent out a survey to our community with a goal of assessing what our priorities for metadata development should be - what projects are our community ready to support? Where is the greatest need? What are the roadblocks?
The intention was to help prioritize our metadata development work. There’s a lot we want to do, a lot our community needs from us, but we really want to make sure we’re focusing on the projects that will have the most immediate impact for now.
In the first half of this year we’ve been talking to our community about post-publication changes and Crossmark. When a piece of research is published it isn’t the end of the journey—it is read, reused, and sometimes modified. That’s why we run Crossmark, as a way to provide notifications of important changes to research made after publication. Readers can see if the research they are looking at has updates by clicking the Crossmark logo.
A Schematron report tells you if there’s a metadata quality issue with your records.
Schematron is a pattern-based XML validation language. We try to stop the deposit of metadata with obvious issues, but we can’t catch everything because publication practices are so varied. For example, most family names in our database that end with jr are the result of a publisher including a suffix (Jr) in a family name, but there are of course surnames ending with ‘jr’.
We do a weekly post-registration metadata quality check on all journal, book, and conference proceedings submissions, and record the results in the schematron report. If we spot a problem we’ll alert your technical contact via email. Any identified errors may affect overall metadata quality and negatively affect queries for your content. Errors are aggregated and sent out weekly via email in the schematron report.
What should I do with my schematron report?
The report contains links (organized by title) to .xml files containing error details. The XML files can be downloaded and processed programmatically, or viewed in a web browser: