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The purpose of this study is to determine which metadata schemas are used in the museums and university collections of the main universities in Spain and other European countries. Although libraries and archives are also university memory institutions (according to a Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums perspective), their collections are not included in this study because their metadata systems are highly standardized and their inclusion would, therefore, skew our understanding of the diverse realities that the study aims to capture.

The analysis has three components. The first is a bibliographic review based on Web of Science. The second is a direct survey of the individuals responsible for university collections to understand their internal work and documentation systems. Finally, the results obtained are complemented by an analysis of collective university heritage portals in Europe.

The results of this study confirmed the hypothesis that isolation and a lack of resources are still major issues in many cases. Increasing digitalization and the desire to participate in content aggregation systems are forcing change, although the responsibility for that change at universities is still vague.

Universities, particularly those with a long history, have an important heritage whose parts are often scattered or hidden. Although many contemporary academic publications have focused on the dissemination of university collections, this study focuses on the representation of information based on the conviction that good metadata are essential for dissemination.

This paper focuses on a project to work on the digital library of Arab children's culture for sustainable development (DLACSD).

This project claims to link the past, present, and future by creating a platform that can grow to include not only works by adults but by children who inspire adults with their imagination and the joys they bring to the world.

This project addresses in phases the different aspects of the problem of the lack of material for Egyptian/Arab children at different stages in Arabic on the internet (with copyright law in mind). It is time to fill this gap by having a rich repository of stories, plays, games and songs for children in Arabic in a digital library to enrich the life of the child and to inform the world that much that is worthwhile is available in Arabic for parents, teachers, and children to enjoy.

Through reading samples of the works by Abdel-Tawab Youssef (1928–2015) by using the Dublin Core Elements, it will be informative to see how his writings address the United Nations Goals of Sustainable Development way before these Goals were discussed.

Writers for children, librarians, teachers, psychologists, literary critics, illustrators, and parents need a platform that makes material available to promote children’s culture in the Arab world and to introduce the world to what is of value for children in Arabic.

Currently, communication brings the world together and although the social media and the new technology have introduced problems that are serious, to say the least, collaborators on all levels must play an active role in redressing the social wrongs, especially those affecting children.

This ongoing project by members of a team who believe in interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity has taken the first step to create and develop (DLACSD).

The purpose of this paper is to construct a digital collection and database of traditional clothing that is convenient for the digital dissemination and application of traditional clothing and provide resources for research on clothing fashion, traditional clothing techniques, clothing culture, history and clothing teaching.

A real object analysis method was used in this paper, based on 15 core elements of the internationally common DC metadata standard, and with consideration to the characteristics of clothing products and clothing industry application specifications, the core elements of DC are expanded to facilitate the detailed record of the characteristic information of clothing, especially the implicit clothing culture. A code symbol compilation method was developed to give each piece of clothing a unique number, facilitating identification, classification and recording. At last, a metadata construction scheme for traditional clothing was developed. A traditional embroidered children's hat and Mamianqunt serve as examples to demonstrate the metadata elements.

The clothing meta-database provides a main body of traditional clothing while also paying attention to the collection of cultural elements. It is composed of five layers of classified data, source data, characteristic data, connotation data and management data, as well as 28 data elements, providing ease of sharing and interoperation.

This paper expands the subset of fashion metadata by describing traditional clothing metadata, especially the excavation of clothing cultural elements, and developing code compilation methods so that each clothing product can obtain a unique identification number, thereby building a traditional clothing metadata construction scheme consisting of five data layers and containing 28 data elements. This scheme records the information about each layer of traditional clothing in detail and provides shared data for discipline research and industry applications.

Studies on academic entrepreneurship (AE) agree on the significant impact that Universities can have on entrepreneurial development. AE deploys through fundamental activities, like the start-up of new companies and the connection of the University with Enterprises. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of digital learning platforms (DLP) to connect Universities and Enterprises effectively. Although the literature has extensively investigated DLP, there is a lack of understanding of the role of DLP in supporting digital AE. This paper focuses, in particular, on the functional requirements that have to distinguish the development of DLPs supporting education-based activities of knowledge transfer between academia and enterprise.

The research is carried out, adopting a case study methodology. A single and holistic case regarding a DLP developed for the strategic and exclusive deployment of AE activities is proposed to describe and discuss the functional requirements of such Platform.

The DLP is a virtual learning space in which Enterprises and Universities can interact. The definition of design requirements is crucial for the efficacy of DLPs and needs to be carefully supported. Various criteria are proposed, respect to the various stakeholders engaged in DAE learning platform (Universities, Enterprises, students, employees), and according to the short- and long-term objectives of Universities and Entrepreneurship connection.

The paper explores an original case of DLP established in AE, to connect Universities and Enterprises. The research also sheds light on the under focussed typology of AE activities regarding education-based knowledge exchange. They are currently unaddressed by the literature on AE.

Triggered by the advancement of information and communications technology, open access repositories (a variant of digital libraries) is one of the important changes impacting library services. In the context of openness to a wider community to access free resources, Wawasan Open University Library initiated a research project to build open access repositories on open educational resources. Open educational resources (OER) is an area of a multifaceted open movement in education. The purpose of this paper is to show how two web portal repositories on OER materials were developed adopting a Japanese open source software, called WEKO.

The design approach is based on a pull to push strategy whereby metadata of scholarly open access materials kept within the institution and network communities’ digital databases were harvested using the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting method into another open knowledge platform for discovery by other users.

Positive results emanating from the university open access repositories development showed how it strengthen the role of the librarian as manager of institutional assets and successfully making the content freely available from this open knowledge platform for reuse in learning and teaching.

Developing further programmes to encourage, influence faculty members and prospective stakeholders to use and contribute content to the valuable repositories is indeed a challenging task.

This paper provides insight for academic libraries on how open access repositories development and metadata analysis can enhance new professional challenges for information professionals in the field of data management, data quality and intricacies of supporting data repositories and build new open models of collaboration across institutions and libraries. This paper also describes future collaboration work with institutions in sharing their open access resources.

The study aims to paint a representative picture of the current state of search interfaces of Swedish online museum collections, focussing on search functionalities with particular reference to subject searching, as well as the use of controlled vocabularies, with the purpose of identifying which improvements of the search interfaces are needed to ensure high-quality information retrieval for the end user.

In the first step, a set of 21 search interface criteria was identified, based on related research and current standards in the domain of cultural heritage knowledge organization. Secondly, a complete set of Swedish museums that provide online access to their collections was identified, comprising nine cross-search services and 91 individual museums' websites. These 100 websites were each evaluated against the 21 criteria, between 1 July and 31 August 2020.

Although many standards and guidelines are in place to ensure quality-controlled subject indexing, which in turn support information retrieval of relevant resources (as individual or full search results), the study shows that they are not broadly implemented, resulting in information retrieval failures for the end user. The study also demonstrates a strong need for the implementation of controlled vocabularies in these museums.

This study is a rare piece of research which examines subject searching in online museums; the 21 search criteria and their use in the analysis of the complete set of online collections of a country represents a considerable and unique contribution to the fields of knowledge organization and information retrieval of cultural heritage. Its particular value lies in showing how the needs of end users, many of which are documented and reflected in international standards and guidelines, should be taken into account in designing search tools for these museums; especially so in subject searching, which is the most complex and yet the most common type of search. Much effort has been invested into digitizing cultural heritage collections, but access to them is hindered by poor search functionality. This study identifies which are the most important aspects to improve.

Although universities have extensive research and initiatives in place that align with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is still a significant gap in documenting and assessing these efforts. This paper aims to discuss how academic libraries can apply their information management skills and open-access platforms, to facilitate the discoverability and retrieval of evidence on SDGs.

Introduced by a brief literature review on the role of libraries in contributing to the SDGs in general, the authors draw on their personal experiences as metadata specialists, participating in a project aimed at linking their university’s research output to the SDGs. A case study, from the University of Pretoria’s Veterinary Science Library, is used as an example to demonstrate the benefits of resourceful metadata in organising, communicating and raising awareness about the SDGs in the field of veterinary science.

Through practical examples and recommended workflows, this paper illustrates that metadata specialists are perfectly positioned to apply their information management skills and library platforms to facilitate the discoverability and retrieval of evidence on SDGs.

Although there are increasing reports on the contributions of libraries to support the successful implementation of the SDGs, limited information exists on the role of metadata specialists, as well as those with a practical focus.

In order to estimate the value of semi-automated subject indexing in operative library catalogues, the study aimed to investigate five different automated implementations of an open source software package on a large set of Swedish union catalogue metadata records, with Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) as the target classification system. It also aimed to contribute to the body of research on aboutness and related challenges in automated subject indexing and evaluation.

On a sample of over 230,000 records with close to 12,000 distinct DDC classes, an open source tool Annif, developed by the National Library of Finland, was applied in the following implementations: lexical algorithm, support vector classifier, fastText, Omikuji Bonsai and an ensemble approach combing the former four. A qualitative study involving two senior catalogue librarians and three students of library and information studies was also conducted to investigate the value and inter-rater agreement of automatically assigned classes, on a sample of 60 records.

The best results were achieved using the ensemble approach that achieved 66.82% accuracy on the three-digit DDC classification task. The qualitative study confirmed earlier studies reporting low inter-rater agreement but also pointed to the potential value of automatically assigned classes as additional access points in information retrieval.

The paper presents an extensive study of automated classification in an operative library catalogue, accompanied by a qualitative study of automated classes. It demonstrates the value of applying semi-automated indexing in operative information retrieval systems.

In the last few years, the size of Linked Open Data (LOD) describing artworks, in general or domain-specific Knowledge Graphs (KGs), is gradually increasing. This provides (art-)historians and Cultural Heritage professionals with a wealth of information to explore. Specifically, structured data about iconographical and iconological (icon) aspects, i.e. information about the subjects, concepts and meanings of artworks, are extremely valuable for the state-of-the-art of computational tools, e.g. content recognition through computer vision. Nevertheless, a data quality evaluation for art domains, fundamental for data reuse, is still missing. The purpose of this study is filling this gap with an overview of art-historical data quality in current KGs with a focus on the icon aspects.

This study’s analyses are based on established KG evaluation methodologies, adapted to the domain by addressing requirements from art historians’ theories. The authors first select several KGs according to Semantic Web principles. Then, the authors evaluate (1) their structures’ suitability to describe icon information through quantitative and qualitative assessment and (2) their content, qualitatively assessed in terms of correctness and completeness.

This study’s results reveal several issues on the current expression of icon information in KGs. The content evaluation shows that these domain-specific statements are generally correct but often not complete. The incompleteness is confirmed by the structure evaluation, which highlights the unsuitability of the KG schemas to describe icon information with the required granularity.

The main contribution of this work is an overview of the actual landscape of the icon information expressed in LOD. Therefore, it is valuable to cultural institutions by providing them a first domain-specific data quality evaluation. Since this study’s results suggest that the selected domain information is underrepresented in Semantic Web datasets, the authors highlight the need for the creation and fostering of such information to provide a more thorough art-historical dimension to LOD.

The purpose of this study is to develop a model for automated classification of old digitised texts to the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), using machine-learning methods.

The general research approach is inherent to design science research, in which the problem of UDC assignment of the old, digitised texts is addressed by developing a machine-learning classification model. A corpus of 70,000 scholarly texts, fully bibliographically processed by librarians, was used to train and test the model, which was used for classification of old texts on a corpus of 200,000 items. Human experts evaluated the performance of the model.

Results suggest that machine-learning models can correctly assign the UDC at some level for almost any scholarly text. Furthermore, the model can be recommended for the UDC assignment of older texts. Ten librarians corroborated this on 150 randomly selected texts.

The main limitations of this study were unavailability of labelled older texts and the limited availability of librarians.

The classification model can provide a recommendation to the librarians during their classification work; furthermore, it can be implemented as an add-on to full-text search in the library databases.

The proposed methodology supports librarians by recommending UDC classifiers, thus saving time in their daily work. By automatically classifying older texts, digital libraries can provide a better user experience by enabling structured searches. These contribute to making knowledge more widely available and useable.

These findings contribute to the field of automated classification of bibliographical information with the usage of full texts, especially in cases in which the texts are old, unstructured and in which archaic language and vocabulary are used.