Metadata Quality Assurance for Audiobooks: : An explorative case study on how to measure, identify and solve metadata quality issues

Sammanfattning: Metadata is essential to how (digital) archives, collections or databases operate. It is the backbone to organise different types of content, make them discoverable and keep the digital records’ authenticity, integrity and meaning over time. For that reason, it is also important to iteratively assess if the metadata is of high quality. Despite its importance, there is an acknowledged lack of research verifying if existing assessment frameworks and methodologies do indeed work and if so how well, especially in fields outside the libraries. Thus, this thesis conducted an exploratory case study and applied already existing frameworks in a new context by evaluating the metadata quality of audiobooks. The Information Continuum Model was used as a way to capture the metadata quality needs of customers/end users who will be searching and listening to audiobooks. Using a mixed methods approach, the results showed that the frameworks can indeed be generalised and adapted to a new context. However, although the frameworks helped measure, identify and find potential solutions to the problems, they could be better adjusted to the context and more metrics and information could be added. Thus, there can be a generalised method to assess metadata quality. But the method needs improvements and to be used by people who understand the data and the processes to reach its full potential.