Successful Metadata Implementation and Lessons Learned

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Successful Metadata Implementation and Lessons
LearnedTreasury Board of Canada
SecretariatCase Study

Information Management DaySeptember 13, 2002
Sara MacKenzieCorporate CommunicationsTreasury
Board of Canada Secretariat
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Why Manage Information?

• To support effective decision making
• to preserve the corporate memory
• to conserve important documents and
• to facilitate access to information while
  protecting the legal, financial and other
  interests of the Government and the public.

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Value of Metadata

• Increases the potential of the Internet to be a
  usable information environment
• provides key data about information (authorship,
  dates, keywords, descriptions and relationships
  to other information products)
• helps manage the life cycle of information and
• supports navigation and displaying content
  online.

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Government of Canada Context

• Guiding principle of Government On-Line is to
  organize services and information around the
  needs and expectations of citizens.
• Common Look and Feel (CLF) Standard 6.3 requires
  government web sites to implement 5 mandatory
  metatags.

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Current TBS Web Environment

• March 2001 Review of TBS web environment found
  that
• information classification and site architecture
  was not intuitive
• information was difficult to find and searching
  capabilities were limited
• information was not accessible on different
  platforms and browsers and
• the wide range of graphics, buttons and colours
  used showed an inconsistent, non-cohesive
  approach to providing TBS information on-line.

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TBS Web Redesign Project

• Working group of representatives from TBS
  branches and sectors with various backgrounds
• Review findings and identify improvements and
  enhancements that could be made to the sites
  while working towards implementing all CLF
  requirements
• Best practices within the organization adopted
• Ongoing implementation

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TBS Web Redesign Goals

• Deliver information that is organized,
  accessible, consistent, timely and in multiple
  formats
• provide a client-centric and consistent approach
  to how TBS information is presented and delivered
  on-line
• manage effectively the life cycle of TBS
  information including long-term preservation and
• meet CLF standards by December 31, 2002.

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TBS Approach to Metadata

• Standard set of metadata for the department that
  includes required CLF tags
• Decentralized application and population of the
  metadata by Webmasters
• Centralized storage and retrieval of metadata
  information from one departmental database

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TBS Metadata Uses

• To manage the life cycle of information ( e.g.
  creation, revision and preservation dates)
• dynamically generate different views of the new
  site (e.g. Organization, Topics)
• to improve searching (e.g. by Document Type)
  and
• to generate administrative reports (e.g. number
  of policies, documents tagged for preservation).

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TBS Metadata Set

• Content Identification meta tags
• Title
• Description
• Keywords
• Originator (Creator and/or Presenter)
• Language of Resource
• Document Type(e.g. policy, report, guide, FAQ)

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TBS Metadata Set

• Life Cycle Management Tags
• Source (dc.source)
• Creation Date (dc.date.created)
• Review Date (dc.date.reviewed)
• Last Modification Date (dc.date.modified)
• Preservation Date (dc.date.preserved)

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TBS Metadata Set

• Tags to Generate Information Views
• Audience
• Subject
• dc.subject
• dc.subject.category
• dc.subject.schema

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TBS Metadata Set

• Making Relationships with other Content
• Relation (dc.relation)
• Replaces
• isPartOf 
• IsBasedOn

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Populating Metadata

• Internal application captures the metadata and
  stores it in a departmental database
• Add-on application to our web site management
  software (MS FrontPage)
• Converts web pages to ASP technology, applies
  corporate design template and populates metadata
• Webmasters responsible for making sure HTML
  validates and meets CLF standards before running
  the application

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Populating Metadata

• Guidelines produced to help Webmasters determine
  the values for metatags
• Controlled list of TBS topics established for
  webmasters to choose from to populate dc.subject
  tag
• TBS list of topics mapped to GoC thesaurus terms
  and populated automatically once webmasters
  choose a topic from the controlled TBS vocabulary

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Populating Metadata
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Implementation

• Conducted one-on-one training sessions with TBS
  webmasters
• Webmasters identified and removed out of date and
  duplicate information from the web for long-term
  preservation
• Started phased-in implementation in August 2002

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Metadata Outside the Web Context

• Key identifying data for cataloguing, retrieving
  and identifying relationships with other
  documents
• Working towards a long-term preservation process
  for departmental electronic information
• Establishing process and guidelines for removal,
  transfer, cataloguing and retrieval of electronic
  information that has been preserved

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Lessons Learned

• Consult content authors to identify meaningful
  terms and descriptions to use to populate
  metadata.
• Plan where you want your web site to be in two or
  three years. Apply new tags for future
  functionality and information management at the
  same time as the CLF tags to save time later.
• Make it easy for webmasters to apply the
  metadata. Provide guidelines and examples to
  ensure that content is tagged properly.

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Lessons Learned

• When populating metadata, consider the language
  your audience would use when searching
  information and incorporate synonyms and jargon
  into keywords.
• Having a controlled subject thesaurus of terms
  related to the business of your organization
  ensures consistent use of language and is a
  valuable tool when populating metadata.
• Identifying and populating metadata takes time
  when dealing with tens of thousands of pages but
  the long-term rewards make it worth it. Make the
  investment now.

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Next Steps

• Complete Phase I by meta tagging and applying CLF
  standards between now and December 2002
• Improve overall functionality of the TBS site
  through future enhancements to searching
  capabilities, navigation and information
  presentation using metadata
• Establish a preservation process for electronic
  information removed from the web
• Improve our list of controlled topics by
  developing a departmental thesaurus