Digging into Metadata

The project was one of the winners of the 2011 Digging into Data Challenge, a competition to promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. The work was a collaboration between the University of South Wales and the MIMAS Data Centre based at The University of Manchester, together with the University of Drexel in Philadelphia. The problem was to search across multiple unrelated libraries with a single query. The approach automatically created new Dewey Decimal Classification terms and numbers from existing Dublin Core records. Weighted key terms were extracted from the title, description and subject fields of each record. Ranked DDC classes were automatically generated from these key terms by considering DDC hierarchies via a series of filtering and aggregation stages. The automatic classification approach accounts for matches within hierarchies, aggregating lower level matches to broader parents, approximating the practices of a human cataloguer.