Facilitating Collaborative Metadata Creation for Faculty-initiated Digital Projects

Abstract The usability and long-term preservation of digital humanities projects, such as a digital archive or other project built around digitized materials, depend on thoughtful and thorough metadata creation. The variety of expertise required to create high-quality metadata for digital humanities projects practically requires a collaborative approach. Putting the call for collaboration into practice requires tools that are accessible and functional for all collaborators. Research on tools for metadata creation has tended to focus either on tools for librarians to manage digital project metadata or on tools for independent author metadata creation (Greenberg, 2003; Crystal & Greenberg, 2005). The literature has also tended to focus solely on the use of spreadsheets for metadata creation. Lincoln (2018) has discussed best practices for Google Sheets in archival metadata entry, and Broman and Woo (2017) have discussed best practices for spreadsheet data entry in general. This article positions tool selection and configuration as site of collaboration for the creation of digital project metadata through its examination of a Google Forms-based workflow for the creation and organization of metadata.