On assessing metadata completeness in digital cultural heritage repositories

Metadata allows access to a wide variety of cultural heritage resources made available through repositories, digital libraries, and catalogues. Usually taking the form of a structured set of descriptive elements, metadata assist in the identification, location, processing, tracking, preserving, sharing, and retrieval of information, while facilitating content and access management. However, low metadata quality, such as the lack of mandatory information, incorrect information, or inconsistency, is still an open issue in many repositories. In this article, we present our ongoing work aiming at automatizing the metadata quality analysis, and the preliminary results on metadata completeness for the Italian digital library ‘Cultura Italia’.