Mastering Metadata for Digital Preservation

In today’s cultural heritage environments, messy and inconsistent metadata can be a professional’s bump in the road. Long, tedious hours spent manually fixing errors and consolidating fields could be spent enhancing a collection’s discoverability and long-term access. Mastering Metadata for Digital Preservation is a practical workshop that responds to a need to equip digital preservation professionals, archivists, librarians, data managers, and researchers with essential technical skills to efficiently clean, standardise, and enrich metadata to enhance and semi-automate their workflows.  

This workshop is ideal for those working with archival datasets in digital collections, institutional repositories, or research archives—especially if you're seeking hands-on approaches to wrangling metadata, enhancing interoperability, and improving the sustainability of your metadata practices. Whether you’re new to metadata or looking to refine your existing workflows, this interactive session provides space to explore real-world challenges alongside peers. 

Topics Covered 

• Identifying and resolving issues in messy metadata using OpenRefine, such as 
• Inconsistent naming and date formats.
• Fields that concatenate values.
• Clustering and merging of equivalent values.
• Complex data transformations with GREL.
• Custom and templated exports of clean data.
• Enhancing metadata interoperability with controlled vocabularies by using OpenRefine reconciliation to link to Wikimedia or ULAN vocabularies.
• Crosswalking between metadata standards (e.g., Dublin Core, CDWA, Darwin Core) through intellectual mapping and semi-automated workflow creation.
• Preservation metadata (PREMIS, PREMIS in METS).
• Testing batch metadata ingest in systems like Omeka.
• Real-world problem solving with sample archival datasets.

Key Activities

• Hands-On Session 1: Foundational metadata wrangling with OpenRefine
• Hands-On Session 2: Metadata crosswalks and ingestion workflows
• Collaborative Challenge: Applying skills to a new dataset
• Group Sharing & Reflection: Insights, tools, and ongoing development 

Frequently Asked Questions 
Do I need any technical background? 
No advanced technical knowledge is required. Basic familiarity with metadata concepts is helpful, but all tools will be introduced in an accessible, step-by-step format.

Date: 5th September 2025
Time: 12pm-4:30pm BST

Are there discounted places available? 
Yes—we are able to evaluate cases for discounted places, particularly for participants from Official Development Assistance (ODA) countries. Please email digitalpreservation@soton.ac.uk with a brief note on your situation and we will offer you a discounted ticket. 

Payment using the Online Store can only be completed via Visa and Mastercard Credit/Debit Card or PayPal.  AMEX is not accepted
If you have not previously created an account for the Online Store, you will need to create an account to make a booking.

RITM0719223