NISO Metasearch Initiative Proposed Property : Collection Completeness

Completeness is mainly applicable to collections consisting of published (scientific) resources. Estimate of the total body of published items in any area (such as books about chess) is to some extent subjective; nevertheless e.g. national collection description initiatives in Czech Republic and Finland have chosen to include Completeness in their metadata element sets.

It is strongly recommended that the value of this property is specified as a Conspectus Level.

A free text value for the property may be used.

By default, the described collection should have just one subject area. If the subject scope of the collection is broad, the collection breadth (the degree of completeness of a collection in relation to its subject scope) should be the same in all subject fields. This is the case in e.g. the national bibliographic collections maintained by the national libraries.

Completeness of a physical collection:

[Conspectus Level] 5

[free text] The Finnish national collection contains all publications issued in Finland, or in Finnish. There is also a lot of material about Finland published abroad.

Completeness of a digital collection:

[Conspectus Level] 3

[free text] The Finnish Web archive contains Finnish Web pages; content from the so called deep Web is missing because there are no tools for harvesting this content.

Description, Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, v1.1 [dc:description]
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/description

Information about the completeness of a collection is important, since without it there is no means for differentiating between comprehensive and basic level collections. The use of a formal encoding based on Conspectus levels will enable users to search for e.g. comprehensive or study level collections from their interest areas.

Evaluation of collections has suffered from some level of subjectivity, but practice and general guidelines will make the collection descriptions more consistent.

Indicating the completeness of collections is primarily relevant for libraries with significant scientific collections. Other libraries and domains such as museums and archives have only limited use for this property.

None

(Proposed encoding scheme) ConspectusLevel
See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/collection-ConspectusLevel/

The RSLP Collection Description schema included a property rslpcd:strength:

An indication (free text or formalised) of the strength(s) of the collection.

This was suggested for inclusion in early drafts of the DC CD AP. However, subsequent discussion suggested that:

• the concept of strength represented by the property was not clearly defined, and as a result the property had been interpreted in many different ways in the context of the RSLP CD schema;
• it was applicable only to particular types of collection.

This proposal attempts to offer a more clearly defined property while acknowledging that it is of relevance primarily for a subclass of collections.

The value of the completeness property would "dumb-down" to a value of dc:description. In the case where the value is a Conspectus label, an "informed" dumb-down application would substitute an appropriate human-readable string rather than the numerical code, as shown in section 3.2.4 of Expressing Qualified Dublin Core in RDF / XML
http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-rdf-xml.