Developing practical automatic metadata assignment and evaluation tools for internet resources

This paper describes the development of practical automatic metadata assignment tools to support automatic record creation for virtual libraries, metadata repositories and digital libraries, with particular reference to library-standard metadata. The development process is incremental in nature, and depends upon an automatic metadata evaluation tool to objectively measure its progress. The evaluation tool is based on and informed by the metadata created and maintained by librarian experts at the INFOMINE Project, and uses different metrics to evaluate different metadata fields. In this paper, we describe the form and function of common metadata fields, and identify appropriate performance measures for these fields. The automatic metadata assignment tools in the iVia virtual library software are described, and their performance is measured. Finally, we discuss the limitations of automatic metadata evaluation, and cases where we choose to ignore its evidence in favor of human judgment