OLAC and Serials: An Appraisal Page: 3

                                
ACM/IEEE JCDL'23, LangArc-2023 workshop

3 DISCUSSION
Thirty-one of the sixty-plus OLAC data providers have records
within the search parameters. There is a significant amount of
diversity in the structure of records representing or referencing
journal articles. Several re-occurring inconsistencies persisted in
records related to the completeness and appropriate semantics of
metadata element usage. In the following sub-sections I briefly
address the usage of the description field, source relationships, and
part-whole relationships. Significant other inconsistencies involved
the following elements and are the subject of ongoing investigation:
dcterms:bibliographicCitation,   dc:title,   dc:contributor,
dcterms:format, dcterms:extent. These inconsistencies disrupt end-
user continuity for the OLAC discovery experience.
4.1 Description Field
Discontinuity in metadata semantics can be observed when
comparing the three selected records for journal articles. The
journal article record shown in Figure 2 is provided by the L&CA,
for an article appearing in the Journal of Translation. The
description field contains a URL. The field is qualified with an
invalid qualifier: dc:terms URI. Neither OLAC documentation [12]
nor the Dublin Core documentation [5] have any indication that the
dc:description field can be qualified with a URI. In contrast, the
description field in Figure 3 provides something like an abstract
(the data-provider doesn't qualify the description). Both of these
records contrast with the description field from Figure 1, which has
various kinds of bibliographic content in the description.
Within the dc:description field of the record shown in Figure 1,
one can find the article's contributor, genre type, extent, and most
of the elements needed for a bibliographic citation. No content-
oriented description is provided in the description field. For
readability the description field is replicated in Figure 4.
4.2 Source Relationships
An important element of this inquiry was to investigate how
journal articles were related to the language resources which
motivated their creation via overt metadata relationships. The
record for the resource presented in Figure 3 is the classic example.
The journal article described is a guide to a specific archival
collection of language resources stewarded by the Endangered
Language Archive (ELAR). ELAR happens to also be an OLAC
data contributor. The OLAC record does mention in the description
field that the collection is deposited at ELAR, but there is no

hyperlink between the OLAC record and the OLAC record for the
ELAR deposit, or even between the OLAC record for the journal
article and the deposit profile on the ELAR website. The broader
finding applicable to records from all data providers is that no
records for journal articles contained, dcterms:isReferencedBy,
dc:source, or dcterms:references relationships. These are the kinds
of relationship fields in which one would expect to find declared
links between publications and their source or supporting materials.

UU       OLAC Record
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Figure 3: OLAC record
oai: scholarspace.m anoa.hawaii.edu:10125/24768.

1 <c:

>Journal article, 8 pages. From:

-'> Primitive Man, Vol 15, No. 3/4 (July-October,
'-- 1942), pages 57-65. Citation: George Washington
&-'-. University, Institute for Ethnographic Research
Figure 4: Figure 3: OLAC record
oai:scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu:10125/24768.

1 <dcterms:isPartOf xsi:type:

>oai:sil.org

--  :40276</d ctermrns:isPartOf]
Figure 5: Part-whole relationship indication in record from
Figure 2.

OLAC and Serials: An Appraisal