Through multiple research and implementation projects, the Smithsonian made significant strides in enhancing educational metadata for both museum classroom resources and digitized museum collections, ultimately improving their discoverability and usability for educators and learners. These efforts focused on two key initiatives: implementing the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) (now part of the Dublin Core) and collaborating with the National Museum of American History (NMAH) to explore audience-centric metadata for museum collection objects. These ongoing projects resulted in 1) improving the discoverability and usability of Smithsonian educational resources for teachers and learners, 2) enhancing the educational value of the Smithsonian's collections by providing richer and more relevant context for museum objects, and 3) supporting the Smithsonian's broader educational mission by making its resources more accessible and impactful for diverse audiences.
Leveraging LRMI for Classroom Resources
Implementation of LRMI Metadata: Recognizing the need for a standardized way to describe online educational resources, the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access (SCLDA) led the implementation of LRMI metadata across a wide array of its digital learning materials, including lesson plans, images, videos, and interactive tools. This involved creating and publishing LRMI metadata for approximately 2,500 resources, making them more discoverable through search engines and educational platforms.
Improved Discoverability and Usability: SCLDA worked with external evaluators to explore whether LRMI enables educators to better discover, analyze, and use Smithsonian resources to create personalized learning resources for their students. By tagging resources with LRMI metadata, SCLDA enabled educators to easily find materials aligned with specific learning standards, grade levels, and subject areas. This approach significantly improved the discoverability of resources and helped educators better understand how they could be used in the classroom.
Capacity Building: SCLDA also focused on building internal capacity for creating and maintaining LRMI metadata, ensuring that newly created resources would be appropriately tagged and discoverable. This laid the groundwork for continued metadata implementation across the Smithsonian's digital learning offerings.
Exploring Audience-centric Metadata with NMAH
Audience-focused Approach: Recognizing that traditional museum cataloging practices might not effectively serve diverse audiences, SCLDA partnered with NMAH to explore audience-centric metadata for digitized museum collections. This project focused specifically on women's history objects and aimed to develop metadata that would be more accessible and relevant to students and teachers. The collaborators “user tested” museum object records with undergraduate history students at American University to better understand what information was relevant to their work as students and student researchers.
Enhancing Discoverability and Use: SCLDA and NMAH conducted research to explore new approaches for describing and contextualizing museum objects. Through revisions to catalog records and enhancements to the online presentation of revised metadata in the Smithsonian Learning Lab, SCLDA improved the discoverability and usability of the collections.
These projects and our sharing of methodologies and results served as models for other museums and educational institutions that aimed to leverage metadata to improve the effectiveness of their digital learning resources and digitized collections.
Organization: Smithsonian Institution
Audiences: Smithsonian museum educators and technologists, classroom teachers, college student researchers, students
Roles: Projects co-director
Read more about the Smithsonian LRMI Metadata Project and the SCLDA/NMAH Audience-centric Metadata Project →
