Metadata Quality Assessment

Metadata quality assessment is the systematic measurement of how good a collection's descriptive metadata is for its intended purposes. Thomas Bruce and Diane Hillmann's influential framework defined quality along a continuum of dimensions — completeness, accuracy, conformance to expectations, logical consistency and coherence, timeliness, accessibility, and provenance — and argued that quality must be defined relative to use, then expressed and exploited. Jung-ran Park and Yuji Tosaka surveyed how digital repositories operationalize the three most widely accepted criteria — accuracy, completeness, and consistency — into concrete control mechanisms. Assessment turns these dimensions into measurable indicators, scores records and collections against them, and produces diagnostics that pinpoint where metadata falls short, so that interoperability, discovery, and trust can be improved.