Enabling easier discovery with a controlled vocabulary for iPRES papers
Andrew Jackson Maureen Pennock Nancy McGovern
Many iPRES papers often receive relatively few citations, indicating low levels of re-use. Whilst these low levels of usage cannot be attributed to a single reason, inconsistent approaches to sharing, publishing, and describing papers over the past twenty years have not helped. This poster goes some way to explore a solution for more consistent description of papers, facilitating their findability and thus their potential for re-usability, by proposing a controlled vocabulary for iPRES submissions. 

A controlled vocabulary for iPRES papers was used in the early days of iPRES, namely the ACM set of classification codes. This however had limited specificity relevant to most iPRES submissions and was later abandoned. The current 'anything goes' approach enables greater specificity but results in more variation across the corpus as a whole: the problem has escalated from insufficient choice to too much choice. Search the iPRES keywords index produced for the DPC Registries of Good Practice, for example, and it suggests over a thousand different entries. The phrase 'needle in a haystack' comes to mind, especially problematic for not only early careerists and researchers but also practitioners with limited amounts of time but urgent business problems to address.

This poster proposes a controlled set of keywords as a first step towards improving consistent classification, findability and subsequently re-usability of our field's knowledge. The core structure is provided by the high level entities from the CHARM domain model on digital preservation risk. These identify at a consistently granular level the main aspects of the digital preservation domain (e.g. legal; policy; strategy; system software; network; metadata; content) and target values (e.g. authenticity; integrity; retrievability). These are supplemented by a cross referencing and subsequent merging of the top 30 (or so) keywords identified by the Good Practice project, and finally a gap analysis by the authors to identify and propose additional terms for areas that are possibly under-represented. Pending discussion with the community during iPRES and subsequent refinement of terms, the results (along with a user guide to facilitate consistent implementation) will be suggested to the iPRES steering group as a proposal for future events.
managing access start 2 preserve