A Systematic Review of Metadata Quality Assessment for Cultural Heritage Digital Resources

Abstract

As museums, galleries, libraries, and archives (GLAM institutions) continue to digitize their collections, the volume of cultural heritage digital resources has grown rapidly, and user experience issues related to search efficiency, comprehension, and reuse have become increasingly salient. Whether users can successfully “find, understand, and make use of” these resources largely depends on the quality of their metadata. Incomplete, inconsistent, or non-interoperable metadata can significantly weaken users’ ability to discover, interpret, and reuse cultural heritage digital resources. Against this background, this paper presents a systematic review of research on metadata quality assessment for cultural heritage digital resources from a usability and user experience perspective. Drawing on studies published over the past two decades in the GLAM domain, the review focuses on three questions: (1) In which types of application scenarios is metadata quality assessment mainly conducted? (2) Which metadata quality dimensions are repeatedly adopted and regarded as critical in GLAM contexts? (3) How are these quality dimensions translated into concrete assessment methods and tools in existing work? The results show that metadata quality assessment efforts are primarily concentrated in three types of settings—local collection databases, large-scale aggregation platforms, and open data portals—each associated with different user tasks and interaction patterns. Building on this, the paper synthesizes a set of commonly used quality dimensions, including completeness, accuracy, consistency, conformance, uniqueness, timeliness, and authority, and discusses how these dimensions relate to user experience indicators such as findability and cross-platform interoperability. The review aims to provide a reference for designing and evaluating user-centred metadata quality assessment frameworks in digital cultural heritage environments.

Keywords: Metadata Quality Assessment, Cultural Heritage Digital Resources, Usability And User Experience

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1008046