The goal of the SHARE initiative, a partnership between the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Center for Open Science (COS), is to build a “free, open, data set about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle.” As of August 2017, 161 repositories and publishers have made metadata available to SHARE for harvesting, and the aggregated data set is available for searching. Many metadata providers are institutional repositories utilizing the bepress Digital Commons platform whose metadata is harvested through the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) protocol for repository interoperability. A group of Digital Commons repository managers who were part of the 2016-2017 SHARE Curation Associates program collaborated on a gap analysis of the metadata provided by their institutions and harvested by SHARE. The goals were threefold: to improve institutional metadata curation processes; to provide good and consistent metadata to SHARE; and to develop workflows and recommendations for other Digital Commons institutions to apply.

This presentation will provide an overview of the group’s process and recommendations but will focus primarily on one aspect of the third goal: Recommendations for Repository Managers. Whether one is becoming a SHARE provider, planning for other harvesting initiatives, or recognizing that it’s time for a cleaning, these recommendations will provide guidelines for how to approach the task. While the examples will be from Digital Commons repositories, the information can be applied to other repositories as well.