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.” To date, more than 150 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 using the bepress Digital Commons platform whose metadata is harvested through the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) protocol for repository interoperability.

As part of the 2016-2017 SHARE Curation Associates program, a group within the cohort began a unique project in July 2016 to review their institutional metadata and the specific elements that are being harvested by SHARE. The project arose out of the overall goal to enhance their own metadata within SHARE. And within this cohort of associates, a number of associates are at institutions utilizing the Digital Commons platform. At ACRL 2017, we presented a poster on our findings at that time.

In this talk, I will share the curation activity to date and update the activity of these 4 librarians from different institutions. We will look at the result of harvesting and some thoughts on how we can continue improve our metadata for interoperability. We would also appreciate feedback on this endeavour and seek input from our colleagues.