Systematic Metadata Remediation for a Large Discipline-Specific Legacy Digital Collection

The Neuro-Ophthalmology Virtual Education Library (NOVEL) is an open-access digital repository of neuro-ophthalmology educational materials hosted by the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library (EHSL) at the University of Utah and established in collaboration with the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society (NANOS). Over its 20-year history, inconsistent metadata standards and evolving platforms have led to irregularities that impeded search performance and collection management across its 20,000 digital learning objects across 31 collections. In 2023, EHSL launched a comprehensive metadata remediation initiative to address these issues and align NOVEL with current metadata and digital collection practices. A five-stage roadmap consisting of collection assessment, metadata analysis, standards development, implementation, and evaluation was developed along with visualization tools and collaborative workflows. Over 18 months, the project team systematically standardized metadata fields, created a specification guide, and edited all metadata for accuracy, completeness, and consistency. This case report establishes a model for systematic metadata remediation for large legacy digital collections with the goal of improving discoverability, usability, and sustainability of the collections.