Calidad en repositorios digitales en Argentina, estudio comparativo y cualitativo

Numerous institutions and organizations need not only to preserve the material and publications they produce, but also have as their task (although it would be desirable it was an obligation) to publish, disseminate and make publicly available all the results of the research and any other scientific/academic material. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and the introduction of Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), make this task much easier. The main objective of this work is to make a comparative and qualitative study of the data -metadata specificallycontained in the whole set of Argentine repositories listed in the ROAR portal, focusing on the functional perspective of the quality of this metadata. Another objective is to offer an overview of the status of these repositories, in an attempt to detect common failures and errors institutions incur when storing the metadata of the resources contained in these repositories, and thus be able to suggest measures to be able to improve the load and further retrieval processes. It was found that the eight most used Dublin Core fields are: identifier, type, title, date, subject, creator, language and description. Not all repositories fill all the fields, and the lack of normalization, or the excessive use of fields like language, type, format and subject is somewhat striking, and in some cases even alarming.