Standardize archival metadata across institutions

Develop methods to standardize metadata across institutions with different cataloging histories so that Living Library corpora can be consistently organized and queried across institutional boundaries.

Background

The Living Library separates immutable institutional metadata from AI-generated enrichment and relies on a governed schema for indexing and retrieval. However, archival collections differ in cataloging vocabulary, granularity, completeness, and historical practice.

The authors identify cross-institutional metadata standardization as unresolved because the framework’s broader transferability depends on making heterogeneous collections interoperable without erasing institution-specific provenance or curatorial context.

References

Beyond this single deployment, generalizing the Living Library model to other institutions raises questions this paper does not settle: how to standardize metadata across institutions with different cataloging histories; how to ensure long-term model accuracy and governance as underlying models change; what best practices should govern representing historical figures responsibly across different subjects and sensitivities; how to measure educational and engagement impact rather than infer it from anecdote; and what interoperability standards would let Layer 3 corpora from different institutions be queried together.

— The Living Library: Transforming Archival Collections into Conversational Knowledge Systems -- Lessons from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library  (2609.09368 - Wang et al., 8 Sep 2026) in Section 10, “Limitations and Future Work,” paragraph “Open questions for the framework more broadly”

Beyond this single deployment, generalizing the Living Library model to other institutions raises questions this paper does not settle: how to standardize metadata across institutions with different cataloging histories; how to ensure long-term model accuracy and governance as underlying models change; what best practices should govern representing historical figures responsibly across different subjects and sensitivities; how to measure educational and engagement impact rather than infer it from anecdote; and what interoperability standards would let Layer 3 corpora from different institutions be queried together.

— The Living Library: Transforming Archival Collections into Conversational Knowledge Systems -- Lessons from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library  (2609.09368 - Wang et al., 8 Sep 2026) in Section 10, “Limitations and Future Work,” paragraph “Open questions for the framework more broadly”