Optimizing Historical Knowledge Retrieval: Standardizing Metadata for Enhanced Research Access

The Challenge A federal research and development center leverages outcomes from past projects and conducts experiments to improve present-day research on innovative scientific solutions. Most of these past reports are stored in a document repository to be made available to technical researchers and analysts. However, these researchers and analysts struggled to find the reports that were relevant to them because the document system lacked standardized metadata. A researcher would search for a report about a subject, but there was no guarantee that the document they sought would be tagged with that subject, or that other relevant documents would be returned in the search results. Meanwhile, the technical team working to upload both historic and new reports to the document management system had to manually add descriptive metadata such as Author, Subject, and Classification to each document.