Semantic Integration of Information Resources in Iranian Digital Libraries

To identify the status of Iranian digital librarie's metadata in terms of semantic integration and proposing suggestions to improve their semantic relations. Methodology/Approach: It's a descriptive study using survey. The population consists of all active digital libraries around Iran (32 libraries), 26 of them cooperated with this survey. Data gathered using a self-designed questionnaire and the validity is guaranteed by experts. The focus of digital libraries is on textual resources and little consideration has been toward non-textual and multimedia resources. These libraries are not in a suitable situation considering digital resources coverage and metadata fields completion. Necessary fields in semantic integration like index keywords, ISBN, ISMN and DOI are not regarded in metadata fields. Also, authorization of metadata field's content is not satisfying. For example, fields related to authors, publishers and keywords are not authorized. Iranian digital libraries are not in a proper condition regarding semantic integration services; therefore, there needs to be a more focus on semantic relations in their metadata fields.