# Enhancing Discoverability: A Metadata Framework for Empirical Research in Theses
## 2 Related Work
### Additional Metadata Standards in the Digital Library Ecosystem  
While Dublin Core and DDI form the primary foundation of our hybrid approach, a comprehensive understanding of the metadata landscape requires consideration of other established standards. This section examines additional frameworks to contextualize our design decisions and justify our focus on Dublin Core and DDI integration. The Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), developed by the Library of Congress, represents a significant advancement over basic Dublin Core for bibliographic description [23; 24]. MODS provides more granular elements, including complex title information, detailed name authorities, subject hierarchies, and sophisticated relationship modeling through elements such as <titleInfo>, cname>, <subject>, and <relatedItem>. However, despite MODS' enhanced bibliographic capabilities, it lacks the empirical research specificity that our framework addresses, focusing on traditional library cataloging concerns rather than research methodology documentation. Similarly, the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) provides a framework for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata for digital library objects [25; 26]. While METS excels as a \"wrapper\" standard that can incorporate other metadata schemas while adding structural organization, it addresses packaging and structural relationships rather than content-specific documentation needs, introducing unnecessary complexity for individual thesis documentation without providing the empirical research fields our hybrid model supplies. Encoded Archival Description (EAD) serves as the standard for encoding archival finding aids, designed to describe collections of materials rather than individual items [27; 28]. EAD supports hierarchical descriptions with provenance information and detailed scope descriptions, but its collection-oriented approach differs from our focus on individual thesis documentation. EAD assumes materials exist within established archival hierarchies, whereas student theses represent discrete intellectual products requiring methodological rather than archival description. Schema.org represents another alternative, providing structured data vocabularies for web content using linked data principles [29; 30]. While Schema.org offers potential complementarity with academic repository systems for enhancing discoverability, its broad applicability comes at the cost of domain-specific depth, lacking the granular empirical research fields necessary for comprehensive thesis documentation. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) provides a foundational model for representing information using subject-predicate-object triples [31; 32], offering theoretical advantages for semantic web integration and cross-repository interoperability. Despite these capabilities, we chose to focus on XML-based standards for practical reasons: existing institutional repositories predominantly implement XML-based metadata systems, making our approach immediately deployable without infrastructure changes; the learning curve for non-technical users is lower with form-based XML entry systems; and while RDF enables sophisticated semantic relationships, the primary challenge in thesis documentation lies in capturing empirical research details rather than complex entity relationships. Two additional standards warrant brief consideration: ONIX (Online Information Exchange) serves the commercial publishing industry by standardizing product information [33], focusing on sales and marketing metadata rather than scholarly content documentation; and PREMIS (Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies) addresses digital preservation requirements [34; 35], documenting preservation actions and technical characteristics rather than research methodology and empirical content. This survey of alternative metadata standards reinforces our decision to build upon Dublin Core and DDI.