Problem with TIGER/Line 2018 Metadata

[KellyLaBlanc]

I am trying to use 2018 TIGER/Line data, but am having trouble reading the metadata.  The technical documentation says to use the ISO 19139 stylesheet in ArcCatalog, but neither of customize ISO options work.  I have no trouble with the 2017 data metadata.  Is this an issue with the TIGER/Line data or an ArcGIS issue?

[MSDISGRC]

Kelly,

We have had similar problems with the 2018 TIGER metadata. After a few emails with the GEO Tiger staff we were informed that the 2018 metadata use ISO 19115-3, as required by data.gov.  Arc, on the other hand, expects ISO metadata to be in the 19139 format. Since the 2018 TIGER data do not also come with FGDC formatted metadata (unlike in previous years), Arc appears to be unable to read the supporting documentation.  You can still open the xml files that come with the data to read it outside of Arc, but I have yet to come across a solution for either importing the 19115-3 data or converting it into 19139.

[JoshGrail · Accepted solution]

Hi @KellyLaBlanc , @MSDISGRC   and anyone else that may be running into this issue,

We came across this post while looking into this issue for TIGER 2020 metadata and I wanted to chime in, the issue is likely the same. We've investigated this within Support and found that contrary to the TIGER documentation the metadata provided is in ISO 19139-2 format, which is the XML implementation of ISO 19115-2 (see here for more details). This metadata format is not supported for use in ArcGIS Software. Supported standard metadata formats are listed here. The naming is a bit contradictory, while 19139 format metadata is supported,  ISO 19139-2 is not compatible with ISO 19139 metadata (again see here). You will also see the following in Catalog view:

In previous years the TIGER downloads provided FGDC format metadata, which is supported in ArcGIS Pro. FGDC metadata is no longer provided in TIGER shapefile downloads, and since the format currently provided is not supported by ArcGIS as described above, this leads to the import failure and/or informational message.

We recommend users who encounter this issue reach out to the Census Bureau to report their concerns with TIGER metadata