Metadata Blog

Below are two selected items discussed at the NRMIG business meeting at Midwinter 2009.

Program Update (Jennifer Roper and Joanna Burgess)

• They’ve confirmed with the ALCTS Program Committee that the preconference “Manipulating Metadata: XLST for Librarians” will be held all day Friday. It is intended to be hands-on, and is the only preconference asking for computers.
• NRMIG will hold a program on metadata workflow tools on Saturday from 10:30 to noon featuring three speakers: Jenn Riley, Ann Caldwell and Rhonda Marker.
• NRMIG is also co-sponsoring an ALCTS metadata applications class which Steve Miller is teaching with Jennifer Lang.

Blog update (Erin Stalberg for Kristin Martin)

• Kristin has been listing programs of potential interest to the metadata community before ALA and soliciting bloggers. She had success at recruiting bloggers last annual, but not as many volunteered during this Mid-Winter. She would like to revisit the conversation on whether we should continue this practice or whether the programs are covered well enough on the blogosphere.
• One suggestion submitted is that perhaps someone could take on job of trying to find out what’s being blogged and where.
• Another question Kristin raised is that most blog activity is focused on Midwinter & Annual conferences, leading to a vast amount of time that it’s quiet in interim. Would people be willing to put together articles here and there?
• Is there any interest in reporting on other kinds of conferences that related to metadata?

The first portion of the NRMIG meeting featured a presentation on taxonomy development by Laura Dorricott, Project Delivery Manager of Taxonomy services with Dow Jones. Her presentation can be viewed at: http://presentations.ala.org/index.php?title=Sunday,_January_25

• Taxonomies are part of an “evolutionary path” featuring the following elements:
  Dictionaries & flat lists --> Structured authority files --> Hierarchical taxonomies --> Controlled vocabulary thesauri --> Ontologies.
• Taxonomies form the building blocks for ontologies; ontologies are semantic representations of the real world in all its rich diversity.
• The purposes of controlled vocabulary include translation, consistency, indication of semantic relationships, hierarchical relationships to assist browsing, search and retrieval (precision and recall). The return of investment comes when you enable someone to save time and increase productivity.
• In response to a question: folksonomies are actually in a different class than taxonomies, as they generally consist of social tagging that are not typically hierarchical.
• Keyword searching has many drawbacks and is insufficient for information seeking purposes. Taxonomy helps people filter out the noise and discover relevant information needs regardless of what they’re labeled.
• Search and navigation are not alternative, but complimentary solutions that serve audiences well considering the multiple viewpoints they bring to the table.
• When building taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, you must account for ambiguity (polysemes), synonymy, semantic relationships (hierarchical and associative), facets, warrant, structures, metadata (controlled vocabulary).
• In response to a list of standards, Diane Hillman recommended that SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) be added to that list(see http://metadataregistry.org for more information).
• What is the rationale for creating a thesaurus, which is usually labor-intensive and requires specialized software when it grows beyond a certain size? A revealing statistic is that 40% of corporate users can’t find the information they need to do their jobs on the intranet. Companies have many information retrieval issues which result in loss of productivity and profits. There is significant value in using controlled vocabularies, including improving productivity, reducing costs, gaining competitive advantages, driving usage, driving cultural change, and leveraging information management skills.
• In response to a question about corporate versus library taxonomy, she revealed that enterprise-wide taxonomies usually feature around fifteen terms up top, fairly broad-based and not very deep. However, if the client offers information about information, they will have subject based taxonomy, such as libraries have. You can see many examples of taxonomies at: http://taxonomywarehouse.com/
• In terms of what experience is needed, Laura responded that she most frequently hires people who have experience building taxonomies. Sometimes you do need subject expertise. The client should be involved in all stages and she uses a live session that the client can view.
• What prompts companies to hire taxonomists? They often reach a point where they have excess information and their situation becomes urgent, especially considering the increasing regulations about managing documents. It is expensive to do manual indexing of all documents and a taxonomy provides a framework for both auto-classifying and manual indexing. Additionally, acquisition of companies often results in a need for taxonomies.

The Networked Resources and Metadata Interest Group (NRMIG) within ALCTS would like to announce that they will hold a discussion on taxonomy development at their ALA Midwinter meeting, set to take place on Sunday, January 25, from 8-10 a.m. (Colorado Convention Center, Korbel Ballroom 4F). The discussion will be led by Laura Dorricott, Project Delivery Manager of Taxonomy Services for Dow Jones Client Solutions. We invite you to participate in this discussion, also to stay afterwards for the business portion of the NRMIG meeting.
Please reply this blog post by including your questions and comments on taxonomy development and related issues in general or in your library. We will include them in the discussion. Thank you!

Erin Stalberg
Chair, NRMIG

Saturday, June 28, 1:30-3:00

The Single-Record Approach for E-books
Philip Young
Catalog Librarian, University Libraries at Virginia Tech
Link to presentation: http://presentations.ala.org/index.php?title=Image:singleRecord.ppt

Adding links to print records is often the practical course taken by libraries when batch records are unavailable and a large number of ebooks (either from vendors or locally digitized) must be cataloged. Such a project occurred at Virginia Tech for a set of ebooks in which links were globally added to print records, after careful consideration of the alternatives (no batch records were available).

He cited some cataloging rules which allow this practice. Institutions such as GPO, NLM, UC, Brown have been using the single record option. The advantages include that it's expedient, preferred by patrons and many librarians, improved access points on collection-level records. However, the disadvantages are that a mixed practice exists in the catalog with record loads, difficulty with standard # matching, and FRBR incompatibility.

He listed factors to be considered in decision-making, such as:
* Equivalent manifestations
* Same publisher
* No batches of MARC records available
* ILS capability (includes consortial considerations)
* Time of staff (if originals needed)

Impact of Vendor Records on the Catalog
Lai-Ying Hsiung
Head of Technical Services, University Library
University of California, Santa Cruz

The speaker started out the talk asking whether we feel in control with these record loads. She then went on to give a presentation dense with information (selected highlights follow).

Why do we load vendor records? To do more with less (due to shrinking budgets), provide timely access to patrons, avoid redundancy in catalog management, and the changing bib control landscape. With the advent of one stop shopping, many of these records might provide good-enough cataloging. The LCWG recommended we make use of bibliographic data earlier in the supply chain (e.g., publishers).

She then described some possible reasons for problems and quality issues of these records. They include incomplete or inaccurate data, lack of authority control, and different cataloging standards.

There is a current problem with duplicate records in OCLC as brief MARC is mixed with full, and also proliferation of multiple separate records for different platforms. All this slows down identification, hinders retrieval, and complicates copy cataloging workflow.

Waiting for another library to catalog or upgrade a title also slows down access and processing. Similarly, if a record upgrades locally, beneficial changes may not be reflected in Worldcat.

She covered ways that OCLC can help, such as by facilitating easier upgrading by member libraries and providing incentives to vendors to contribute full MARC records. Vendors can be helped by providing cataloging training and encouraging them to enrich their records with value-added services, such as table of contents. Finally, libraries can be helped by granting more of them enhance status and allowing re-loads of vendor records into OCLC.

Many record loads are problematic because they are not in Worldcat, and Worldcat Local only searches the holdings in Worldcat. The contract with many ebook vendors prevent libraries from loading their records in Worldcat. UCSC is planning to move to a network level and implement Worldcat Local.

Aggregator-neutral records have already been approved for serials, and most recently, for integrating resources. Discussions of aggregator-neutral ebooks are already occurring and will likely become a standard.

Temporary Employees: Managing Practicum, Internship and Volunteer Experiences in Technical Services Unit
Margaret Mauer
Associate Professor, Head, Catalog & Metadata
Kent State University Libraries and Media Services
Link to presentation: http://www.personal.kent.edu/~mbmaurer

Kent State has been hosting practicum, graduate student assistants, and volunteers for 10 years. National trends that support the use of students include diminishing financial support for libraries (and thus technical services), less "junior" cataloging positions, and decreasing availability of cataloging courses. The students' often enthusiastic presence does change the tone of the workplace.

It helps to think of them as very temporary employees. You have to consider how to maximize the benefit while minimizing the cost to your department. For example, even though the standard practicum only requires 100 hours, the Cataloging Department requires 150 hours to recover the investment in training. Also, they used to assign them special projects, but have found that works best is to separate the opportunities into 2 tracks: copy cataloging and original cataloging. They write job descriptions for each position. Training material is re-used from semester to semester. They also establish a limit of face-to-face training (for example, 25 hours for copy cat), since constantly answering questions can become a real time-sink. They've found it's best to have a standard workspace as well as a webpage of resources just for the students.

They conduct exit interviews with the students and also provide them with a survey to evaluate the program with 5 or 6 questions. This procedure has provided some valuable feedback that has been used to improve the program.

The benefits include opportunity to do quality control and freeing staff from repetitive work, as well as the additional manpower. In the long run, they are also helping the cataloging profession since some of the students have begun to make professional contributions.

Notes by Mary Aycock