Metadata Blog

This post contains links to write-ups from this blog and around the Internet that may be of interest to metadata librarians. If I couldn't find anything, there is no currently no link. If you've posted a write-up and want it linked to, email me at kmarti@uic.edu

FRBR Interest Group
Friday, Jan. 23: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM; Colorado Convention Center, RM 205
ALCTS

Cataloging and Classification Section Forum
Link to Presentations from ALA Wiki
"FRBR and RDA: a Glimpse into the Future of Cataloging and Public Displays."
Friday, Jan. 23: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM; Colorado Convention Center, Korbel Ballroom 3C
ALCTS

Electronic Resources Management Interest Group
Friday, Jan. 23: 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM; Ritz Carlton Denver, Salon 3
LITA/ALCTS

Cataloging Issues Disc. Group
Saturday, Jan. 24: 8 AM - 10 AM; Crowne Plaza Denver City Center, Office
ACRL

Intellectual Access to Preservation Metadata Interest Group
Link to Rebecca Guenther's presentation
Saturday, Jan. 24: 8 AM - 10 AM; Sheraton Denver Hotel, Gold
PARS

MARC Formats Interest Group
Saturday, Jan. 24: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM; Colorado Convention Center, RM 501
LITA

Electronic Resources Interest Group Meeting
Saturday, Jan. 24: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM; Ritz Carlton Denver, Salon 3
ALCTS

Catalog Form and Function Interest Group
Saturday, Jan. 24: 10:30-12:00 PM; Grand Hyatt Denver, Maroon Peak
ALCTS

Cataloging Norms Interest Group
Saturday, Jan. 24: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM; Colorado Convention Center, RM 703
ALCTS

Catalog Management Interest Group
Saturday, Jan. 24: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM; The Curtis, Keep-Away
ALCTS

Emerging Technology Interest Group
Saturday, Jan. 24: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM; Sheraton Denver Hotel, Colorado
LITA

Standards Interest Group
Saturday, Jan. 24: 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM; Grand Hyatt Denver, Maroon Peak
LITA

Networked Resources and Metadata Interest Group
Sunday, Jan. 25: 8 AM - 10 AM: Colorado Convention Center, Korbel Ballroom 4F
ALCTS

Cataloging Issues Disc. Group
Sunday, Jan. 25: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM; Hyatt Regency Denver, Captial Ballroom 7
AFAS

Resource Description and Access (RDA) Update Forum
Sunday, Jan. 25: 10:30 AM–12:30 PM; Colorado Convention Center, Korbel Ballroom 3C.

Authority Control Interest Group Issue Updates & Business Meetings
Sunday, Jan. 25: 1:30 PM - 5:30 PM; Grand Hyatt Denver, Mt. Sopris
ALCTS

Collection Management and Development Section Forum
Focus on collecting free Web resources
Sunday, Jan. 24: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM, Grand Hyatt Denver, Maroon Peak
ALCTS

The Next Generation Catalog Interest Group
Sunday, Jan. 25: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM; Colorado Convention Center, RM 110
LITA

RDA Implementation Task Force
Sunday, Jan. 25: 4:00 - 5:30 PM; Grand Hyatt Denver, Mt. Evans
AlCTS

Program for Cooperative Cataloging Participants Meeting
Sunday, Jan. 25: 4:00 - 5:30 PM; in the Colorado Convention Center, RM 201
PCC

Heads of Cataloging Interest Group
Monday, Jan. 26: 8 AM - 10 AM; Denver Marriott City Center, Denver Ballroom III
ALCTS

Continuing Resources Cataloging Committee Update Forum
Monday, Jan. 26: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM; Colorado Convention Center, Korbel Ballroom 3C
ALCTS

ALCTS Forum: FRBR, RDA and the Catalog of the Future

Barbara Tillett, Director of the LC Acquisitions and Bibliographic Directorate's Policy and Standards Division (new name), gave her personal views on the future for FRBR and RDA. She favors "Scenario 1", an object-oriented, linked-data, Semantic Web approach which would require new data structures and systems. She sees a future in which there are "no longer records, but description sets as DC community calls them" - so that machine applications can determine the FRBR level of descriptive elements, and work can be done once and shared all over the world in many kinds of applications. She wants more automated tools, vocabulary registries and validation to make description work easier and more efficient. She recognizes that compromises had to be made with RDA - it "carries over 'case law' from AACR2" - but hopes that the value of its new approaches will be recognized and that this will lead to further revisions. She noted experimentation with FRBR structures by OCLC, VTLS, and the National Libraries of Australia and Sweden, but "more is needed".

Diane Vizine-Goetz of OCLC Research talked about OCLC's user surveys (they want more subjects, tables of contents and summaries, and details) and OCLC's current experimental work using OCLC's FRBR clustering algorithms (building on Fiction Finder), to extract this kind of data along with classification and other elements and present it to users at higher level displays.

John Utley of VTLS described the FRBR clustering features of their Virtua product.

Robert McDonald, Assoc. Dean for Library Technologies at Indiana University, described the Open Library Environment Project. Specifications for interoperable library system components will be developed and implemented using Service Oriented Architecture. "Fortune 500's say SOA is dead, but we think SOA design can work for us." A core group of libraries are developing the specifications, but there will be many opportunities for participation for interested libraries of all types.

Report by Laura Akerman

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.

Collection Management and Development Section Forum
Sunday, Jan. 24: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM, Grand Hyatt Denver, Maroon Peak
ALCTS
Blogger: Melanie Wacker

This discussion forum was a follow-up to the ALCTS e-forum that was held in November 2008.

Melanie Wacker moderated the forum and also gave an introductory overview. This included the issues that have to be considered when archiving or cataloging free Web resources, as well as a summary of the e-forum.

Tracy Seneca of the California Digital Archive was the first speaker. Her presentation covered a wide range of issues: The Web Archiving Service (which will become publicly available in summer 2009), tools and vendors available for Web archiving (including Archive-it, CONTENTdm, and Web Curator Tool), workflow issues, the California State Government Documents Project, and the recommendations of the Section 108 Study Group regarding the legal basis for Web archiving.

Alex Thurman of Columbia University Libraries gave a report on a Mellon funded planning grant for establishing a workflow integrating free Web resources into library collections. He described the use of del.icio.us as a selection tool and his experiences with Archive-it as an archiving tool, as well as future plans for this project.
The metadata collected in del.icio.us has been mapped into MARC for integration into the library catalog and will be uploaded from there to OCLC.
Thurman recommended to perform at the minimum one quality controlled crawl for all sites that were selected for being in-scope of the collection. Regular re-crawls should be scheduled for all sites that are determined to have high priority.

The presentations were followed by a very lively discussion.