Metadata Blog

Metadata Interest Group Program, Sunday July 12, 2009, 8-10 AM

Metadata Librarians Today: Roles and Competencies
Myung-Ja Han, Assistant Professor and Metadata Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Patricia Hswe, Project Manager for NDIIPP Partner Projects, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Powerpoint presentation

The study examined position descriptions for catalog librarians and metadata librarians from 2000-2008. It looked at job descriptions for both metadata librarian and cataloging librarian positions, focusing on preferred and required qualifications.

It asked the following research questions:

• What is the required skill set in the position descriptions?
• What changes/differences can be detected over the time period of the study?
• What are differences between cataloging librarians and metadata librarians with regard to qualifications?

Review of the literature indicated that professional catalog librarians are involved in instruction and training, database management, and developing standards for cataloging. Catalog librarians need to know about mark up language and schemas The first position with title “metadata librarian” appeared in late 1990s, probably because of increased non-book resources and libraries trying to provide access to them. Four key functions of metadata librarians are collaboration, research, education, standards development.

Position descriptions were analyzed with an Excel spreadsheet. Some interesting findings:

• The number of metadata librarian positions increasing, while cataloging librarian positions decreasing
• Most jobs are in research universities and in technical services departments
• Job titles for “metadata librarians”: 21 different titles with term “metadata”; 48 of 86 had title “metadata librarian”;
  Recent surge in “metadata” appearing in title
• Catalog librarians position descriptions demonstrates shift in responsibility from original cataloging to coordinating descriptive activities
• 96% of metadata librarian positions called for MLS degree (many allowed equivalent), compared to 100% of cataloging librarian positions requiring MLS.
• Competencies for metadata librarians included knowledge of metadata standards (MARC most common, then Dublin Core), XML, knowing OAI and managing OAI provider.
• Cataloging librarian positions emphasized foreign languages, cataloging standards, bibliographic utilities, and cataloging experience. There was less emphasis on computers and XML.
• There was a broader range of knowledge and experiences required for metadata librarians.
• For work-related skills, metadata and cataloging librarian positions are almost the same: good communication, team environment, but "Willingness to Learn" only appeared in Metadata librarian positions
• Desired qualifications for Metadata librarian positions included data exchange protocols, xml, xslt
• Desired qualifications for both types of positions mirrored the required qualifications of the other type of position. Metadata librarian positions requested knowledge of foreign language and knowledge of bibliographic utilities, while cataloging librarian positions requested familiarity with metadata standards and non-book format cataloging.

Questions for future study:

• Is the metadata librarian position replacing the cataloging librarian position or is it a new position?
• What are the metadata librarian’s responsibilities?
• How does LIS education evolve to meet changing requirements?
• Do the requirements for the position vary by the size of the staff of the institution?
• Do requirements change if the positions is for a fixed term or permanent?

Discussion of Qualifications for Metadata Librarians
After the presentation a discussion of qualifications and LIS education was led by Steve Miller, Senior Lecturer, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee School of Information Studies.

[Rather than try to attribute each answer to a specific person, I’ve tried to group like comments underneath each question.]

Question: Where did people learn the skills they needed for their position?

• Many people said they began their career as a cataloger and moved into position. They learned by taking workshops, reading, talking to colleagues, and learning project management.
• Self-training
• Working in digital initiatives while going to school, or taking internships in digital projects. Important skills learned:
• * Connecting the metadata design to the systems design
• * Knowing what the features of the element set needs to be included
• Having the “ability to learn”
• Taking computer science classes at grad school: digital publishing, xml.
• Certificate in web design through community college
• Workshop on data curation
• Taking classes in MLS program at Drexel

Some other thoughts:

• It’s challenging to identify opportunities for professional development while balancing needs of the local institution and the need to share metadata outside of the organization
• Most people moved into metadata from something else: cataloging, programming, or digital initiatives.
• Does the age of the librarian affected how he/she has approached the job?
• Institutions are interested in bringing into new and adaptable people into the library—thinking about the big picture and how things are changing.
• The liaison role for manager-style metadata librarians is absolutely key
• Project management skills are needed by metadata librarians
• Should metadata librarian be a manager or a practitioner?
• * The room was evenly split between manager-styles jobs and practitioner-style jobs
• Metadata librarians have to be diplomatic about stepping on someone else’s territory.

What did you learn in your MLIS program?

• Practicums and work experience were stressed over formal classes. Rutgers offers a practicum where students have a chance to work on digital production from start to finish—-selection, scanning, metadata, quality control, publishing—-this is seen as particularly valuable
• There is the need to combine formal education with practical experience to allow students to understand the application of what they are learning.
• There needs to be more opportunities to use tools and learn metadata skills.
• Metadata standards class and systems analysis class provide a good background.
• Keep classes with a user focus
• Grant writing experiences

The program concluded with a business meeting.

Notes by Kristin Martin

Workflow Tools for Automating Metadata Creation and Maintenance
Saturday, July 11th, from 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon. Sponsored by ALCTS, co-sponsored by LITA.

As digital projects become less peripheral and more integral to library
operations, institutions must begin to address the implications of this
change. With the increasing amount of digital content libraries are
expected to create and maintain, data curation has emerged as a key
objective. Intended for librarians who are involved with the
development and management of metadata, this session will present
examples of current work and discussion opportunities for
collaborative development of tools among institutions.

Slides available at ALA Conference Materials Archive.

Herding Cats
Ann Caldwell, Coordinator, Digital Production Services, Brown University.

“Herding cats” seems like a fascinating title. As Caldwell explained,
she spent lots of time working with faculty. Besides one-to-one basis
meetings, she recently worked with the entire engineering division to
assist their re-accreditation process. During this process, a set of tools
were developed to allow faculty and users to easily contribute digital
objects to Brown’s repository. (In the accreditation case, the “cats”
may also refer to the digital objects, “materials needed to be
deposited for the accreditation team: syllabus/outline, website,
homework, lab reports and graded student work, project and graded
student work, exams and graded student work and student
assessments…”) The set of tools include a file uploading folder system,
a MODS editor and a file tracking system.

Caldwell emphasized two problems in dealing with digital objects in
Brown and the tools developed to tackle these problems. The first one
is to keep track of materials. The solution is “Project Manager”, a
previously developed system that can help track the engineering
accreditation materials as well. This pretty sophisticated tool “tracks
projects, equipment, software, users, as well as processes”. The
second problem is to create metadata which is not a problem for
digital services but for faculty and bibliographers. They wanted to
create a user-friendly metadata editing interface that can hide the xml
encoding. The result is a MODS editor: it can list a couple of fields
including required fields, add restrictions to the names (e.g. define
type: personal, corporate, conference and the role) and to the date,
and allow viewing of the raw xml file. Before metadata can be added,
they built a file uploading folder system to assist file deposit. The
professors can create communities and have their personal folders.
An example of a community can be all the classes a professor teaches.

She discussed the project workflow including both behind the scene
and in front of the scene processes. The first half can be summarized
as: authentication, user uploading file, “item digitized” and recorded
in the tracking system, JHOVE validating the file and MIX record
created, tracking system marking “metadata created”, a bundle folder
created, and MODS record saved to this bundle folder. Now the
bundle is ready to load. An API program will automate file uploading
and allow querying of the folder. Next, the bundle will be scripted into
a METS record. Currently they are developing a Fedora ingester “that
will suck in the METS record and spit out a FoXML record” to create
the Fedora object. Finally, the system will “detect new Fedora object
and automatically update SOLR index”.

Caldwell indicated that the Engineering Department will continue
using the system to deposit their digital materials for future
accreditation due to the success of the project, and other
departments might try the same in the future.

Using Schematron for Analyzing Conformance to Best Practices for EAD, TEI, and MODS(and some other thoughts on workflow tools)
Jenn Riley, Metadata Librarian, Indiana University Digital Library Program.

Riley works with System design and programmers. She helps to design the system and one of her visions is to make metadata creation systems work well. Her experiment is an example of those tools that could improve workflow in a larger environment.

She first provided some context on why they implement Schematron to analyze file conformance against guidelines. She suggested that one of the biggest challenges in text encoding is metadata consistency, a component of quality. While it is easier to make data centric xml (e.g. MODS, DC…) consistent (because you already have the fields and you can decide what to put in), it is much harder to encode document centric xml (e.g. EAD, TEI...) consistently. In the latter case, the text is available already and needs to be marked up. At Indiana University Libraries, they do lots of TEI and EAD encoding. They work with xml directly instead of using Archivist’s Toolkit. There are some tools available to help achieve consistency, such as schema validation in XML editor, tag libraries, xml templates, examples, workflow documentations and guidelines. In developing the Schematron plug-in, they got inspiration from RLG EAD report card, which takes EAD guidelines and defines them in a machine readable way. It is an online tool downloadable to a server or a desktop, and it will report problems of the xml documents against those guidelines.

Riley elaborated on the Schematron plug-in in Indiana University Libraries and how it works. They added Schematron checks into the xml editor Oxygen and check files against their local guidelines. The schematron technology was wrapped as a Java plug-in in Oxygen. They call it XTF Validator. Actually it only performs one additional layer of validation. She showed some of the errors and warnings produced by the validator and said that the correct expressions could be copied and pasted to the original xml file. In her TEI poem sample, the plug-in reports that the page break needs to have an id attribute and the id attribute must match a certain pattern.

She further explained how schemetron technology works and how to implement the package. Schematron is an xml assertion language, and it can make an assertion on how an xml document should look like. It organizes into patterns, patterns have rules, and rules have context (e.g. an EAD header). Assertions exist within rules. A user can define rules and tests which were written in XPath language and the tests will generate error reports. The schemetron website is at http://www.schematron.com and the software is downloadable. It runs under XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 processors, both of which include a set of stylesheets running in sequence. The result is a schematron validator file. When running the instance document against the validator file, an xml report will be produced. This report can also be rendered as html pages and several reports can be combined on a repository level.

After showing Indiana University’s experiment with Schematron, Riley put Schematron in a larger context and showed an example from DLF Aquifer. DLF collects MODS from different institutions and has guidelines for those MODS files. They come up with levels of adoption (and requirements) and make the guidelines machine readable. An interface using schematron technology was created for contributors to check their records.

Finally, Riley discussed some general issues related to metadata workflow and tools. For example, what should new workflow look like? She emphasized on automating, streamlining and validating. She suggested that tools should be configurable, modular, connected with other tools and sharable among different institutions and environments. She also touched on some related issues such as usability of the cataloging tools and user interfaces.