Tag: metadata

Education

Greetings from Metadata Management Tools!

| Kelsey George
Image of cut out letters covering a surface, on top of them are Scrabble titles with letters spelling out the word "Hello"

  Earlier this fall, I taught a 3-week online course titled Metadata Management Tools for LITA. The course was designed for library staff who regularly work manipulating MARC and metadata sets or library school students interested in the subject of metadata management. My goal was for students to finish the course with an understanding of the tools available to them for metadata management, example use cases for each tool, and the resources available to them if they would like to further their knowledge or have any questions regarding any of these tools. A big “Thank you!” to LITA for giving me the opportunity to teach this online course. What is “metadata management”? According to Margaret Rouse of WhatIs.com, [m]etadata management is the administration of data that describes other data. It involves establishing policies and processes that ensure information across the organization can be integrated, accessed, shared, linked, analyzed, and maintained to best…

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Technical services

Thoughts on the 3R Project: Part 2

| Kelsey George
Image of road sign with no words, just two arrows pointing in opposite directions on an empty road.

Thoughts on the 3R Project Part 2 Part 1 of this series is available here. Now that some time has passed since the rollout of the beta version of the new RDA Toolkit, in this section, I would like to look at the conversations around the changes and the implications they have for the cataloging community. Three issues that continued to come up in the discussion around the new version were: The absence of an outline, enumeration, or another organizational schema throughout the toolkit; The absence of embedded AACR2 rule links in the RDA Toolkit; RDA’s role as a cataloging standard. Out of Order On rda-l, the first issue that came up in response to the RSC Secretary’s announcement was regarding the removal of numbering throughout the RDA Toolkit. The original online RDA Toolkit was structured much like a print book would be, with numbered chapters containing series of nested…

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Technical services

Thoughts on the 3R Project: Part 1

| Kelsey George
Image of grey card catalog with drawer labelled "Si" slightly opened.

Thoughts on the 3R Project Part 1 What is the 3R Project? On June 13, 2018, the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign Project (also referred to as the 3R Project) released an English-only beta version of the new RDA Toolkit in North America. An announcement predating the release, News on the RDA 3R Project beta release, was sent out by the RDA Steering Committee (RSC) Secretary to multiple listservs[1] on June 8th. It included links to a ‘document describing the “Outcomes of the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign Project” by RSC Chair Gordon Dunsire’ as well as an ‘announcement titled “What to Expect from the RDA Toolkit beta site”’ (Barnhart, 2018). One of the listservs to receive this communication was the ALA-hosted rda-l, which I follow. Suddenly, emails about the new release inundated my inbox. The RSC Secretary’s email prompted more than 100 responses on the listserv: at least 25…

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General information

Article Discussion on Schema.org

| Jacob Shelby

Article Discussion A month ago I came across an interesting article titled “Schema.org: Evolution of Structured Data on the Web”. In the article, R. V. Guha (Google), Ban Brickley (Google), and Steve MacBeth (Microsoft) talked about Schema.org, the history of Schema.org and other structured data on the Web, design decisions, extending the core Schema.org vocabulary, and related efforts to Schema.org. Much of the article revolved around the design decisions and implementation of Schema.org by “The Big Search Engines” (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc). Schema.org, first and foremost, is a set of vocabularies, or, a data model, just like Dublin Core and Bibframe. So, in that regard, we as information publishers can use the Schema.org vocabularies in whatever way we like. However, from what I can gather from the article, The Big Search Engines’ implementation of Schema.org has implications on how we publish our data on the Web . For instance, given this quote:…

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General information

Hack Your Calendars? Using Them for More Than Just Appointments

| Whitni Watkins

As librari*s one thing we know, and usually know well, is how to do more with less, or at least without any increase. With this mindset, even the most mundane tools can take on multiple roles. For example, our Calendars I had a boss near the beginning of my professional career who leveraged their calendar in ways I’d never thought to: as a log for tracking projects, personal ticketing system, and the usual meeting/appointment scheduling. It stuck with me; a handful of years later and I still use that same process. When I interviewed for my now current job, I was asked how I prioritize and manage what I have to do. My response: with my calendar. I don’t have meetings every hour of every day but I do have a lot of tasks to do and things I’m working on, and having a running log of this is useful,…

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General information

A Linked Data Journey: Survey of Publishing Strategies

| Jacob Shelby

Image Courtesy of Shelly under a CC BY 2.0 license. Introduction Happy Friday everyone! This is part five of my Linked Data Series. You can find the previous posts by going to my author page. Last week I was fortunate enough to attend Mashcat 2016 in Boston. It was a wonderful one-day conference. We had some very interesting conversations aimed at breaking down communication barriers in libraries (archives and museums), and I was able to meet some fantastic professionals (and students). In addition to attending, I also presented a talk titled Finding Aid-LD: Implementing Linked Data in a Finding Aid Environment (slides). During the presentation I identified various Linked Data publishing strategies that are currently being implemented. I thought this would be a neat topic to post here as well, so today I’m going to give you the deets on Linked Data publishing strategies. Survey of Publishing Strategies Note that these strategies…

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General information

A Linked Data Journey: Proof of Concept

| Jacob Shelby|3 Comments

Courtesy of Alex Berger under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license Introduction This is part two of my Linked Data Series. You can find the first post here. Linked Data is still a very abstract concept to many. My goal in this series is to demystify the notion. To that end I thought “wouldn’t it be cool to put Linked Data to practice, to build a proof-of-concept record”, so I did. I decided to create a Linked Data catalog record, because I wanted to write something relatively quickly, though I later found out that even writing a simple catalog record in Linked Data was going to be more effort than I anticipated. About the Record Link to display record: link Link to visual graph of record: link Link to code: link First, here’s a link to the display record. It might take a second to load, as it is pulling in…

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General information

A Linked Data Journey: Introduction

| Jacob Shelby|3 Comments

retrieved from Wikipedia, created by Anja Jentzsch and Richard Cyganiak Introduction Linked data. It’s one of the hottest topics in the library community. But what is it really? What does it look like? How will it help? In this series I will seek to demystify the concept and present practical examples and use-cases. Some of the topics I will touch on are: The basics Tools for implementing linked data Interviews with linked data practitioners What can you do to prepare? In this part one of the series I will give a brief explanation of linked data; then I will attempt to capture your interest by highlighting how linked data can enhance a variety of library services, including cataloging, digital libraries, scholarly data, and reference. What is Linked Data? I’m not going to go into the technical detail of linked data, as that isn’t the purpose of this post. If you’re…

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Original Content

Dates: Or, the Continuing Frustration of Unnecessarily Ambiguous Metadata

| Bill Dueber|2 Comments

  The MARC data structure, and the AACR2 rules that usually accompany it, are strange beasts. Every once in a while I’m asked why I get so frustrated with them, and I explain that there are things — strange things — that I have to deal with by writing lots of code when I could be spending my time trying to improve relevancy ranking or extending the reporting tools my librarians use to make decisions that affect patrons and their access. This is one of those tales. I’m a systems librarian, which in my case means that I deal with MARC metadata pretty much all day, every day. Coming from outside the library world, it took me a while to appreciate the MARC format and how we store data in it, where appreciate can be read as hate hate hate hate hate. I find it frustrating to deal with data…

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2010

LITA Session: Developing a Sustainable Digital Workflow

| Laura Choyce|4 Comments

Behind the interfaces of the digital libraries and institutional repositories we see today are carefully-planned and proactive processes that ensure that the end user can easily find what s/he needs. With digital libraries and repositories becoming increasingly popular, it is important to know what strategies work well. As a current MLIS student at the University of North Texas (and new LITA member) with a concentration in digital content management,  I had the privilege of attending the LITA session Developing a Sustainable Digital Workflow, at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC.  This session exhibited two very successful digital endeavors:  the digital collections at my very own UNT, and RUcore, the institutional repository at Rutger’s University. I chose this session because it is my goal to work in digital services/archives once I graduate (7 weeks left!!).  Below is a recap from each institution’s presentation on how they handle the management of…

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