ALCTS Metadata Interest Group meeting, Midwinter 2013

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Jason Kovari
ALCTS Metadata Interest Group
ALA Midwinter 2013
Sunday, January 27th from 8:30 to 10:00 am
Washington State Convention Center, TCC 204
Add this event to your Midwinter schedule: http://alamw13.ala.org/node/9033
 
Please join us for the ALCTS Metadata Interest Group Program at the 2013 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, Washington. We will be featuring two presentations focused on preservation metadata:
Sandy Card –  Binghamton University Libraries
Creating a metadata portal and workflows for a digital preservation repository
Binghamton University Libraries became one of the first academic libraries to implement Ex Libris’ Rosetta digital preservation system. This presentation will provide an overview of the process used to create the dictionary of metadata fields and metadata templates and the role Binghamton’s metadata catalogers have as project managers for preservation projects. Examples from the metadata portal and metadata templates will be shared; and the role non‐librarians have in creating metadata for the preservation of the University’s research materials will be explained.
Aaron Collie and Lucas Mak — Michigan State University Libraries
Incompatible or Interoperable? A METS bridge for a small gap between two digital preservation software packages
Michigan State University Libraries is utilizing Archivematica, an open‐source digital preservation system, to extract preservation metadata and to prepare digital objects for long term preservation. The management of this metadata and objects will be handled by the Fedora Commons middleware application. There exists a small gap between these two software packages that when bridged can create a robust pipeline for generating, extracting and handing metadata. This presentation will discuss utilizing the METS standards as the bridge between these two software packages by noting the differences between the software packages’ two implementations of the METS standard, the transformation design and assumptions, and will propose a possible implementation and code contribution.
A business meeting open to all will follow the presentations.
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2012 DLF Fall Forum notes & slides

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Jason Kovari

An incredibly successful Digital Library Federation fall forum has just concluded in Denver. As part of this conference, attendees collaboratively took notes in GoogleDocs, linked from the individual session description pages off the Schedule page (http://www.diglib.org/forums/2012forum/2012-dlf-forum-schedule/); slides are being added so check back if not yet available.

This conference was seriously great and included an update on the Bibliographic Framework Initiative; tons on digital scholarship, data curation and digital humanities; and plenty more metadata fun.

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Cataloging Theory Meets the Real World

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Sarah Theimer

In Cataloging Theory in Search of Graph Theory and Other Ivory Towers (Dec. 2011) Ronald Murray and Barbara Tillett  wrote about enhancing cataloging theory.   Murray and Tillett conclude that cataloging theory formation and practice can now be understood as a much more comprehensive, multilayered activity containing two distinct viewpoints : the cosmological view of the bibliographic universe – managing large scale resource descriptions , and the quantum level view – character sets, identifiers, RDF triples, etc.

At ALA Midwinter Diane Hillman also described cataloging practice as a more comprehensive, multilayered activity.  She found the cost of traditional cataloging far too high for increasingly dubious value. Librarians must think differently. We must assume new roles as aggregators of relevant metadata content, create methods for developing and sharing data in an uncentralized environment, model and document best practices and develop vocabularies. We must learn new skills to adapt.

For many, daily work includes transfers and rebarcoding.  A 2011 survey found 58 percent of professional catalogers performed copy cataloging.  This work structure does not require us to take the cosmological view or to learn new skills so even if we developed new skills no one would notice.   How do we bridge the gap between what we should be doing and what we are doing?  Even with the appropriate skills we will not automatically be invited to the table.  The University of Minnesota recently created a Data Management and Access Department, consisting of staff from systems and cataloging/metadata. This appears to be one attempt to bridge that gap.

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The Bibliographic Framework Initiative : Are We all Speaking the Same Language?

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Sarah Theimer

Information about the planning underway for the MARC replacement can be found in Sally McCallum’s slides from a talk given at IGeLU:   http://igelu.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/IGeLU-sally-McCallum.pptx.  These includes interesting glimpses into the future.  A timeline information on slide 29 predicts  Phase 1.5, early experimentation with a very small group, should take place October-November.

I recently published an article in the Journal of Library Metadata comparing MARC’s death with Language death  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19386389.2012.700604   and discussed what language planning and death could teach us about MARC’s replacement.  The most recent slideshow illustrates how essential it is to develop a common understanding of words.   When you use pre-existing words to convey specific concepts with a non-typical meaning, people are not going to realize that they don’t understand each other.

Word Ambiguity

Annotation is usually defined as a critical or explanatory note or body of notes added to a text.  Slide 24 uses the term Annotation as “a resource that decorates other MARCR resources like holdings, cover images and reviews”, thus changing the definition from explanation to decoration.

Slide 23 delineates four core classes. The Work class reflects the conceptual essence of the item “roughly equivalent to a FRBR work or expression”. Instance, a word usually defined as a case or occurrence,  now as a core class means  “a resource reflecting an individual, material embodiment of the Work” , a good definition, but also different.

Interesting wording on Slide 18 as both FRBR and RDA are called “previous efforts” implying they are in the past, when RDA is yet to be completely implemented.

Language also grows through the creation of totally new words.  In such cases definitions are created through context.  Eric Miller  (Zepheira)  tweeted  “these slides are high level MARCitecture in nature, details soon” See: https://twitter.com/erimille/status/250343696510353408.  At least it is easily discernible what that word means.

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ALA Annual 2012: MARBI (Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information) meetings

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Haiyun

10:30am-12:00pm, Sat. June 23; 1:00pm-5:00pm, June, 24, 2012

Matthew Wise, the committee Chair, announced the statement from ALCTS. The ALCTS Board approved to dissolve MARBI as of the conclusion of Annual 2013 and create a joint ALCTS-LITA Metadata Standards Committee (MSC) with liaison from RUSA with the similar charge of MARBI: “The ALCTS/LITA Metadata Standards Committee will play a leadership role in the creation and development of metadata standards for bibliographic information.  The Committee will review and evaluate proposed standards; recommend approval of standards in conformity with ALA policy; establish a mechanism for the continuing review of standards (including the monitoring of further development); provide commentary on the content of various implementations of standards to concerned agencies; and maintain liaison with concerned units within ALA and relevant outside agencies.”

Sally McCallum from the Library of Congress stated that the Library of Congress would revisit the structure of MARC Advisory Committee to include the members of MARBI and national libraries representatives as voting members. The new MAC will be LC’s consultative national committee, just as the other national partners have their own committees. A separate group, the MARC Steering Group, will include the national library representatives from LC, BL, DNB and LAC, and will have the final approval on MAC decisions. The names of these two new committees are provisional until next year. LC is committed to maintaining the formats and the current system of proposals and discussion papers.

2012‐02 Identifying Titles Related to the Entity Represented by the Authority Record in the MARC 21 Authority Format

After discussion, the proposal was asked to be tabled since many important considerations have surfaced which cannot be dealt in a logical manner at the MARBI table. The group preferred simple coding (all title elements in one subfield) rather than complicated coding (mirroring the uniform title 130/240 or title statement 245 fields). It was suggested that the proposal only referred to entities in authority 100, 110 and 111 fields, not 148, 150, 151.

Proposal No. 2012-03: Data provenance in the MARC21 bibliographic format

Option two of this proposal was approved (defining field 883) with revisions to the definition of $u to use it for URIs only, using $c instead of $1 for the confidence level, and defining 883 in the authority and classification formats.

Proposal No. 2012-04: New data elements in the MARC 21 authority format for Other Designation Associated with the Person and Title of the Person

This proposal was approved with the addition of $s, $t, $u and $v. The existing field 368 will be renamed to simply “Other Attributes.”

2012‐05 Making 250 Field Repeatable in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

This proposal was not approved. It was suggested that Music Library Association took this paper and worked it into a discussion paper for
the midwinter meeting.

2012‐06 Defining Subfield $c (Qualifying Information) in Field 028 (Publisher Number) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

This proposal was approved with revision to define $q instead of $c.

2012‐07 Defining New Code for Vocal Score in Field 008/20 (format of music) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

This proposal was approved.

2012‐DP02 Authority Records for Medium of Performance Vocabulary for Music

This paper will come back to the midwinter meeting as a proposal.

2012‐DP03 Chronological Aspects in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats

It was agreed that MARC need a place to encode date or period of creation in particular for the content of published collections/aggregated works. This paper will come back as a proposal at midwinter meeting. The task group will write a best practices document which will substitute for a content standard for now.

2012‐DP04 Recording Audience Characteristics of Works and Expressions in the MARC 21 Bibliographic
and Authority Formats

It was agreed that audience characteristics of a work is one of the work’s attributes and should be recorded. Most people preferred 3XX block rather than 6XX block since 6XX is named “subject”.  It also was suggested to not make 008/22 codes obsolete. The content standard will need to be developed to decide whether the terms should include the double dash syntax in their content standard, or possibly allow separate subfields.

2012‐DP05 Recording Creator/Contributor Group Categorizations of Works, Expressions, and Persons in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats

It was agreed that it would continue to be necessary to record in bibliographic records group categories for creators/contributors of compilations/aggregate works who share a particular characteristic. It was also agreed that individual persons have attributes for categories of groups to which they belong and should be recorded in personal name authority records. The 3XX block was preferable for this data than 6XX and the tags used in the Bibliographic and Authority formats should be the same if possible.  Separate 3XX fields for creator/contributor group categorizations and for audience characteristics were preferable to a single field for both. Nationality is not a clear‐cut question and there will be some redundancy. No clear answer was obtained.

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Linking Data Across Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Kim Durante

ALA Annual 2012: Linking Data Across Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Sponsor: Committee on Libraries, Archives and Museums (CALM)

Speakers

  • Martin Kalfatovic, Asst. Director, Digital Services Division, Smithsonian Institution
  • Patricia Harpring, Managing Editor, Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute
  • Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist, OCLC
  • Rachel Frick, Director, Digital Library Federation at CLIR

The combined Committee on Libraries, Archives and Museums (CALM) sponsored a session titled “Linking Data Across Libraries, Archives and Museums.” Convened by Danielle Plummer, the session consisted of four panelists who contributed to the discussion of how these three institutions in particular are contributing to the creation, dissemination, and linking of cultural heritage data on the web.

Matrin Kalfatovic’s presentation titled “Thinking of Linking,” outlined the standard definitions of what is means to structure data as well as the principles underlying the Linked Data movement. He compared the current efforts in opening data to the established role of cultural institutions as knowledge organizations, object curators, and access mediators. While the mechanics required to support twenty-first century methods of inquiry might have changed dramatically, the ideals of facilitating discovery, research, and information literacy, still lie at the very core of the institutional missions within the LAM communities. Kalfatovic encouraged these communities to contribute their authoritative and interconnected knowledge domains to an expanding global information network.

Kalfatovic mentioned a few LAM applications already supporting structured data. The Digital Public Library of America is expanding its current holdings and plans to provide a triplestore for pubic access, including links to the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). He cited the advancements of the Biodiversity Heritage Library in building an open data repository of taxonomic names and bibliographic information. Kalfatovic also mentioned developments in web architecture and information management strategies, citing the example Zepheria, as potential application for deploying semantically enriched platforms for disseminating data.

In her presentation “Getty Vocabularies and Linked Data,” Patricia Harpring of the Getty Institute gave an overview of the Institute’s plans to transform the existing vocabularies into linkable data. While currently not linked, the Getty vocabularies are well equipped for expression in a variety of RDF formats. Each of the terms in the Getty thesauri is identified by Uniform Resource Number (URN), which can serve as a persistent link to the term. Getty is currently experimenting with the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) and investigating which linked data formats are of most relevance to their communities.

Harpring showed examples of how the four Getty vocabularies (AAT, TGN, ULAN, and CONA) support complex relationships such as hierarchical associations, events, or geographical contexts. Currently, CONA (Cultural Objects Name Authority) is the only vocabulary containing links to the other three. However, due to the existing architecture and associative linkages present within all Getty thesauri, the expression of complex relationships and hierarchical associations will be possible.

Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist at OCLC (yes, that’s his real title) suggested that Libraries, Archives and Museums serve as the ‘Cultural Linked Data Backbone,’ for broadening information networks. Wallis suggested that the LAM communities should be primary contributors to an increasingly networked hub of data. Libraries, Archives, and Museums can provide a rich cultural context when describing and classifying resources. When supplemented by other information entities, such as the Media, Government, and Scientific networks, these efforts will strengthen the information architecture of the semantic web.

Wallis showed examples of library applications that support linked data including VIAF, British National Bibliography, FAST and the Dewey Decimal System. Wallis also showed the embedded linked data feature now accessible from within every Worldcat record. Wallis also mentioned the substantial growth in the development of schema.org. He stated that currently, seven to ten percent of the pages crawled by Google contained some sort of schema.org markup and he predicted that this figure is likely to increase.

The session concluded with a presentation by Rachael Frick, Director of the Digital Library Federation at CLIR. Frick’s discussion was focused on the activities of LOD-LAM and related organizations. Frick elaborated on some of the events sponsored over the past year, including Hack4Europe, as well as the first LOD-LAM summit held in San Francisco at the beginning of June. She also gave preliminary details regarding the next LOD-LAM challenge, aimed at developers and other information industry professionals looking to create sustainable and standardized applications capable of supporting structured data. The 2013 LOD-LAM summit will be held in Montreal and will sponsor a total of five attendees with projects showing potential for intensifying the role of LAMs in the Linked Data environment. Stay tuned for specifics regarding the event and the application process.

While only a handful of applications, tools, and systems that were mentioned by the speakers made it into this session summary, the full range of platforms and standards already existing in LAMs, as well the opportunity to partner with other industries, make this an exciting time for cultural data stewards across disciplines and organizations. The web of data is growing, and it looks like libraries, archives and museums are ready to contribute.

 

 

 

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Digital Public Library of America at the ASCLA/ICAN Collaborative Digitization IG

Posted on July 13, 2012 by rmarker

ASCLA/ICAN/Collaborative Digitization Interest Group

June 23, 2012, 4:00-5:30  pm

Hyatt Regency Orange County – Harbor Room

Jason Kucsma (Metropolitan New York Library Council), chair of the IG, convened the meeting at which about twenty people were present.  Emily Gore (Associate Dean, Digital Scholarship & Technology Services, Florida State University) spoke about the Digital Public Library of America. http://dp.la/ Gore is a convener on the Technical Aspects Workstream for DPLA. The goal of DPLA is to build a national digital library: “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform and empower everyone in the current and future generations.” http://dp.la/wiki/Sign_On

The DPLA established a secretariat at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and has received funding from the Sloan Foundation and Arcadia Fund. They have established a Steering Committee and several workstreams:

  • audience and participation
  • content and scope
  • technical aspects
  • legal issues
  • financial/business models
  • governance

Several of the attendees are conveners on one or more workstreams: Rachel Frick (DLF/CLIR and co-chair Content & Scope workstream), Maura Marx (Harvard’s Berman Center and DPLA Secretariat), Robin Dale (LYRASIS and convener Content & Scope workstream).

DPLA has developed code, released in April 2012, which will be  built upon for a 2013 initial release. They have held workshops, for example a technology workshop was held in conjunction with the Digital Library Federation meeting. Currently there are three major areas of focus:

  • Governance: The goal is to form a 501(c)(3) organization and name a new board.
  • Technical aspects:  Following the beta code release, the goal is to build out a platform for an April 2013 release.
  • Content and scope: DPLA will look to hubs as major content providers; wrangle with metadata in coordination with the Technical aspects workstream to build metadata models and establish partnership agreements; determine the locus of rights management responsibilities. Gore emphasized that, while there are many digital repositories that would like to participate, DPLA is looking at the hub-and-spoke model because they can’t sustain individual relationships with all the contributing repositories. Participant institutions or collaboratives could be part of more than one hub if that is appropriate.

DPLA sent out a survey, for which they have received 19 responses. Although the official deadline has passed, they will be accepting completed responses for a few more weeks. The link is https://harvard.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5C7jeRQseCWTmcc

Gore ended her presentation with some questions for the participants, which prompted a lively discussion.

Q: What are your biggest challenges?

Participants indicated that the biggest challenges are rights, metadata, funding, and technology. LSTA funding is common for digitization projects. There are differences from state to state of what is funded by LSTA. Some states do not spend any of the funds for digitization.

Q: Do you still have a lot of content to digitize?

Participants said they have an overwhelming amount of cultural heritage material to digitize. Institutions and collaboratives need to triage and push the work down to the local level — even to the content creators — as much as possible. Only a few institutions are trying to create content. Institutions need to get collection owners to prioritize materials, suggesting criteria such as identifying items that are at risk, unique or single copy items, and items that support the priorities of the cultural heritage organization. For some, money makes the decision. Cultural heritage organizations have a great deal of unique materials. They need guidance at the local level. A hub of DPLA could help guide such conversations, as well as help organize and describe the collections. We are still looking for that transformative model for digitization of cultural heritage materials, as Google Books was for books and text.

Q: Do you have existing organizational agreements in your collaboratives, or is your structure (and agreements) looser?

Q: Would metadata interoperability be a roadblock to participation in DPLA? What do you need to do to remove those roadblocks?

Participants indicated that metadata interoperability is both a hurdle for collaborative partners to overcome, but also a necessity for the collaborative to succeed.

Gore and other DPLA conveners talked about the need for DPLA in the Age of Google (and other major Internet search engines).

  • Not all digital collections are accessible. Some are in dark archives and the metadata is not exposed to search engines.
  • DPLA will allow institutions to create their own links to resources. DPLA will be a point of organization and discovery so that institutions do not have to duplicate this effort.
  • Collaborations like DPLA will help increase search rankings, making a digital collection or collaboration more Google-Bing-Yahoo friendly.
  • Today’s search engines won’t be here a hundred years from now, but initiatives like DPLA will allow us to work on search engine optimization and improve discoverability in the aggregate.
  • DPLA participation will require common rules of engagement and open standards such as RDF. Participants will not have to agree, for example, on any particular controlled vocabulary, but will share common schema or data structures. We hope that the benefits of participation will overrule local resistance to change. This seems to be a common pattern, historically, in library cooperation.

DPLA is a framework. It seeks to be a data service, not just another portal. It will permit multiple standards and metadata schemas as long as the data is based on identifiable standards.

DPLA plans a curated exhibit (together with Europeana <http://www.europeana.eu/portal/>), its first, on Immigration.

In response to the questions of whether DPLA is using OAI-PMH or another harvesting standard, it was explained that DPLA is more “push” than “pull”. They are still working out the technical details, but they want DPLA to be “RDF-ie” and “link-ie”, able to use web crawls. While OAI-PMH is based on “do it our way so we can use it”, DPLA wants to send the message, “we can use what you’ve done”.

See the DPLA website for more information: http://dp.la

You can join the dpla listserv, or any of the workstream listservs. Information is on the website.

Lists of statewide digital collaboratives:

Library of Congress:  http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/statememory/

LYRASIS: http://www.lyrasis.org/Products-and-Services/Digital-and-Preservation-Services/Collaborative-Digitization-Programs-in-the-United-States.aspx

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Presentations available: Data Management: What is the library’s role? (2012 Annual sponsored program)

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Jason Kovari

The presentations from the MIG and LITA sponsored program: “Data Management: What is the library’s role?” have been posted to ALA Connect:
http://connect.ala.org/node/183000

These include:
“developing practical metadata services for data management programs”. Kevin M. Chair (Penn State)
“Beyond Data Management Plans”. Maria Esteva, Colleen Lyon and Angela Newell (UT-Austin)
“Increasing the Role of Libraries in Data Management at OSU”. Maura Valentino (Oregon State)
“It Takes a Village: The Collaborative Construction of a Data Management Infrastructure”. Anne C. Elguindi (American University)
“The Team Approach: Developing a Data Services Program at the University of Washington”. Matthew Parsons, Malyka Ianni, Theodore Gerontakos (U Washington)

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ALA Annual 2012: Digital Special Collections Discussion Group

Posted on July 6, 2012 by img7u

4:00pm to 5:30pm
Digital Special Collections Discussion Group
Location: Disneyland Hotel, Monorail A
Sponsor: ACRL/RBMS

Moderated by Jason Kovari, the Digital Special Collections Discussion Group met on Saturday afternoon in a standing-room only session.  The discussion addressed three major topics:

  • Updates
  • Born-digital acquisitions
  • Donor requirements for digitization

Updates

  • Jason reported on work at Cornell University Library relating to ancient coins and hip hop flyers
  • Erika Dowell of Indiana University announced a new exhibit related to the War of 1812
  • The Getty Research Institute reported on a new research portal that links to full-text art history books
  • The University of Houston relayed information on a new project tracking initiative to address communication problems related to digital projects
  • The University of Michigan’s Center for the History of Medicine announced a forthcoming exhibit, to be available in October 2012, related to the influenza epidemic of 1918-19
  • The New York Historical Society announced an initiative for digitizing photographs of New York City, with fifty-thousand images included for scanning
  • The Yale University Library described a linking effort to connect a batch of previously-restricted correspondence from Georgia O’Keefe to a finding aid
  • Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! reported on an effort to digitize 80 years’ worth of cartoons
  • The National Library of Medicine announced the completion of a two-year project to digitize Spanish-language medical books and pamphlets
  • The Duke University Library reported on the IMLS-funded project undertaken by Triangle Research Libraries Network to digitize manuscripts related to the civil rights movement
  • The University of Virginia Library announced the creation of a digital archive to collect materials related to the resignation of University President Teresa Sullivan

Born-digital Acquisitions

Following updates, the group briefly addressed the topic of born-digital acquisitions, touching on the following points:

  • Access rules – unpublished content may be treated differently, country-to-country
  • The Yale University Library has issued a series of guidelines for authors to keep their content safe and providing advice on how works might be arranged

Donor Requirements for Digitization

The majority of the session focused on what requirements donors might request or demand related to digitization of gifts made to the library.  Broadly, the discussion addressed three themes – curation, workflows and communication, and resources – with relevant points enumerated below.

Curation

  • A conversation between curators and the development office, if it is involved, is necessary to avoid gifts wherein all content, regardless of research value, must be accepted and digitized
  • At several institutions, loose committees are formed to review digital project proposals (which may be submitted by anyone)

Workflows and Communication

  • A large gift, without instructions or a discussion about the scope of digitization, can be frustrating and disruptive to multiple departments
  • Can there be a single workflow for receiving donations, or must the variables be re-negotiated every time?
  • How can we establish a feedback loop to reference staffs to enable them to know about the existence of donated collections?
  • One possible solution:  have separate digitization workflows – one patron-driven, one for curated digital projects
  • Bureaucracy not necessarily bad in some cases, especially where there is an institutional imperative for collaboration

Resources

  • Necessity of determining what it means to digitize:  does the donor expect a stand-alone exhibit, or is it acceptable to attach digitized materials to a finding aid?
  • The institution must be mindful of promises made regarding the date of availability, as speed and quality are difficult to achieve together
  • Scarcity:  is everyone’s digitization team too small?
  • Digitization requires more overhead – equipment, storage, description for every object

 

Throughout the conversation, the group made clear that establishing clear communication with donors and with other relevant departments within the library is a top priority.  Some institutions reported that they had made progress in this area and had developed documentation that they might be able to share the documents following the conference.

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ALA Annual 2012: Intellectual Access to Preservation Metadata Interest Group Meeting

Posted on July 5, 2012 by Chelcie Rowell

Intellectual Access to  Preservation Metadata Interest Group Meeting
June 23, 2012, 4:00-5:30 PM
ALA Annual Conference

The Metadata Interest Group held a series of two presentations on the topic of embedding and extracting metadata from digital objects. Full presentations, when available, are posted on ALA Connect: http://ala12.scheduler.ala.org/node/386.

Chris Lacinak
President, AudioVisual Preservation Services
Editing and Embedding Audio-Visual Metadata with MetaEdit

Building upon a foundation laid by the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI), Lacinak presented two tools—AVI MetaEdit and BWF MetaEdit—built by a team at AudioVisual Preservation Services for embedding, editing, and exporting technical metadata for AVI (audio) and BWF (video) files.

Lacinak likened embedded metadata—metadata that is stored inside the same file, or a container that also stores the audiovisual essence to which the metadata refers— to a wallet. That is to say, embedded metadata isn’t analogous to your resume or bio, but like your ID provides the the critical information you need in case of catastrophe.

Embedded metadata already exists in born-digital files. Its significance to preservation is multifold, from providing a means to verify authenticity and integrity to, in some cases, providing some form of backup. Lacinak quipped, “To ignore it is to effectively de-catalog.” Still, he acknowledged how easy it is to ignore the existing embedded metadata in text documents, audio, video in both our personal and professional lives managing our digital files.

Take for example a photo of a scene on Airforce One. Its filename isn’t descriptive, but embedded metadata includes the name of the photographer, GIS information, camera settings in the digital object itself. The question becomes how do we make this embedded metadata work for us?

Files are encapsulated in file formats, which provide structure to the data composing a digital object. In the case of A/V file formats, both WAV files and AVI file format rely upon the RIFF file structure composed of “chunks,” including an INFO list chunk (various metadata elements) and a data chunk (the audio itself).

Lacinak presented two tools, BWF MetaEdit and AVI MetaEdit, to help people who work with A/V digital content to manipulate embedded metadata in the INFO list chunk to serve professional needs. AVI MetaEdit is for use with (audio) AVI files, while BWF is for use with (video) Broadcast Wave Format files.

Although there are some differences between the two tools, for the purposes of the presentation Lacinak emphasized their shared foundation and shared features. From a design perspective, both applications are built to support description recommended by the FADGI guidelines, and both are informed by the concept of PREMIS and PBCore events. From an implementation perspective, both applications are free and open source, work across platforms, offer both command-line and GUI interfaces, and support both singular and batch processing.

With the option of a simple spreadsheet-like interface, it’s possible to populate with CSV or XML to embed metadata in a file, edit existing embedded metadata, and extract embedded metadata. Other key features include the following:

  • Validation—the ability to check integrity at the more granular level of file “chunks” rather than the full file.  Hash values can be stored externally or internally as a new chunk.
  • Process history—a set of metadata elements that capture the “process history” of a digital object; particularly well-suited for reformatted digital objects but can be used for born-digital, as well.
  • Quality control—the ability to read files that are illegal without writing illegal files and the ability to detect file truncation (as from an incomplete download or FTP session).

For more information, see the FADGI Guidelines, BWF MetaEdit on SourceForge, AVI MetaEdit on GitHub, or NARA’s Digitization Services Products and Services page.

Joan DaShiell
Product Manager for Digitization Services, Backstage Library Works
Discover the Technical Metadata in your Still Image Digital Files

Tipping his hat to the second presentation, Lacinak observed “At every point in the chain of the still image life cycle, people are aware of need for embedded metadata, starting with photographers who are rights holders. The A/V community sees the still image community as a beacon of hope!”

Dashiell began her presentation by posing the 5 reporter questions about metadata. Who should capture? What data? Where is it? Why do we want it? How do we get to it? Dashiell discussed these questions at a more granular level for each of the 5 different kinds of metadata and from the perspective of a digitization vendor for libraries.

Descriptive metadata is typically captured prior to digitization by the library working with Backstage Library Works in the form of Dublin Core, MODS, and/or MARC.

Structural metadata, such as the relationship between files in complex digital objects, is established during the digitization process. Backstage Library Works uses the CCS Doc Works system to create a METS file and push or pull metadata into the file. In addition to containing modules for descriptive and administrative metadata, a METS wrapper describes structure by pointing to, for example, the TIFF files and ALTO files that make up the still image and OCR text of a digitized issue of a newspaper.

Technical metadata is often found embedded in the digital file itself, such as TIFF, EXIF, or XMP tags. Dashiell noted that one practice at Backstage Library Works is to embed a file name as a tag, as well, because they’re so easily corrupted across operating systems. Other kinds of technical metadata include the following:

  • Object info—identifier, file size, format, compressions, fixity, etc.
  • Image info—height, width, color related data, etc.
  • Capture info—device dependent (scanner, camera)
  • Assessment info—spatial metrics, image color encoding, target data

Administrative metadata, including preservation metadata, is typically created after digitization and ingest to a repository.

…

After the conclusion of the two presentations, the Q&A session turned into a lively audience discussion. One attendee, a preservation specialist whose purview included both physical and digital preservation, compared embedded metadata to microfilm targets. Another attendee likened the file and embedded metadata, associated METS object, and system management features such as randomly generated unique IDs in a mediated storage system to “Dante-esque” concentric circles of preservation spaces. High stakes indeed!

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