Metadata Blog

Standards Committee, Holdings Committee, Continuing Resources Section, ALCTS

 Auditing Digital Repositories: An Update on Standards, Preservation, and UsageCenter for Research Libraries

By Marie-Elise Waltz, Special Projects Librarian, Center for Research Libraries

 Marie introduced that, based on the interests of members on auditing and certification of digital repositories, CRL developed OAIS (Open Archival Information System) to define attributes and responsibilities of trusted digital repositories; and then, the framework was accepted by ISO as standard ISO 16363 for certification and auditing. So far 6 repositories in the US and Europe have been tested. As defined by RLG, a trusted digital repository is one whose mission is to provide reliable, long-term access to managed digital resources to its designated community, now and in the future. Marie believed that an audit benefited the repositories by establishing their soundness and dependability. The standards which are used for auditing include Metadata Standards (Dublin Core, CSDGM, etc.), technical Standards, ISO 27001 and data and format standards, PDF/A, etc. After auditing, qualified repositories will be certified as trusted repositories and report to the research community. CRL welcome academic and independent researchers to contact them if they have interests in have their repositories audited and certificated. Community involvement and feedback is crucial for the project’s success.

Cataloging Unique Collections with RDA and Non-MARC Standards

By Melanie Wacker, Metadata Coordinator, Columbia University Libraries

Melanie shared her experience in cataloguing digital items with non-MARC standards based on RDA concept. She found only a few non-MARC records were tested in the US RDA test. She tested metadata standards such as MODS, Dublin Core and EAD. The items catalogued include websites, finding aids and digitized text and images. The following were the issues she encountered:

• One-to-one Principle. RDA requires one description for one resource while MODS recommends cataloguing digitized and original carriers together in the main record.
• Relationships. It is hard to define whether a digitized item is the digital reproduction of the item or the manifestation.
• FRBR. There are four levels of description in FRBR. Melanie gave an example that a 3D object was printed on an envelope, and then somebody wrote some text on it, and then the envelope was digitized. The item might be consider as the work (3D object), the expression (image of the 3D object), the manifestation (the envelope), or the item (texted envelope) in different scenario.
• Relationship Designators. In non-MARC metadata standards, the definition of contributor is pretty broad, e.g. the collector, while RDA only defines the statement of responsibility as the creation of, or contributing to the realization of, the intellectual or artistic content of the resource.

Melanie concluded that RDA might be better for describing traditional resources. For cataloguing digital resources with non-MARC standards, more research needs to be done on finding best practise, documentation and testing.

The PIRUS Project: objectives, outcomes and next steps

By Gary Van Overborg, Scholarly iQ

The PIRUS project has been funded by JISC. the UK Joint Information Systems Committee

Gary introduced the PIRUS project which purposed on collecting usage data of online resources on article level. The articles could in any online locations, such as journal publisher’s website, aggregator sites (Ovid, ProQuest, etc), subject repositories ( PubMed Central, etc) and Institutional Repositories. Authors and funding agencies are increasingly interested in a reliable global overview of usage of individual articles, as well as online usage is becoming an alternative, accepted measure of article and journal value. The system is based on COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources), an international initiative by setting standards that facilitate the recording and reporting of online usage statistics, and generate XML-based stats reports. Gary brought up the concept of Central Clear House (CCH) that behaves the bucket of usage data for authorized parties, which can compile and tailor the data reports. The CCH process is that each journal article download invokes an  tracker code that sends data to a single big bucket. Repositories and publishers also can collect data into their own buckets. The feedback from authors, publishers and research institutions are pretty positive. The only concern from repositories is global standard and cost.

ALA Midwinter 2012: ALCTS Metadata Interest Group presentations, Sunday, Jan 22, 2012, 8-10 a.m.

Links to presentation slides are available on ALA connect.

The Metadata Interest Group had three presentations.  Below is a short synopsis of these presentations.

Video metadata @ Cornell: implementing Kaltura by Jason Kovari

The session began with the presentation of Kaltura at Cornell by Jason Kovari.  Kaltura is an open source content management system for videos and audios. This project at Cornell is still a work in progress. The Cornell Library provides metadata expertise to the campus community by providing baseline and extended metadata field sets for this project. The presentation mainly focused on the Cornell Library’s involvement in providing metadata field sets for two collections—Muller-Kluge (collections of videotaped interviews) and Experimental Television Center (collections of video art). In general, providing metadata for video collection is challenging as these collections are distributed across the campus, use various platforms for streaming, have different languages, and are structurally different-either they are described at the segment level or at the chapter level. The baseline metadata field sets consist of creator Net ID, contributing unit as some of the core fields along with the others such as title, description, keywords, etc.  The extended metadata sets consists of technical and administrative metadata which is captured automatically. Jason noted that Kaltura also pose some metadata challenges. Kaltura’s controlled vocabulary can only be controlled in the baseline fields, it does not support nested elements, for example, name, first name, Net Id, have no wrapping and are not repeatable. Also, Kaltura does not have any underlying common schema to map to metadata elements. A crosswalk to PBCore, a metadata standard to describe digital and analog media can be developed.   Jason concluded his talk by suggesting the need to create multi -level hierarchical description of the video content, its integration with DSpace, discovery layers, and with the digital archival repository.

Kaltura: http://corp.kaltura.com/

Examples of Cornell’s video projects include the Muller-Kluge collection (http://muller-kluge.library.cornell.edu/en/) and the Experimental Television Center (http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/).

The slides for Jason Kovari’s presentation can be found here: http://connect.ala.org/node/167132

Preservation and access metadata for born digital videos: by Amy Rushing

The University of Texas Libraries (UTL) at Austin has established the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) to preserve and make accessible the historical records of genocide and human rights violations. HRDI aims in long term preservation of fragile and most vulnerable records (audio, video, and print) of human struggle around the world. It collaborates with human rights organizations and engages in post custodial management of digital copies of the records. There are five partners involved in this project- Kigali Genocide Memorial, Free Burma Rangers, Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, Texas After Violence Project, and WITNESS. UTL defined metadata guidelines to achieve consistency, interoperability, access, management, and preservation of the digital content. The guidelines are METS based and OAI compliant and define standards for capturing descriptive, technical, source, and preservation rights metadata. The presentation outlined metadata challenges that UTL had for describing highly sensitive human violation content of the videos and audios. Privacy, diverse local metadata practices of the involved partners, lack of vocabulary for describing human rights violations subjects, and access restrictions to the content were noted as major challenges. Moreover, with respect to the videos there were more challenges such as there were no existing guidelines, technical metadata was not well defined, and also video content needed to be understood to determine which fields were important so that they could be included in the description. The Metadata Guidelines are METS based. The METS profile maps to MODS and to qualified Dublin Core and has been registered with the Library of Congress. The descriptive metadata uses multiple access systems (Dspace, digital Archive) and is interoperable with other human rights archives. The UTL has developed xml schemas to capture technical and source metadata, although adding source metadata has been the responsibility of the partner organizations.  The preservation metadata is generated using PREMIS by UTL. The UTL is in the process of developing HRDI thesaurus, has developed  HRDI Metadata Guidelines for videos with element definitions, input guidelines, mappings to MODS and DC, and also the source and technical metadata schemas. HRDI Metadata Guidelines and METS profile for Audios are also being developed, and HRDI thesaurus and Metadata Guidelines for the Archived Websites will be out soon.

HRDI: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/hrdi/

The finished University of Texas Libraries’ Human Rights Documentation Initiative Metadata Guidelines for Video can be found here: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/schema/Video_Metadata_Guidelines_v1.pdf

The slides for Amy Rushing’s presentation can be found here: http://connect.ala.org/node/167149

Repurposing Metadata for an Institutional repository at the Ohio State University” by Maureen Walsh

The Ohio State University’s Institutional Repository (IR) is called the “Knowledge Bank.” So far it has 67 communities, 46, 178 items, and 97, 441 content files containing about 73 percent images and 5 percent audio and video collections.  The Metadata application profile is based on the Dublin Core and uses OAI for harvesting. Submissions are done by staff and the campus community and are added to the IR either individually or by batch loading. For individual item submissions, customized input forms are available that requires information to be filled into the form such as description of the item, keywords, controlled terms, resource type, sponsor, etc. Importing items in batch is done in two ways- by importing Metadata into csv file that uses DSpace Simple Archives format for repurposing metadata or using XSLT workflow. XSLT workflow uses MarcEdit to export tab delimited files into the IR. Image data repurposing is done using Adobe photoshop. The metadata is extracted using ExifTool and csv file is batch loaded into the IR. For adding text metadata, the printed list of records is OCRed. The delimited text file of the records is cleaned using the text editor and regular expressions, and the results are batch loaded into the IR.

Knowledge Bank: https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/

The slides for Maureen Walsh’s presentation can be found here: http://connect.ala.org/node/167277

Reported by Kavita Mundle

The Digital Conversion Interest Group meeting featured four speakers each sharing their experiences with different aspects of digital conversion work.

The session’s first speaker was Jacob Nadal, a Preservation Officer at the UCLA Library, who described the process by which he has established an institutional AV lab at UCLA.  Nadal noted that having received funding from the Arcadia Foundation, he was able to begin a project that aimed to capture performances – many of which were occurring on the UCLA campus – that merited expert preservation.

Nadal acknowledged that these activities were happening in an area rich for movies, so why, then, would the UCLA library need an AV lab?  Simply put, Nadal explained, someone has to be able to translate from library-speak to industry-speak, and to be able to communicate with the solid vendor network for AV preservation.

Nadal also shared sample collections from UCLA, including:

• The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive at UCLA
• The Martin Perlich Interviews
• Ojai Music Festival Records

In discussing these collections, Nadal stressed the importance of hiring a “very good lawyer” as intellectual property and privacy concerns will be undoubtedly be issues related to AV preservation.  In addition to sorting out the legal implications of preserving these collections, Nadal reported that a number of site visits – including trips to the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Sixth Floor Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Long Island City, and the WNYC radio archive – contributed to his knowledge of AV preservation and positively informed plans to build the lab at UCLA.

In his closing remarks, Nadal enumerated the next steps for his project, including evaluating in-house vs. outsourced formats and appropriate handling of VHS, U-matic and cassette formats.  Nadal ended his talk by noting that setting up a digital management system and acquiring appropriate diagnostic equipment and software are also immediately forthcoming activities for the project.

Following Nadal was Linda Tadic, Executive Director of the Audiovisual Archive Network.  Tadic began her talk but emphasizing that archival activities are more than simple back-up measures, and that digital preservation must be integrated into archival workflows.  Tadic espoused the notion that digital preservation activities ought to focus on files and their content, rather than on physical properties and that these activities require managed actions, rather than a simple “store and ignore” approach.  Managed actions, Tadic argued, require that archivists preserve both the content as well as the asset, and that managed preservation occurs through a resource’s lifetime and is accomplished through metadata.  As part of managed preservation, Tadic recommended the following actions for content:  identify the file format, perform file validation, identify the rendering environment, and capture technical and preservation metadata.

Tadic also encouraged the audience to consider other issues associated with digital preservation, among which are:

• Possible need to save old operating systems in order to access content later
• Beware of format interdependencies (i.e., digital animation)
• “What was the original source file?” – Track all transcoding data and history

Tadic concluded her talk with the following five recommendations for digital preservation:  preserve the asset, establish online archival storage (being cognizant of back-up software, which is often proprietary in nature), establish geographic dispersal of assets to protect against both human and naturally cased threats, plan for physical carrier forward migration, and, finally, revalidate and check the files (running checksums to compare to the original.  Tadic reiterated that digital preservation activities are integral to archival workflows, and that much of the process can be automated.

The third speaker of the session, George Blood, is the President of George Blood, L.P., a firm specializing in content reformatting.  Blood’s talk focused on determining suitable digital video formats for medium term storage.  Blood imparted to the audience the importance of considering tape a non-option for storage (“tape is dead”), and reiterated throughout his talk the most important maintenance commandment: “thou shalt not compress video.”  Blood reminded the audience that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to video formats and encouraged the audience to consider the high quality vs. low quality divide to be artificial.

The final speaker of the Digital Conversion Interest Group meeting was Dr. Karen Gracy of Kent State University.  Dr. Gracy shared with the group a study she and her team conducted regarding the current archival practices and attitudes of moving image curators and managers.  Despite, as Dr. Gracy noted, a small return rate and a gap in responses (public libraries are missing from the survey), the survey results proved useful for understanding the types of archival activities in practice presently at different types of institutions.  During the question and answer period following the talk, a member of the audience inquired as to whether Dr. Gracy believed that most institutions involved in the survey had done an inventory of their content or whether they were simply guessing, to which Dr. Gracy responded there was a broad swath of inventory activities taking place.

Final considerations during the question and answer period following the last speaker involved some members of the audience acknowledging feeling overwhelmed by digital preservation efforts.  Linda Tadic responded that digital preservation is not necessarily an overwhelming endeavor and to remember that many activities can be automated.  Another audience member objected to a few of Jacob Nadal’s comments regarding preparation for audio and video resources.  Other commenters from around the room encouraged consideration of the cost of acting now versus the cost of acting later, with the concluding comment of the session reminding the attendees that start-up requires investment while maintenance is less expensive.

Cataloging IS a Public Service: Repositioning Cataloging and Metadata Services

Heads of Cataloging IG, ALA Midwinter 2012

ALA Midwinter 2012, Jan. 23, 2012

Five speakers shared their experiences in running and reorganizing their cataloging departments. Common themes that ran through the four presentations were doing more with less staff, moving staff into working with non-MARC metadata, involving cataloging staff with library operations outside of technical services, and bringing flexibility and dynamic change to what might have been a formerly staid work environment.

The first speaker was Jee Davis, Head of Cataloging and Metadata Services (CMS) at the University of Texas Libraries. Davis came from outside the organization and needed to re-evaluate the department due to loss of positions through attrition (10 fewer positions) and wanted to change the sometimes negative reputation about the department that others in the library had. She defined the core functions of CMS using the FRBR user tasks, and how CMS would need to describe information to support these tasks. The three distinct units of monographic cataloging, serials cataloging and music were restructured so that all units worked together and participate in non-MARC metadata creation. Davis also improved communication to other library units so that CMS would be more aware of end-user needs. She set some work prioritization and training standards:

• New work standards
• Rush/request (24 hrs)
• Newly purchased (within 3 days)
• Gift/backlogs (project-based)
• New staff training
• Core training (fundamentals of cataloging & metadata)
• Routine training (changes in cataloging and metadata practices)
• Special training for special projects

Davis concluded with a description of the continuing challenges for cataloging units and suggestions for tackling them.

• Declining budgets and less staff mean cataloging units need to assess/reassess and resdesign workflows around different staffing levels but also need to convice administrators of the importance of the work. Outsourcing option can help with decreasing staff, but still need to consider the needs of the users.
• Demands in user-centered catalogs involve frequent changes in software and data needs, so cataloging units need to get involved in the decision making process. As such, there should be an increased emphasis on digital resources and understanding various non-MARC metadata, which may result in new training programs.
• RDA is coming, so start planning!

The second speaker was Jina Wakimoto at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She framed cataloging as an unmediated public service: it facilitates users’ self-sufficiency and enhances user experience. She wanted to have the Cataloging Department, which became the Cataloging and Metadata Services fit its work into the CU Boulder strategic plan for the library: a client-centered focus, emphasis on library as destination, and provide the optimal organizational structure. The new department redeployed staff and reassessed positions, based on a user-centered focus and expanded metadata services. Reorganization is complete, but tweaking of the structure continues as necessary. As an example of the reorganization, the Serials Cataloging changed to the Electronic Reosurces and Serials Access Team, which became a combination of cataloging and acquisitions. It manages serials acquisitions, knowledge base maintenance, the ERM, and link resolver. The unit works with Acquisitions, Collection Development, Public Services, and directly engages with users.

To determine the proper reorganization Wakimoto felt she needed a better understanding of trends in the library in order to assess and perform data-driven storytelling. She also needed to demonstrate the return on investment for support for the department. She reviewed and performed a 5 year update on trends in the library. As a result of this work, she identified that digital scholarship and digital materials were increasingly important and hired a new metadata librarian in 2011. The new role of data management is critical for libraries and this area needs to be supported by metadata librarians. Standards and interoperability will help establish a common framework for understanding data and data structures. In general, Wakimoto is pushing the department to demonstrate our values to the university. As Lorcan Dempsey said, “if libraries want to be seen as experts, then their expertise must be seen.” Some other examples for getting out beyond the department include: librarians as the metadata experts for local course management tools; work on data conservancy software; and work on a data management task force. The reorganization continues: effective February 1, the department will be called Metadata Services.

The third speaker was Teresa Keenan of the University of Montana. She described the work of integrating non-MARC metadata into the library’s cataloging staff and routines. The need was instigated by a digitization program to digitize primary source materials of various tribes of Montana called NOMAP (Natives of Montana Archival Project). The project, based on SWORP (Southwest Oregon Research Project), includes digitized materials from multiple sources, including the National Archives. The Mansfield Library provided training with digitization and metadata and uploaded objects to the Montana Memory Project. Keenan described the first three years of the project, 2009-2011. Each year, the workflow was adjusted and input from the cataloging department increased, leading to greater integration of processes over time.

• 1^st year: minimal inputting from cataloging department, and workflow was not sustainable
• 2^nd year: metadata librarian spearheaded metadata creation and loaded into CONTENTdm, with copy catalogers creating metadata
• 3^rd year: all post-processing handled within technical services with one support staff is responsible for quality control and loading into CDM

Training has been crucial to the project and has been done as large group, small group, and one on one training. There was a time-lag between initial training and then implementation of work. One on one training was done after the group training, but turned out to be crucial to consistent metadata creation. The follow-up training reviewed Dublin Core, a local application profile, common types of errors, adjusted the data entry form and parts of the workflow, and updated the FAQs. Documentation was provided on a wiki.

Keenan did identify three obstacles to the project and provided some examples of ways of overcoming them:

1. Technology: Staff had wide variety of familiarity and comfort with computers and had to work with different programs: Excel, Access, CONTENTdm, general file structure and maintenance. The lack of familiarity with some of these programs was surprising. The department utilized campus IT department short courses for training on general programs and a series of webinars on CONTENTdm. Keenan also varied what staff can do based on skills and continues to offer ongoing technology training.
2. Attitude: Perceptions that work was temporary, and not AACR2, so just not that important. The length of the project and ongoing training and support from management have helped adjust this attitude. Providing training that includes looking at digital collections from a users’ perspective has also been helpful. New job descriptions now include metadata as a job responsibility.
3. Time: Limited staff and too much work. Basically this required some adjustment of departmental priorities to include metadata. Management had to show importance of projects, because more metadata work meant that other things would not get done. The integration of metadata into positions descriptions was also helpful.

The forth speaker was Jennifer O’Brian Roper, Head of Cataloging at University of Virginia. She has been head since 2008 and discussed some management classes she took in 2010 to help manage change and articulate direction in the department. The departments traditional duties and set-up included: multiple technical services units within multiple locations, but central cataloging services, emphasis on MARC cataloging, batch-loading of records into the ILS, coordination of maintenance across locations, and sporatic involvement in non-MARC metadata work. Roper also described some trends occurring within the library that led the need for change: reduction in print materials, reduced or eliminated backlogs, increase in shelf-ready materials, collaboration with special collections cataloging, and the need for centralized non-MARC expertise that comes from the perspective of sound data policy. Recently the library replaced the user interface from a traditional ILS to the Blacklight interface that merges metadata from multiple sources and started an electronic theses and dissertations program.

Roper attended university management class that taught the Strategic Framework. The Strategic Framework consists of four parts:

• Vision: Description of a future state
• Mission: Action for realizing vision
• Values: Shared beliefs as a department organization
• Strategy: End goals for and means for realizing the vision

When Roper began reorganization work, a full vision was not clear, so she focused on mission to reorganize department. The revamped mission statement was “Cataloging and Metadata Services is committed to providing timely and accurate access to library managed content” and removed the word “quality” from the statement, which some staff found disturbing. To get staff by-in, she had staff create a departmental charter. The department had an opportunity to contribute to service-oriented cataloging and identified the following themes (documents will be available ALA Connect).

• Purpose: providing and maintaining metadata; facilitate discovery; provide expertise; contribute to the larger cataloging community
• Final products: metadata; description, classification, controlled headings; organized and distinct access to content
• Success: users find what they are looking for and more; provide services in a timely proactive manner; happy, engaged, and proud

Roper used mission and value statements to create departmental, but was still missing the vision statement. The vision statement developed about a year and half after the mission and values statement and Roper felt this time-delay was helpful in determining the appropriate vision. Staff found it a little grandiose and harder to connect to daily routine, but as a manager, Roper liked having the vision statement as something to aspire to and refer to when new opportunities come up. The statement has themes for stewardship for metadata, deep understanding of metadata models for storage and discovery, and a flexible and service-oriented approach.

With the Strategic Framework in place, the department was ready for a development of strategy to achieve the end goals. This included being less centralized, building strategic partnerships, performing experimentation, ongoing education, and becoming more wholly involved in the mission of the library. The new structure of the department allows for flexibility for allocating resources to manage pressure points. Users can drive decisions about where, when and how to provide and enhance metadata. One example that Roper provided was in managing the 4^th year Science and Engineering student theses. These are managed by science and engineering library, and now catalogers are going over to the library to quickly catalog the materials, which leaves them still accessible. In another example, rather than dictating a single solution, the department presented a choice of options to the video staff, but allowed the video staff to determine the best way to get notes into catalog records and followed their preference. Staff are encouraged to go to meetings on broader topics, which will both increase awareness that the expertise in the department and demonstrate that staff can add to the larger conversations in the library. For example, staff are now taking a leadership role in the development of user interfaces, which is critical because the department holds expertise in data structures and content. On the whole, staff enjoy the challenge of looking at data from actual use, and the new structure has fostered a culture of learning, inquiry, and risk-taking, and moved away from simply looking at statistics as the chief means for measuring success. As with other speakers, Roper noted the ongoing nature of the process: she will be revisiting the department charter this year, share statements via intranet, and continue to refer to them and update as needed.

The final speaker was Sharon Wiles-Young of Lehigh University, who presented about technical services involvement with new services in the library. She began with some context about Lehigh: staff are organized into teams with merger of libraries into Library and Technology Services. There is a technical services team that is a combination of professional and paraprofessional members, which is unusual, as most teams are professionals only. There are 19 total professional librarians at Lehigh.

As with other universities, a big change has been the transition to electronic/digital information. This has made access services the top issue, so technical services needed to set up direct communication with help desk, which opened the door for expertise to be seen in the public area. The serials team updates SFX and link resolver, manages cataloging, and works with ILL and circulation to resolve access problems. Technical services has also become involved in the institutional repository and archive to support institutional memory.

Digital information and unique collections provided opportunities to get into new responsibilities, but also meant existing practices need to change. Wiles-Young asked the question: What can we let go of as new staff pick up new responsibilities? To assist, circulation staff now handle gift books and copy cataloging, but the theme of withdrawing collections to increase space for users keeps traditional management roles as a big part of some positions. Lehigh is also using more students and increased shelf-ready processes to free up time. Additionally, as based on the report, “Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services,” by the University Leadership Council, higher responsibilities have been assigned to staff.

Wiles-Young provided two examples of new roles for technical services:

1. Lehigh is using a CLIR post-doc fellow to build their institutional repository and the Head of Cataloging worked with IR committee to build the repository. The Fellow trained staff on metadata techniques, examined different vendors for IR and collected feedback from all librarians. This helped expand knowledge in the library of value of technical services.
2. Lehigh moved to using VuFind for its catalog interface (they have a Sirsi backend). The initial role-out did not get any tech services buy-in, but then work expanded to include catalogers who had knowledge of data structure and MARC and could help identify issues and suggest ways to resolve them. One big issues has been serials display, which is improved, but still has some problems with holdings display.

Lehigh is continuing to build new partnerships to expand and share skills and anticipates future projects and reorganizations to support them. Wiles-Young is still struggling with what processes to eliminate and how to shift responsibilities to others and expand roles in other areas. New projects continue to come up too, for example the department will be involved in the Kuali/OLE open-source ILS development.

The session ended with questions from the audience. One question was: What should we do for ourselves as cataloging managers to make ourselves equipped for change? Jennifer Roper went to university management classes, which was not library specific – talked about management principles and how they could be applied broadly. She tries to attend at least one class a year. Erin Stalberg recommended the Triangle Research Libraries Network Management Academy as another option for training. Other panelists also recommended going to relevant conferences to bring back ideas. They recommended librarians stretch themselves as conferences, even if certain sessions are outside of scope or beyond your knowledge. Look at higher education trends, like SPARC (Scholarly Publications & Academic Resources Coalition) and open access, or technology trends. They also recommended attending strategy planning and making sure technical services is involved at the management level—there is a need to understand big picture in library and see how the department fits in. Another recommended class is the Pacific Northwest Library Association Leadership. Finally because succession planning is a very important job of managers, get reports to go to management/leadership training.

Another question came up about how to make the transition if staff are too busy and shrinking. The panelists suggested that if you want to get rid of something: 1. have a reason as to why it is no longer important, and 2; have a methodology for how to change it.

Submitted by Kristin Martin

Bibliographic Control: A Meeting between Educators and Practitioners Co-Sponsored by ALCTS and ALISE

This meeting focused on the requirements for educational preparation of catalogers and other metadata specialists, so that the educational system will continue to produce professional librarians whose skill sets match the needs of the marketplace that they will be entering.

The session was moderated by Arlene G. Taylor, Professor Emerita of the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences, and featured the following panelists: Shilpa Rele, Digital Program Librarian – Loyola Marymount University and 2009 MLIS Graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles; Beth Picknally Camden, Patricia and Bernard Goldstein Director of Information Processing – University of Pennsylvania; and Dr. June Abbas, Associate Professor – University of Oklahoma Department of Library and Information Studies.

Shilpa described her LIS studies and the internships that she held while in school. She had no traditional MARC/AARC2 cataloging classes, but did enroll in metadata courses. Shilpa’s internships gave her experience in social tagging and describing digital resources. She appreciated the invited practitioners who spoke her classes, as they gave example of the why of librarianship and shared their practical experience. Shilpa also made a commitment to professional development, and was the ALCTS Emerging Leader in 2010. She concluded that her LIS education was useful, and she made her program work for her goals. The internships were important in giving her hands-on experience with different systems and tools.

Beth spoke as a current practitioner and an employer. She polled colleagues to see what types of positions were open, the skills needed, and the candidate pools that are currently on the market. Many of the positions are part-time, temporary, or grant funded. There’s a demand for digital projects staff, language and/or format specialists, rare book cataloging, and supervisors/managers. The technical skills needed are foreign languages, coding, and the ability to work with large datasets and batch processes. Soft skills in demand are project management, flexibility, training, leadership, and growth potential. Beth and her colleagues have found that the candidate pools are larger, but they aren’t finding many potential employees who fit all of the desired qualifications. There is a perception by employers that MLS programs are not creating a balance between technical services theory and practice.

June gave an overview of research on LIS education in technical services. There is a need for the acquisition of skills like standards, technologies, best practices, and workflows in education. Some of the highlights of the research are that everyone is dissatisfied, including students, practitioners, and employers. There is a consensus that there has to be a balance between technical services theory and practice. There has also been a trend that fewer PhD students are focusing on the organization of information and cataloging, which leads to more adjunct instructors in this area.

During the question and answer session, there was further discussion on the soft or technical skills that employers have to sacrifice when hiring new graduates. Many cataloging/metadata courses examine cataloging records on a one-by-one basis, and there’s a greater demand for employees who can deal with large datasets and understand the patterns in those records. There is also a demand for new hires to be able to think for themselves and have experience with the existing tools of technical services. Technical services departments are getting smaller, and existing staff has less time to train newer staff. In fact, many employers expect new hires to be able to get existing staff up to speed on new processes and skills.

Metadata for Datasets and Dataset Management: Tools and Approaches for Access and Preservation

Joan Starr, California Digital Library

Intellectual Access to Preservation Metadata Interest Group

ALA Midwinter Meeting, Jan. 21, 2012

 The presentation began with an overview of the California Digital Library, which serves all of the University of California, and provides services by licensing agreements, union bibliographic tools, and data curation and management tools. It shares resources, services, and provides solutions for managing digital assets.

Requirements for dataset description

• Start by asking the researchers: why are their requirements? Different domain areas are starting to come forward with their requirements.
• New descriptions are primarily in the area of access: track impact of research, lay groundwork for reuse, ensure fairness, accountability, and transparency.
• Libraries have their own needs: we want to ensure the preservation of our institutions scholarly assets
• Libraries have an ally because the funders for research now require a data management plan

How do we describe datasets?

•  There is an astounding amount of variety among different research domains
  • locator persistent identifiers – this is universal
  • access date and time is very important for dynamic data sets, data could be coming from streams of data of millions of points per second
  • Recommendations are still being developed
  • For persistent identifiers: DataCite
    • Founded two years ago by a group of libraries
    • Mission is to help you find, access, and reuse data
    • Organization is run by the members
    • Assigns digital object identifiers (DOI) to datasets
    • DOIs have been traditionally assigned to scholarly papers
    • DOIs are governed by the International DOI Foundation, which governs the uniqueness the DOIs.
    • What is a persistent identifier?
      • It looks like an alphanumeric string that never changes, that is associated with the location of an object, and it may optionally have some other metadata
      • DOIs can be described in their native form or as an actionable link
      • The string will always stay the same, regardless of where the data is moved, as long as the metadata behind the link is updated

EZID and Metadata

• Tool to let you create DOIs and manage them over time, and manage metadata
• URL is http://n2t.net/ezid
• There is a help tab where without an account you can create test DOIs and test ARKs (use of ARks is recommended until research is ready to be published because they are less permanent than DOIs)
• There is an API, and many users use the API to batch ingest items.
• DataCite required elements are based on the Dublin Core Metadata Set
• Universal redesign, automated link checking is underway
• The “gory details” of the DataCite Metadata set, V. 2.2
  • small required set = citation elements
    1. Identifier – currently only accepts DOI
    2. Creator
    3. Title
    4. Publisher – the entity who makes the data available to the community of researchers, so it might be a distributor, data repository, traditional publisher, university repository, etc.
• DataCite wants to remain domain agnostic, it’s hard to please everyone, but it can be used by all
• Optional descriptive set of 12 elements that add additional information
  • domains can add more information here
  • Provide support for a number of external fields
  1. Subject (with schema attribute)
  2. Contributor (with type & name indentifier attributes)
  3. Data (with type attribute)
  4. Language
  5. ResourceType (with description attribute)
  6. AlternateIdentifier (with type attribute)
  7. RelatedIdentifier (with type & relation type attributes)
  8. Size
  9. Format
  10. Version
  11. Rights
  12. Description  (with type attribute)
  • will be adding with v. 2.3: IsIdenticalTo

The importance of Data Management Planning

• Need a lifecycle approach, as done at CDL
• CDL Curation and Publishing Services creating tools to support this
• Data management needs to be done all the way
• Identifiers should be assigned as soon as possible, and allows researchers to keep track of data
• Managing versioning: anytime there is a major version change, dataset needs to be reregistered. The challenge is: what is a major version change? Different domains may define this differently. Also challenging is how to deal with minor version changes – should these be reregistered too?

More links to materials are available in the slides (will be posted on ALA Connect soon)

• EZID: http://n2t.net/ezid
• DataCite: http://datacite.org/
• CDL: http://www.cdlib.org/
• Beta search: http://search.datacite.org

Posted by Kristin Martin