EDUCAUSE | Metadata

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:08:38 +0000

The author uses Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird to discusse the position of the catalog and uses it to illustrate more general discovery and workflow directions.

Curating for Quality: Ensuring Data Quality to Enable New Science

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:54:27 +0000

The National Science Foundation sponsored a workshop on September 10 and 11, 2012, in Arlington, Virginia on curating data, inviting Individuals from government, academic and industry settings gathered to discuss issues, strategies and priorities for ensuring quality in collections of data. This workshop aimed to define data quality research issues and potential solutions. The workshop objectives were organized into four clusters; 1) Data Quality Criteria and Contexts, 2) Human and Institutional Factors, 3) Tools for Effective and Painless Curation and 4) Metrics.

Latest Version of CEDS Now Available for Comment

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:41:54 +0000

Our friends at the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC) sent us the following information about the status of the Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) process; note the September 28 deadline for submitting comments on the latest version of CEDS released for public review:

The Digital Preservation Network - Sponsored by Presidio

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 23:33:10 +0000

This session will address the progress occurring in launching the Digital Preservation Network. With more than 50 institutional members, DPN builds on the higher education community's current preservation efforts by creating a federated preservation network, owned by and for the academy, which will provide secure digital archiving of the scholarly and cultural record. At the heart of DPN is a commitment to replicate the data and metadata of research and scholarship across diverse software architectures, organizational structures, geographic regions, and political environments. Replication diversity, combined with succession rights management, will ensure that future generations have access to today's discoveries and insights.

Making Metadata: Students and Scholars Enriching Digital Collections

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:05:09 +0000

Brown faculty and students are working with library staff (metadata specialists and digital humanities staff) to make detailed page- and image-level metadata for books in digitized special collections. This metadata will be incorporated into the Brown Digital Repository. We'll discuss the goals, process, and tools with which this is accomplished as a model for digital repository enrichment, special collections dissemination, and the incorporation of digital methods into a conventional classroom.

LadyBird: A Tool for Production, Distribution, Storage, and Presentation Workflows for Digital Objects and Their Metadata

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:00:18 +0000

At Yale multiple library units and digital projects are creating digital assets. Without centralized digital collections support, each unit with various configurations of IT support has created its own tools, processes, and policies to manage its digital assets, preserve them, and present them on the web. In this presentation, a programmer, a metadata librarian, and a digital collections librarian will discuss LadyBird, a new tool at Yale University Library that's being developed to centralize digitization workflows. The tool is the result of collaborations between programmers, librarians, and professional staff.

Linked Data: A Way Out of the Information Chaos and toward the Semantic Web

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 19:55:52 +0000

The author discusses the use of linked data in a informtion discovery process.

CNI Podcast: Tad Shull on Jazz Discography and Digital Communications

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:54:36 +0000

The history of jazz resonates in its recordings: they capture the act of musical creation in real time. A huge body of reference works on jazz recordings, the product of seventy years’ labor by jazz discographers, in turn documents this legacy of improvised performance. The discographies now present the field of jazz studies with an untapped source of knowledge about jazz history.

CNI Podcast: Karen Wetzel on Creating Standards for Supplemental Journal Article Materials

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 23:28:47 +0000

Karen A. Wetzel is the Standards Program Manager for NISO, the National Information Standards Organization. She manages the process of standards development, oversee activities of the technical committees creating NISO standards, and organizes outreach and education programs related to those standards. Wetzel spoke with EDUCAUSE at the Coalition for Networked Information 2010 Spring Member Meeting, where she presented the session, "Standards and Best Practices for Datasets and Other Supplemental Journal Article Materials."

Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:12:40 +0000

Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it's safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google's servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.

An Arbitrage Opportunity for Image Search and Retrieval

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:16:53 +0000

A new paradigm for image search metadata collection is emerging exemplified by the Human Computation School's application of gaming principles to information science search challenges. In parallel, a suite of Web 2.0 interface applications for visual search have recently appeared opening new interactive possibilities and visual metaphors for navigation. This article briefly introduces this paradigm shift and then looks critically toward wider innovation with an eye on fresh territory. Arbitraging differing methodologies opens new visual search possibilities, as affordances and differences between models present opportunities to leverage inefficiencies in one model with efficiencies of the other. This article capitalizes on such inequities, prescriptively suggesting a synergistic path for combining new image-retrieval metadata methodologies with new frontend visual search directions for future application innovation.

Special Collections in ARL Libraries: A Discussion Report from the ARL Working Group on Special Collections

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:07:05 +0000

The ARL Working Group on Special Collections was charged by the Research, Teaching, and Learning Steering Committee in 2007 with advising it "on special collections issues on an ongoing basis. In this context, 'special collections' is construed broadly to include distinctive material in all media and attendant library services."

The Working Group has two interrelated priorities:
1. Identify opportunities and recommend actions for ARL and other organizations that will encourage concerted action and coordinated planning for collecting and exposing 19th- and 20th-century materials in all formats (rare books, archives and manuscripts, audio and video, etc).
2. Identify criteria and strategies for collecting digital and other new media material that currently lack a recognized and responsible structure for stewardship.

Professionally Indisposed to Change

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:56:57 +0000

The author discusses the merging of various technologies that could serve as a model for the useful exposure of potentially all repositories of unique works in museums, archives, and libraries, which are among the key data repositories for scholars in the humanities.

Maelstrom Over Metadata

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:25:04 +0000

A change in policy for how libraries can use and share online catalog data is causing a backlash among open-access proponents and some librarians.

7 Things You Should Know About Geolocation

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:08:46 +0000

Geolocation, also called geotagging, is the practice of associating a digital resource with a physical location. A photographer, for example, might include the longitude and latitude coordinates for where a picture was taken, allowing others to pinpoint that location on a map. Increasingly, geolocation is being applied to infrastructure components and end-user devices for the purpose of knowing where people are. This additional layer of location data can make resources much more useful to a broad range of users.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

In addition to the "7 Things You Should Know About…" briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more, please visit the ELI Resources page.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Mark Notess, Development Manager & Usability Specialist at Indiana University

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 23:47:36 +0000

In this 12 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Mark Notess, Development Manager & Usability Specialist at Indiana University. He is involved in several online learning and research tool development projects including the Variations 3 Digital Music Library Project, and Integrating Licensed Library Resources with Sakai. He also co-authored an article with Lisa Lorenzen-Huber entitled, "Online Learning for Seniors: Barriers and Opportunities". He spoke with Carie Windham at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference in Seattle, Washington.

Enhancing Search and Browse Using Automated Clustering of Subject Metadata

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 21:42:08 +0000

The Web puzzle of online information resources often hinders end-users from effective and efficient access to these resources. Clustering resources into appropriate subject-based groupings may help alleviate these difficulties, but will it work with heterogeneous material? The University of Michigan and the University of California Irvine joined forces to test automatically enhancing metadata records using the Topic Modeling algorithm on the varied OAIster corpus. We created labels for the resulting clusters of metadata records, matched the clusters to an in-house classification system, and developed a prototype that would showcase methods for search and retrieval using the enhanced records. Results indicated that while the algorithm was somewhat time-intensive to run and using a local classification scheme had its drawbacks, precise clustering of records was achieved and the prototype interface proved that faceted classification could be powerful in helping end-users find resources.

Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums

Fri, 04 May 2007 16:50:00 +0000

Integrating digital content from libraries, archives and museums represents a persistent challenge. While the history of standards development is rife with examples of cross-community experimentation, in the end, libraries, archives and museums have developed parallel descriptive strategies for cataloguing the materials in their custody. Applying in particular data content standards by material type, and not by community affiliation, could lead to greater data interoperability within the cultural heritage community.

In making this argument, the article demystifies metadata by defining and categorizing types of standards, provides a brief historical overview of the rise of descriptive standards in museums, libraries and archives, and considers the current tensions and ambitions in making descriptive practice more economic [1].

EDUCAUSE2006 Podcast: Project Builder

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 18:25:00 +0000

In this 32-minute presentation from the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Michael Fegan and Dean Rehberger in a session entitled Project Builder: Building Rich, Contextualized Web Presentations from a Digital Archive. They explain how the Project Builder CMS helps faculty members and cultural institutions create rich, multimedia digital archives and Web sites that are easily maintained and augmented.

Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:31:31 +0000

Martha L. Brogan's Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library is a major contribution to the Digital Library Federation's (DLF) suite of work that focuses on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). With generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, DLF has harnessed deep OAI expertise from the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Emory University to prototype "next-generation" OAI services informed by advisory panels of scholars and technical experts; to build registries of providers to aid in the creation of new OAI-based services; and to formulate best practices for sharable metadata that focus what we have learned collectively for innovative library services. The best practices work has received intellectual and practical support from our colleagues at the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), a service of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Repository Librarian and the Next Crusade: The Search for a Common Standard for Digital Repository Metadata

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 20:16:49 +0000

"Metadata is an exceedingly broad category of information covering everything from an object's title and date of origin to information about layout, presentation, and rights. Within libraries and digital object repositories, metadata is the cornerstone of the infrastructure required for exchange and use of information. While metadata standards abound, and acceptance and use of these standards is equally widespread, agreement on a common standard is much harder to find."

An Interview with Terri Bays

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 19:15:41 +0000

In this 19 minute recording, we'll hear from Terri Bays, OCW Project Director at the University of Notre Dame. Listen in as she shares some thoughts on open courseware, institutional repositories and more.

Uncovering the Science in Computer Science: Challenges for the 21st Century

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 20:56:42 +0000

Progress on the hardware side of computer engineering has been impressive, but software has lagged behind. Security continues to be troublesome at the operating system level, network level, and various application levels in computer networks. Some collections of computers (called "bots" or "bot armies") are used in abusive ways to send spam by launching distributed denial-of-service attacks. We may not be configuring the hardware of our basic computing platforms to assist in improving security. Where should we be spending time, money, and brainpower to significantly enhance our ability to provide deeper roots for computer, system, and network designs for the future?

Moving Towards Shareable Metadata

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 17:25:31 +0000

A focus of digital libraries, particularly since the advent of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, is aggregating from multiple collections metadata describing digital content. However, the quality and interoperability of the metadata often prevents such aggregations from offering much more than very simple search and discovery services. Shareable metadata is metadata which can be understood and used outside of its local environment by aggregators to provide more advanced services. This paper describes shareable metadata, its characteristics, and its importance to digital library development, as well as barriers and challenges to its implementation.

What Do Researchers Need? Higher Education IT from the Researcher’s Perspective

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:28:53 +0000

Research methods, research subjects, the composition of research teams, and collaborative practices have all been affected in ways that are important to those who manage research and information technology (IT) on campuses. The boundaries of any single institution's research computing infrastructure have expanded to include regional, national, and international as well as campus-specific resources. Researchers continue to need speed, flexibility, and affordability when it comes to networking, and IT is still learning how to most effectively support the work of collaborations undertaken at a distance. This occasional paper focuses on the national research agenda, research trends, and IT from the researcher's perspective.