Innovating with Metadata

The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) has developed a new Library Reference Model (LRM) that will have major consequences for the structure, design, and implementation of RDA (Resource Description and Access). This presentation will cover the basics of the model and how its implementation in RDA will affect cataloging on practical level.

One of the chief promises of linked data for libraries is search engine visibility. Few studies, however, have attempted a quantitative analysis of linked data's impact on search engine rankings. Sophisticated tools have been developed to test search visibility in the related field of search engine optimization, including rank trackers, link analyzers, site auditors, and web crawlers. In this session, the presenter will review a linked data project from a search engine optimization perspective, applying SEO tools to quantify the impact of linked data and to identify best practices for implementation.

Like many academic libraries, the Ferris Library for Information, Technology, and Education (FLITE) acquires a range of materials, including learning objects, to best suit our students’needs. Some of these objects, such as the educational manipulatives and anatomical models, are common to academic libraries but others, such as the tabletop games, are not. After our liaison to the School of Education discovered some accessibility issues with Innovative Interfaces' Media Management module, we decided to examine all three of our realia collections to determine what our goals in providing catalog records and visual representations would be. Once we concluded that we needed photographic previews to both enhance discovery and speed circulation service, choosing processing methods for each collection became much easier. This presentation will discuss how we created enhanced records for all three realia collections including custom metadata, links to additional materials, and photographic previews. It will also describe the difference between photographic previews where the image is the metadata and digital surrogates where the image is the resource.

In the last 30 years, we have made an effort to automate (digitize) as much of cataloging as possible. The FRBR model and its extensions such as FRBR-LRM have continued that effort. Digitization in this broad sense has helped make cataloging more efficient and consistent, but the work entity and subject access present particular difficulties for this endeavor. My presentation will give some examples of how cataloger judgment, an "analog" element, will continue to be crucial.

Internet bots are popular software applications that perform automated tasks. They can be written in a wide variety of both coding languages and expertise, making them easily incorporated into a range of library projects. In fact, you and your patrons probably already interact with bots on a daily basis: libraries have been using bot-like automated processes for some time, including OCLC cataloging macros, MarcEdit task lists, and phone calls to notify patrons of due dates. Bots can also interact with APIs to further improve ILS and OPAC functions, as librarians continue to be directly involved in writing and developing different code languages.

Increasingly, libraries, archives, and digital repositories are building bots that interact with existing metadata to expose their collections to wider audiences on social networking platforms like Twitter. This presentation will focus on Fondren Library’s development of Twitter bots that promote library services and interact with digital archival metadata.

DPLA, the Digital Public Library of America, has been live for close to five years but is seemingly still not well known or well understood in the library community. If our local digital libraries are ponds and DPLA is an ocean of digital resources, metadata is the boat that travels between the two. Learn about DPLA's approach to metadata harvesting and the real-life experience of some Missouri libraries that began collaborating so that they could begin contributing to DPLA. This talk will cover the initial metadata requirements as well as recent changes.

The Fresno State Digital Repository is an open access repository managed by the Henry Madden Library at California State University, Fresno. In this webinar, the presenter will share the IR workflow at Fresno State that is used to generate metadata from various data resources. The audience will learn the conceptual model of the automated workflow, which is flexible and can be applied to many metadata projects.

The University of North Texas Libraries' Digital Collections comprise more than 1.8 million items from library collections, campus entities, and over 380 institutions across the state of Texas. We use a single, unified system to store all the items and their metadata, which all conform to a schema containing 21 fields based on locally-modified Dublin Core. While our sources of materials are diverse, so is our pool of metadata editors, which includes departmental staff and students, volunteers and library science students, and partner institutions. More than 600 editors of various skill levels have registered accounts in our system since October 2010. In an effort to provide guidance to novices and make metadata more consistent, our metadata editing interface has undergone a number of iterative changes. Many of these changes have added functionality and tools to assist editors who are creating metadata, such as color-coding, help messages, and direct links to guidelines. Recently, during spring and summer 2017, we have made more extensive changes to add system-wide tools specifically intended to discover problems and improve the quality of metadata in our Digital Collections. Changes include a new item-level interface to see more information about the history of a metadata record and broader tools to evaluate metadata values across an entire collection or the whole system. This presentation would provide an overview of interface design features in our editing system and a demonstration of the various tools.

This presentation will introduce to the non-programmer tools and techniques intended to clean, re-purpose, or transforms legacy metadata in anticipation of a metadata cleanup project or metadata migration. The presenter will cover string manipulations using Excel functions, pattern matching basics using regular expressions, and will share a variety of open source tools to aid the remediation process.

As many cultural heritage institutions (and their users) know, ambiguous or meaningless rights statements can cause confusion and limit downstream use of works. Following DPLA and Europeana’s lead in drafting simple, standardized terms that help metadata contributors more effectively communicate copyright and re-use status of digital objects, Washington University Libraries evaluated materials in more than 40 digital exhibits in order to assign each an appropriate statement from Rights Statements and help facilitate the same for other contributors to the DPLA Missouri Hub.