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Vanessa Whippo, LTLS Cataloging Center Consultant, attended
workshops focused on metadata creation and the future of cataloging.
In Metadata Mashup: Creating and Publishing Application Profiles a
panel ofacademic librarians stressed the importance of creating and documenting
metadata standards for digital projects and shared their relevant experience.
Diane Hillmann, Director of Metadata Initiatives at the Information Institute
of Syracuse, stressed the importance of striving for metadata interoperability
among projects rather than continuing the practice of creating project-specific
application profiles. Of particular interest is
news that the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative will soon publish guidelines
for application profiles that are expected to be of significant value to
the library community at large.
Creating the Future of the Catalog and of Cataloging and Catalogers was
a wide-ranging panel discussion of metadata creation, sharing and
interoperability by Roy Tennant (OCLC), Tim Spalding (LibraryThing),
Jennifer Bowen (University of Rochester), Martha Yee (UCLA Film & Television
Archive), and Diane Hillmann (Information Institute of Syracuse).
Converging trends in metadata creation include:
- An increasing amount of metadata creation by machine
- Greater use of content provided by persons outside the library community
(e.g., publisher information and social cataloging)
- Greater emphasis on human creation of metadata for primary sources
rather than works of secondary scholarship
- Need for greatly increased metadata interoperability and willingness
to share freely.
Of particular interest was information about the
University of Rochester’s eXtensible
Catalog Project, which is developing open source tools to facilitate
resource discovery and metadata management. Among these will be tools
for enriching and moving MARC-encoded metadata to and from other environments.
An interesting divergence in points of view about the Semantic Web was
expressed by Diane Hillmann and Tim Spaulding, Hillmann believes it is
important for librarians and others involved in metadata creation to become
more familiar with Semantic Web standards and schema, while Spaulding expressed
what he said is the view of many members of the Web community that, like
MARC, the Semantic Web will fail because of its overly complex nature.
RDA and Its Conceptual Underpinnings
Attendees at Getting Ready for RDA and FRBR: What You Need to Know were
treated to a review of FRBR and FRAD, the conceptual underpinnings of the
forthcoming new cataloging standard, RDA: Resource
Description and Access, which will replace Anglo-American
Cataloging Rules, 2nd Edition, in 2009. RDA goes beyond AACR2
by providing guidelines for cataloging digital resources and placing
considerably more emphasis on making users aware of the availability of
a particular work’s different editions, translations, and physical
formats.
RDA will be released in the first quarter of 2009 and, prior to general
implementation in the U.S., will be subject to a period of testing by the
Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the National Agricultural
Library, OCLC, and participants in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging,
among others. The task force for implementation of RDA in the U.S. estimates
that initial training materials will not be available for another year
and will probably be presented at the 2009 ALA Annual.
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