I kept thinking I’d write a really interesting report of all I heard at ALA Midwinter, but it wasn’t meant to be. The months slipped by and before I knew it, April had arrived. ALA Midwinter was in January. Oh well.
Here are some of the sessions I attended that I found worth noting:
I Never Met a Data I Didn’t Like: Metadata Issues in Local and Shared Digital Collections. Presentation to ALCTS Electronic Resources Interest Group, January 21, 2006, by Carol Hixson, Head, Metadata and Digital Library Services, University of Oregon Libraries.
Here is the official summary of her session (from ALCTS, I think):
Carol Hixson, Head, Metadata and Digital Library Services, University of Oregon began with a lively, down-to-earth session called: “I never met a Data I didn’t like: metadata issues in local and shared digital collections”. After a general review of current metadata tools and issues, Carol gave us the real picture of the challenges using D-Space and CONTENTdm, with Dublin Core metadata, for creating joint and local repositories for textual and image digital objects. Stressing the goals of agreed standards and consistency in joint projects, she acknowledged that being a “self-taught practitioner” one really had to be flexible and accept what worked best for the users. She ended with a suggestion to try our own metadata creation and defined a new metadata buzzword: “folksonomies” or on-the-fly terms that users invent to categorize information on the web.
MODS at Brown University (Reality and Illusion: The truth about Digital Projects and Sharing Metadata). Presentation to ALCTS Electronic Resources Interest Group, January 21, 2006, by Ann Caldwell, Metadata Specialist, Brown University.
Here is the official summary of her session:
Ann Caldwell, Metadata Specialist, Brown University also presented a clear and practical session about how Brown has built a growing digital collection based on METS records with descriptive metadata in MODS for library or campus generated projects. Ann described how they developed local tools as needed and used students and interns (who received class credit) to deal with the “usual” situation of having no additional staff assigned to early digital projects. She also gave the audience an online demonstration of actual record creation.
My own notes included the following bullet points:
- only one person from Technical Services in the Center
- projects come from subject specialists and also from faculty
- no institutional repository - just digital projects
- used SQL and PHP to build repository because at that time there was nothing on the market
- every object has MODS record but some have other records too
- MODS is MARC-based
- Ann developed guidelines for description
- Brown has large journal project
- they also use VRA with image management software for things that don’t fit well with MODS
- Filemaker can be output to XML
- they have 2 EAD specialists
- dl.lib.brown.edu
PCC Participants’ Meeting Summary, ALA 2006 Mid-Winter Conference
The discussion focused on the PCC’s strategic directions for 2006-2010:
- Be a forward thinking, influential leader in the global metadata community
- Redefine the common enterprise
- Build on and expand partnerships and collaborations in support of the common enterprise
- Pursue globalization
- Lead in the education and training of catalogers
and there was a presentation by Karen Calhoun:
The challenges facing catalogers include the affordability and scalability of our services; the competition within libraries for resources to develop library services; changes in information seeking behavior; the slow disappearance of catalog librarians; the reduced significance of the catalog in information seeking; and the debatable future of the discrete individual library catalog.
The meeting concluded with a tribute to John D. Byrum, chief of the LC Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division and the PCC Secretariat.
