Grand Metadata Tool Ideas November 24, 2008
Posted by wsexton in : Trident , 10comments
We’re embarking on a project to adopt or build a metadata tool at Duke University Libraries. Before we’re immersed in architectures, designs, workflows, schedules, layers, platforms, capacities, etc., I’d like to indulge in some guilt-free big thinking. I thought I’d just kind of put the question out there: What are some of the big ideas that could inform the development of a metadata tool?
I invite conversation here and on the web4lib and code4lib lists, to which I’m sending an abridged version of this post. Other conversations will occur in various venues over the next month or so. I’ll try to pull together and post on anything I see, hear, read or say. In the meantime, I’ll share one big idea that I’ve been considering; I’m not saying it’s THE big idea or even implying that we’ll follow through on it at Duke. It’s just one way to bend our thinking about this project. I’m interested in other ideas that can help with the bending of the thinking on the project for the tool for the metadata.
The idea that I’m posing follows from a blog post that Lorcan Dempsey wrote in May, mentioning an example of a “shared cataloging environment”. When I read it, I wondered, what if you take that idea to its logical (illogical?) extreme: a metadata tool as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.
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A metadata tool that scales October 10, 2008
Posted by wsexton in : Trident , 7commentsIn January of 2007 I sent a post to the Web4lib list titled “Metadata tools that scale.” At Duke we were seeking opinions about a software platform to capture metadata for digital collections and finding databases. The responses to that inquiry suggested that what we were looking for didn’t exist.
About a year ago, an OCLC report on a survey of 18 member institutions, “RLG Programs Descriptive Metadata Practices Survey Results,” supported that basic conclusion. When asked about the tools that they used to “create, edit and store metadata descrptions” of digital and physical resources, a sizable majority responded “customized” or “homegrown” tool.
Since my initial inquiry, we launched a new installation of our digital collections. Yet we still lack a full-featured software platform for capturing descriptive metadata.
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