First Wednesday Jan 7 – A Metadata Tool Project January 6, 2009
Posted by wsexton in : Trident , add a commentSlides for my First Wednesday presentation tomorrow on the metadata tool project, including the exciting new project “code name” (which has been determined, pending a better idea) …
American Song Sheets December 19, 2008
Posted by Jill Katte in : Announcements , add a comment
American Song Sheets, another new digital collection we published in October, includes approximately 1,800 broadsides and song sheets from nineteenth-century America. For this collection, we provide the song sheet images, as well as the searchable full text of the song lyrics. Will processed the full text to generate a collection-level “term cloud” based on commonly occurring words within the lyrics. This technique has proven useful for other collections, such as the Sidney Gamble Photographs of China term clouds (in two languages!) and the Americans in the Land of Lenin collection term cloud.
For the Song Sheets, Will also used full-text processing to enhance the metadata for each item with “more frequent words” and “less frequent words.” These approaches allow us to support additional browsing pathways for our users without the costs of hand-crafted metadata.
Why digital collections aren’t just a big pile of stuff October 17, 2008
Posted by Rich in : metadata , 1 comment so far
Continuing the introductions … I’m Rich Murray, and I’m one of two Metadata Librarians in the Digital Collections Program. I’m based in the Cataloging & Metadata Services Department, and I work with Noah Huffman (in the Rare Book, Manuscript, & Special Collections Library) to plan and create metadata for our digital collections.
What does that mean, exactly? Basically, Noah and I –- and the rest of the metadata team –- work to describe, organize, and allow users to discover the cool stuff in our digital collections. Metadata is “data about data,” and without it, a 5000-item digital collection is like 5000 photographs thrown into a big pile. You might be able to find what you want by going through them all one at a time, but it will probably take forever, and you may get to the end and discover that what you were looking for wasn’t in the big pile anyway.
With good metadata, though, you can find what you’re looking for much more efficiently and painlessly. We group objects into categories based on subject, format, time period, or anything else that makes sense. We apply captions to images, keywords to advertisements, plot summaries to videos, and anything else we think will help you find what you’re looking for. And if we’re doing our job right, the metadata we provide might even lead you to really, really cool stuff that you didn’t even know you were looking for.
Fortunately, Noah and I don’t have to do all this on our own. We work with a great group of folks, including the rest of the Digital Collections Implementation Team, the Metadata Advisory Group, and other staff throughout the libraries. It’s a team effort, and as our Digital Collections Program grows, more and more of us are involved in making it happen.
The other part of my job, which may sound completely unrelated at first but really isn’t, is serving as the Catalog Librarian for Spanish & Portuguese (and Catalan and Galician) Languages. Both parts of my job involve describing, arranging, and providing access to the library’s collections so you can find what you need.
Metadata isn’t something new –- it’s what librarians and archivists have been doing all along, even if we called it something else. Connecting people and ideas is what do best, and as part of the Digital Collections Program, I get to spend my days bringing some truly remarkable resources to an audience around the world. It doesn’t get much better than that.
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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Megadata, an Introduction October 9, 2008
Posted by wsexton in : Uncategorized , 3commentsI’m Will Sexton, Metadata Analyst / Programmer here at Duke University Libraries. My job focuses on technical support for the metadata-heavy stuff: finding aids, finding databases (like this one) and digital collections. I’m part of a great team that includes Sean Aery, who designed the front end for our digital collections platform. Sean and I will present on that project next week at the LITA National Forum.
When I took this position six years ago my job title was the only “metadata” anything in the library. Now we have two Metadata Librarians, a committee called the Metadata Advisory Group, and an internal metadata “standard” named Duke Core (derived from that other core). What used to be our Cataloging Department is now known as Cataloging & Metadata Services. Yes (rubs hands together, cackles) my plan is working beautifully. Next I will change my job title to “Toll House Cookies for Everyone Analyst.”
Anyway, the first time I told a friend of mine outside of the library field about my job, she said, “Huh? Megadata? What’s megadata?” This particular friend was in law school at the time, so now when people ask her, “What do you do?” she says “I’m a lawyer.” I gave up answering that question directly; now I just say I’m a computer programmer (partially true) or a librarian (nominally untrue, though true in the sense of “a person who works in a library on library stuff”).
But at least now I have to explain my job less when I’m IN the library than I did six years ago.
Anyway, this Word Press thingie for digital collections has been sitting up on cinder blocks on the side of the house for a while, and I thought I’d take it for a spin. Wheeee! Before I move on to a subject other than “me me me” I’ll add that I contribute 6-to-8 hundred words of topical observation to the Chapel Hill News‘ “My View” feature every 7 weeks or so. My most recent column attempts to make issues relating to “megadata” and library technology seem like the kind of thing you talk about in a newspaper.
Coming soon … a post about metadata.
