OCLC Research @ U of Calgary: New directions for metadata workflows across libraries, archives, museums

Scene setting: New directions for metadata workflows across libraries, archives, museums G ünter Waibel Karen Smith -Yoshimura Merrilee Proffitt Thom Hickey University of Calgary February 10 th 2010

Taylor Family Digital Library

Sheila Cannell Director, Library Services University of Edinburgh LAM: Campus Context

Sheila Cannell Director, Library Services University of Edinburgh “ I'm really quite convinced that what we have to do is to boost up the whole area of what would be called the intellectual capital of the university, which I think happens within our special collections, within our archives (both those that are older and those that are being created now), and in our museums. I'm really interested in how we reposition the traditional library into that more general area.” LAM: Campus Context

Anne Van Camp Director, Smithsonian Institution Archives LAM: Opportunity & Challenge

Anne Van Camp Director, Smithsonian Institution Archives LAM: Opportunity & Challenge We are 19 museums, 9 research centers that are scattered across the world, we have 18 different archives, we have 1 library, but that library has 20 branches, and we have 1 zoo. So it's a rather complicated place, and you can imagine the challenge we face in trying to bring all of this disparate information together.

OCLC Research LAM Workshops Princeton Smithsonian Victoria & Albert U of Edinburgh Yale

Beth McKillop Keeper of Asia , Victoria & Albert Museum One Search

Beth McKillop Keeper of Asia , Victoria & Albert Museum “ The William Morris question remains with us. How do you show what the V&A has to offer to students interested in William Morris: designs by William Morris, archival materials by William Morris, and library books about William Morris.” Single Search

V&A Core Systems Integration Project (CSIP)
Strategy
Data harvesting for archival materials
Metasearch for library and museum content

Yale Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI) slide courtesy of Meg Bellinger,Ann Green, Louis E. King Yale University's Model for Campus-wide Digital Content Strategy and Implementation (CNI 2009) www.cni.org/tfms/2009b.fall/Presentations/cni_yale_bellinger.pdf

Strategy
LAMs as OAI data content providers
ODAI as harvester

Outcome: SI Collections Search Center
Strategy
Central Index
Webservices

New Directions for Metadata Workflows Karen Smith-Yoshimura [email_address] OCLC Research University of Calgary February 10, 2010

Current Descriptive Metadata Practices
2007 survey of 18 RLG Partners in the US and the UK that:
had “multiple metadata creation centers” on campus
had some interaction among them
Brigham Young U. Center for Jewish History Chemical Heritage Foundation Emory Getty Research Institute Harvard Minnesota Historical Society Princeton Smithsonian Institution Syracuse University U. Aberdeen UC Los Angeles U. Cambridge U. Edinburgh U. Michigan U. Minnesota U. Washington Yale

Workplace environment

Materials handled 78% handle both published and unpublished items

Types of materials described

Metadata description tools
65% Integrated Library System (Innovative Interfaces Millennium, Exlibris/Aleph or Voyager, VTLS/Virtua, SirsiDynix/Unicorn or Horizon, etc.)
41% Digital Collections software (CONTENTDM, Luna Insight, MDID, etc.)
31% Institutional Repository software (DSpace, Digital Commons, ePrints, etc.)
31% Collections Management system (TMS, KE Emu, Willoughby, etc.)
25% Digital Asset Management system (Portfolio, TEAMS, MediaBin, ClearStory, etc.)
17% Archival Management system (Archivists’ Toolkit, Archon, etc.

Data structures used

Thesauri and controlled vocabularies
Two thirds or more use:
Library of Congress Subject Headings, LC/NACO Name Authority File, Art & Architecture Thesaurus
More than 30% use:
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, Thesaurus of Graphic Materials I: Subject Terms, Thesaurus of Graphic Materials II: Genre and Physical Characteristic Terms, Union List of Artist Names
More than 10% use:
RBMS Controlled Vocabularies for Use in Rare Book and Special Collections Cataloging, Geographic Names Information Services, Local
Others used:
ICONCLASS, MeSH, LC Moving Image Materials, NCA Rules for construction of personal and place names, UK Archival Thesaurus for subjects, Chemical Markup Language Dictionaries, Chicago Thesaurus, Universal Decimal Classification for Polar Libraries, Linnean names, UNESCO Thesaurus, International Astronomical Union’s Astronomy Thesaurus, British Educational Thesaurus, Society of American Archivists, Glossary of Archives and Records Terminology, Integrated Taxonomic Information Systems for archeological faunal collections

45% build and maintain one or more local thesaurus (especially archives, museums, institutional repositories, digital libraries)

Image: from the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” Who knows what’s hidden in our collections?

What percentage of your collection do you estimate has not been adequately described – and is unlikely to be described without additional resources, funding, or both? RLG Programs Descriptive Metadata Practices Survey Results: Data Supplement http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2007-04.pdf 18% 35% 24% 22%

Sharing guidelines and strategies with other units

RLG Partners Metadata Creation Workflows Survey
Working Group conducted 2008 survey of RLG Partner heads or directors of units responsible for creating non-MARC metadata, either solely or in addition to MARC metadata.
134 responses from 67 RLG Partner institutions.
Two-thirds used the same staff to create both MARC and non-MARC metadata.
80% reported that creating non-MARC metadata was part of their “routine workflows”.

Crosswalks between schemas used (70% have conversion tools)

Streamlining metadata creation workflows
Descriptive metadata elements
Procedures
Standards
Tools
Authority control
Rights management
Repurposing data
Capturing data from other systems

Harnessing the power of terminologies Merrilee Proffitt [email_address] OCLC Research University of Calgary February 10, 2010

Making soup from the alphabet
GSAFD FAST LCSH LCTGM LCNAF GMGPC MeSH AAT ULAN TGN CSH

Terminologies “summit,” September 2007
Establish priorities based on a “strawman”
Search optimization
Support terminologies management & sharing (including local terms)
Support “social interactions” that add value
Value added intelligence (creating relationships between terminologies)
15 participants (45+ views!)
Lively discussion and prioritization

Key findings
Enhancing search terms
“End users should be our primary concern – if they don’t find anything, they won’t be back” – Amy Lucker, New York University
Taking “local” global
“No published terminologies are going to meet all needs. The reason we have local terminologies is because contributing to published terminologies is so difficult.” Jenn Riley, Indiana University

Enhancing search
Using web services to…
Suggesting search terms
Adding related terms on the fly
Depends on implementation (it’s up to you)
Query from institution in XML, passed to OCLC, XML passed back to institution, XML parsed by institution, presented in interface.

“ Local” terminologies
Additional interviews conducted with institutions who maintained “local” terminologies
Largely unstructured, some based on existing structures (primarily AAT)
Maintaining local terms because…
Barriers to contributing to existing structures
Perception that terms were truly local
All interested in a cloud environment
Ease creation and maintenance of terms
Allow terms to flow into local systems
Facilitate contribution to established terminologies

Names, Identities Hub, VIAF, WorldCat Identities Thom Hickey [email_address] OCLC Research University of Calgary February 10, 2010

Names touch everything…. Authors Publishers Institutions Musicians Families Government agencies Artists Fictional characters Actors Plant discoverers Corporations Pseudonyms Illustrators Editors Translators Correspondents Historical figures Directors Scientists Architects Animals Politicians Inventors Associations Cartographers

Names can be ambiguous…
“ John Adams”
… the US president?
… the US composer?
… the British mathematician & astronomer?
… the British nuclear physicist?
… or someone else?

Networking Names Advisory Group

Cooperative Identities Hub
Framework to concatenate and merge authoritative information
Gateway to all forms of names without preferring one form over another
Use social networking model
Provide a switch to extract relevant information
for re-use in own contexts
Create federated trust environment to
authenticate and authorize contributors

Hub objectives
Increase metadata creation efficiency
Easier to identify identity regardless of language or discipline
Determine preferred form within own context
Enable contributing agencies to augment own data resources
Expose information about personal and corporate
bodies beyond original contexts

Hub functions
Searches by both people and software applications
Edit: Add information, merge, split, flag for deletion
Create new entities
Batch update
Discussion
Audit trail and rollback

Virtual International Authority File
Matches names across 20 authority files
12.5 million records
10 million names

One persona, many representations http://viaf.org/viaf/95216565

Other efforts
ISNI
International Standard Name Identifier
ORCID
Open Researcher and Contributor ID
WorldCat Identities
A page for every name in WorldCat

International Standard Name Identifier
Driven by ‘rights’ holders
Need standard way to exchange information
OCLC
Participating in standards effort
Matching of test files
VIAF may be used as base file

Open Researcher and Contributor ID
Driven by scientific publishers
Need to exchange information, make systems more usable
Mostly interested authors of journal literature
OCLC
Participating in group
Possibly sharing metadata
Possibly working on matching

WorldCat Identities
A page for every name
25 million personal names
30 million names total
Includes imaginary characters, horses, etc.

Collaboration Continuum

OCLC Research @ U of Calgary: New directions for metadata workflows across libraries, archives, museums

by OCLC Research on Feb 12, 2010

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OCLC Research @ U of Calgary: New directions for metadata workflows across libraries, archives, museums Presentation Transcript