March Metadata Madness!
March 2nd, 2010Hello catalogers, content strategists, information architects, knowledge organizers, metadata librarians, metadata specialists and all those who love and appreciate our kind of librarianship. December was a busy month and I didn’t post nearly as much as I should have, so the kind folks at Desk Set have invited me back for some March Metadata Madness! Over the coming weeks I will be discussing emerging standards, professional development, and perhaps a special interest or two. I invite you to send questions concerning cataloging, metadata, and all things technical services. But for now, let’s get back to basics.
Whether you call it cataloging or metadata, in principle it’s the same thing. We are generating and recording (whether automatically or manually) some kind of information about an asset, information package, item, whatever you want to call it…some thing in a collection. How the information is captured is all that separates metadata from traditional cataloging, and even that is a thin line. Both rely on structure standards, content standards, and value standards to create their syndetic structures- they just use different standards…and that’s ok.
Rick Block once described, “standards are like toothbrushes, everyone agrees they’re a good thing but nobody wants to use anyone else’s.” Is that such a bad thing? I used to think it it was. I once thought that to provide access to all the collections in the world, we would have to agree on a single standard and single method for interoperability. Well, that just isn’t practical. Experience has shown us that no one standard can capture the unique information required for all kinds of collections.
So then what is most important is continual creation of quality records based on the accepted standards of the time, and the needs of your collection as well as users. To fuel this development we need continual experimentation with new technologies that will enable us work toward descriptive independence and system interoperability. At the latest ASIS&T conference this past November in Vancouver the keynote speaker, Tim Bray, encouraged information professionals to experiment with emerging (open source) technologies to create innovative information systems for their users. He told us to “just do it” – that “…things have changed…you don’t need to know IT to create something useful anymore, you need to know your subject and users.” This is a very reassuring idea to subject specialists, I’m sure.
Bray also said, “The culture of online is epistolary…we are in a golden age of writing…a golden age of archiving and libraries.” If this is true, and I believe it is, what an exciting time to be a librarian! As digital data proliferates, it is our job to provide access to it – through any means necessary. No longer can we be boxed into 15 elements, MARC tags, or meta tags. What I’m describing here hasn’t been developed yet, and what excites me is that it will be our job as catalogers to develop these technologies of organization and access.
-A. Billey
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