RSSMarch Metadata Madness!
Mar 02
From Our Guest Bloggers a. billey, cataloging, emerging standards, metadata, Rick Block, Tim Bray 8 Comments
Hello 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
B494
Mar 03, 2010 @ 09:23:40
Amber,
I just wanted to first say Amen!
I think you have hit upon something many catalogers tend to forget – we catalog for our users. Yes, metadata rules and schemes and standards are important, but our records, the metadata we create is for our users, something which I feel is lost in this great RDA/DC/AACR2 mess we are in the middle of right now.
I look forward to your next posts!
Jason
Mar 07, 2010 @ 19:36:12
If the cataloguing is not standardized, how will libraries be able to communicate with each other? The possibilities for federated searching are increased if the catalogue structures are not normalized. Similarly, content standards allow one library user to search another system without learning an entirely new terminology. While we should always adapt the cataloguing to the user needs, if this is taken to the extreme, it creates a Catalogue that is siloed from the world. In the age of Web 2.0, this is undesirable.
Another problem is that with so many things being produced, more than ever before as the Internet is the cheapest means of publishing content ever, there is no way to tag/catalogue it all. What is the role of cataloguers to be? If we are automated, will we still be required? With user-generated tagging becoming increasingly popular, will cataloguers continue to act as the organizers of access points to materials? I do not share your optimism for the profession in the upcoming years.
Mar 08, 2010 @ 07:44:43
I meant to say that the possibilities for federated ARE increased if the catalogues ARE normalized.
Mar 08, 2010 @ 18:32:27
Mark – I’m not saying that we throw out the baby with the bath water here – or even build a whole new bathtub! Over the past decades, libraries have developed very important standards and amazing technologies to share their information. (There is a reason why AACR2, MARC and Z39.50 are so powerful and are still used today.)
But as information changes (from codex to code), so do the methods for accessing that information. For our profession to stay viable we must be part of the developments to provide access to those resources. Tags are just one method, there may be others – and it’s our role as catalogers to figure it out. The nuances of data structures and description require a cataloger, and this is why I don’t share your pessimism about our profession.
Mar 10, 2010 @ 08:45:41
I am pessimistic about the need for bibliographic control, but of the user’s expectations and of the quality of the metadata collected.
The Amazon, Delicious, and Google Books models have really changed how users want to search for bibliographic materials. Librarians are increasingly forced to question the need for controlled vocabulary schemas to structure subject headings as users no longer want to search in this fashion or learn the approved terminology.
I agree that metadata must be captured if access to thematically linked material is to be achieved. What I question is who will be doing this tagging (e.g. content producers, users, librarians) and what the nature of the tags will be. I think that expectations concerning “quality records” have been lowered as people want federated searches from general portals and are putting less effort in evaluating the quality of the hits and their sources.
Mar 10, 2010 @ 11:13:47
I am NOT pessimistic about the need for bibliographic control…
What I need to be more careful with are my negatives apparently. An option to edit responses would be nice.
Mar 10, 2010 @ 12:17:21
Thinking about bibliographic control, it seems to me that there needs to be an effort to move towards something like InterParty
http://www.interparty.org/
So that the metadata generated by disparate groups (including tags) can be integrated into one (for lack of a better term) authority file. This, as you pointed out Mark, enhances the search-ability of records, but removes the duties for the primary creation of metadata from its traditional domain (catalogers).
You will, of course, have to have some entity moderating these files, but that is problematic to me. It’s hard to pass judgement on the metadata (tags) people place on certain items, as tags are a far more relative description of an item. And who will “step up” to do the moderation?
I agree with Amber in that catalogers are needed, as we understand metadata and its associated structures. It also seems to me that at some point, a person must sit down with a given object and produce the original record for that item. Other individuals must then adapt those records to the needs of their particular user group. I think, then, that catalogers will always be around, but perhaps without the numbers we have seen in the past.