Who Should Create Metadata for Online Submissions in DSpace II?

What happens at small academic/research libraries? At some libraries, metadata librarians or archivists create metadata for a variety of collections if metadata standards have been established. However, this is not only a huge amount of work, but also needs professionals to do the job. Today, to facilitate metadata creation, metadata librarians are seeking for batch loading or auto-generated metadata to provide access to digital contents with the benefit of technologies. This is an emerging challenge for Metadata or Digital Initiative Librarians. When libraries migrate a collection to a new platform, batch loading metadata for the collection is more efficient and effective, especially if the collection is not created from the scratch. This also needs metadata librarians to map metadata in one system to those in another with their expertise.

Some people think the library can use students or paraprofessionals to do the job. I would say Yes and No. As you might notice, the purpose of metadata creation is to let users easily find the information they need. If a person doesn't understand the philosophy of the information retrieval, how can he/she know to create the right access for users? However, if metadata librarians can set up some procedures, teach them some of the processes, then they would be a great help to metadata librarians. For instance, if metadata librarians set up batch loading form, students or paraprofessionals will prepare the basic metadata form first, then metadata librarians can work on the form and batch load metadata into DSpace.

Therefore, there is no rules for this. Librarians should allocate tasks with the collaboration of the personnel in the libraries. The bottom line is to facilitate metadata creation for digital collections.

Who Should Create Metadata for Online Submissions in DSpace I?

Since the Miller Library started to deposit seniors theses in the college digital repository DSpace in 2007, librarians have been wondering who is the appropriate person to create metadata for theses. Ideally, metadata librarians can do this with best knowledge they have. However, most submitted theses need original cataloging. Usually, there is only one metadata /cataloging librarian in a small academic or research library to do this type of original work. The amount of electronic theses received by the library each year is far beyond what a metadata librarian can handle in a timely manner. Especially, the metadata librarian has to design metadata models for different types of electronic collections, and facilitate access for users to easily search information in Dspace. So what are the possible solutions?

At large university libraries, students submit theses and dissertations online. In this submission process, a senior needs to create descriptive metadata for his own work, such as title, author, keywords, abstract, table of contents etc. After the student submits his/her thesis, the metadata librarian will review the submission. If the thesis passes the review, the librarian will publish it right away. If the metadata librarian finds out inappropriate metadata in the submission, s/he will not publish it until errors are fixed.

Building an Institutional Repository for Your Instutution

Institutional repositories (IRs) have been successfully populated at higher education institutions, where users not only get open access to those scholarly publications, but also create collections. It opens the door to share research information within or beyond the community. IRs are also extremely useful at research companies.

Research companies could set up different communities to share information at different levels. This will reduce duplicate paperwork, such as lab reports, lab records and datasheet. It also minimize the requests for the same information, and leads to a green business environment. The easily customized workflow could be designed to facilate researchers to deposit thier data in a moment. IRs could also serve as a platform for record management. The descriptive metadata and administrative metadata can be shared or transferred as a part of management records.

Currently, some open source software, such as DSpace, Greenstone, Fedora, are widely used at academic libraries. The other commercial products, such as CONTENTdm and Inmagic Presto, are also used in business environment. How to create an institutional repository and promote it in your community? The article, Building an Instutional Repository at a Liberal Arts College, might give you some thoughts and inspiration.

Metadata Workshop on NIS Camp in June 2009

Self-created digital collection has become an effective means for libraries to create knowledge, preserve and share archival and research information. In order to provide easy online access to these research materials for users, librarians and information professionals use metadata to organize and describe information, and make these resources online searchable. How to create effective metadata for digital collections? Jin Xiu Guo will offer a workshop on NITLE Information Services Camp at Smith College on June 4, 2009. This workshop is for everyone who wants to know about metadata and likes to explore knowlege management in digital age. People who are interested in the workshop could visit NIS Camp.

Thesauri for Information Retrieval Part. 1

Thesauri have been widely used in information retrieval in recent years. They are built in software to facilitate users to retrieve information on websites or content management systems. Currently, law firms and consultant companies have integrated thesauri into their websites. Thesauri could be also used to automatically index contents in databases. Most commercial databases all have thesauri to help users increase search effectiveness, such as STN, WilsonWeb. However, there are no standards for current thesauri developers to adopt or compose concepts consistently. The same concept could be displayed differently in different thesauri for different purposes. For example, "knowledge management software" could be splitted into "knowledge", "management" and "software"; it could be also broken down to "Knowledge management" and "software". The first case could happen in a general thesaurus, second one might possibly happen in a thesaurus of Information Science. People who want to integrate the above thesauri into their software will ask a question, which one is more appropriate for my system?

Except for specific purposes, most thesauri should be interoperable with software to maximize the benefit of thesauri to certain extent regardless of different domains. Sometimes, it even takes longer to customize a thesaurus for local systems than develop a thesaurus from scratch. In another word, how we could let current content management systems easily adopt available thesauri? We need a standard to standardize the way we create concepts in thesauri.

"Author vs. User Tagging" on Journal of Library Metadata

With the increasing application of social tagging technology in web 2.0, librarians have applied social tagging in online library catalog as an additional search entry for users. Now scientists, attorneys and technology consultants start to tag web contents as subject experts to provide such convenience. This user tagging is becoming an acceptable access tool for researchers. But what are the differences between author-supplied metadata (endo-tagging) and user- supplied metadata (exo-tagging)? An interesting article by Heather Lea Moulaison on Journal of Library Metadata, (2008, vol. 8, issue 2 p101-111, 11p) has a critical review on this issue.

Journal of Library Metadata focuses on emerging issues about all aspects of metadata applications in today's digital libraries. Haworth's Journal of Library Metadata, now published by the Taylor & Francis Group, is seeking a new editor. Any interested professionals with sufficient credentials who might like to take on this task can contact Bill Cohen, the publisher at bcohen7719@aol.com.

What Does a Metadata Librarian Do?

A metadata librarian becomes a new professional library title in recent three years. It needs to transfer traditional cataloging knowledge into digital information management with emerging technologies. Many new metadata librarians are experiencing new challenges in the digital age, especially, social libraries are becoming an emerging knowledge network. Here is the interview with Inmagic " Getting the Metadata Experience with Jin Xiu Guo".

International Standard Collection Identifier (ISCI)

International Standard Collection Identifier is under review now. The purpose of the document is to make various collections and fonds to be identified by a system in a systematical way. An identifier is an important metadata element, so far, there is no standard way to construct an identifier. Different entities have their own ways to create identifiers.

With the appearance of metasearch engine, an identifier has played an important role in locating information. Especially electronic resources have been exponentially increased in a recent decade, an identifier is usually generated by local practices. There is no systematical way to guide local practices to formulate an consistent identifier. Now more and more digital libraries have created digital collections including digital archives, descriptive metadata are used to describe those resources. An identifier is a key element of descriptive metadata. Today, knowledge sharing is an effective learning process. Knowledge sharing can not be alive on its own, metadata sharing and exchange inevitably accompany with knowledge sharing.

When a variety of organizations use different local identifiers, the metasearch engine has to do duplicate searching because of irregular formation of the identifiers. This irregularity greatly reduces search engine efficiency. To increase search effectiveness, we need to build standard identifiers for collections and fonds, to facilitate global metadata exchange. The proposed standard way is:

ISIL:Collection identifier string

ISIL is the identifier for the organization, the collection identifier may contain up to 16 characters.

e.g. FI-Ht:Up Helsinki University Theology Library, Psychology of religion collection. (example from ISO/CD 27730)

If ISCI becomes a standard, it will greatly reduce duplicate detection of a search engine, users will be able to identify collections and fonds through ISCI.