Networked Resources and Metadata Interest Group
June 24, 2007, 8:00-10:00 am
ALA Annual Conference, Washington, D.C.
Minutes
Chair Brian Surratt called the meeting to order at 8:00. Today’s program includes two speakers, followed by a business meeting. Officers were introduced:
Brian Surratt, Chair
Louise Ratliff, Secretary
Michael Babinec and Holly Mercer, Program co-chairs
Jennifer Roper O’Brien and Jen Wolfe (not present), Publications
Jin Ma, Intern
Holly Long, LITA Liaison
Greta de Groat, Liaison to CC:DA
Louise introduced the two speakers:
Jane Greenberg, Associate Professor, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The DRIADE Repository project
Diane Hillmann, Research Librarian, Cornell University Library
RDA and Dublin Core
Jane Greenburg:
Driade (pronounced Dree ah’ dee) is actually named after a café in Chapel Hill. It is a data repository for data in the field of evolutionary biology. Think about Charles Darwin, and data supporting published research (histographs, etc.)‹what is the data behind that research? That is the DRIADE project.
Dr. Greenburg summarized the background and history of the project, commenting on its importance to the field and the collaboration among the various stakeholders. A paper on the project will be published from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative conference to be held later this year.
Diane Hillmann:
Diane’s talk explained some of the changes in the way RDA (Resource Description and Access) is moving forward with regard to an RDA element vocabulary and value vocabularies, to be formulated as components of a Dublin Core Application Profile. She provided handouts of some PowerPoint slides to illustrate her points. Some of her main topics included the RDA
Element Vocabulary, the Guidance Instruction component, and the RDA Value Vocabularies. She explained that Application Profiles provide the documentation of community understanding and intent: what is described, relationships, requirements. An AP provides guidance for crosswalks, to allow better machine manipulation and evaluation. It allows the data to be
interpreted by machine.
BUSINESS MEETING
Chair Brian Surratt called the meeting to order at about 9:30 a.m.
It was moved and seconded to accept the Midwinter meeting minutes as submitted. Approved unanimously.
Program officers: Michael Babinec reported that the NRMIG-sponsored program is today at 1:30, entitled “Bringing Order to Chaos, Managing Metadata for Digital Collections.” No program has yet been planned for 2008; however, a proposal could be submitted for the Tuesday morning ALCTS Program Committee meeting.
Publications: Jennifer Roper O’Brien stated that we need to evaluate the usefulness of the blog, and perhaps find other uses for it. There are permissions issues and it is not real user friendly. Brian noted that there are publications opportunities when we host a program.
CC:DA Liaison: Greta de Groat reported that CC:DA has been reviewing the draft of RDA Chapter 3. Overall, it is an improvement over previous drafts. Some confusion remains about “media type” scope and definition (they are trying to align with Onyx). Most abbreviations have been eliminated, and all spellings are British English; this is merely a convention of the JSC public documents, and trying to clarify this does not apply to us. There is a big desire for simplification, but it is unclear how to go about this. Hopefully the machine readable products will make this more human-usable. She wants to see what the simple form will look like; she may do a mock up, as it is hard to see the big picture.
Her concern is more MARC and ISBD, where most of us are working right now. She wants the information in bibliographical notes to be made more visible to users, especially for a-v materials. MARC instructs putting this information in notes, but maybe MARBI will consider making these encodeable. She’s worried about inertia in this process. Overall there has been some very healthy debate in the cataloging community over this, and she is feeling encouraged that we are going in a positive direction.
She needs volunteers to comment on Chapters 6 & 7. Brian asked Greta to send an email to the list, asking for volunteers.
LITA liaison: Holly Long stated that LITA and our group are becoming more intertwizled (Brian’s term). Upcoming LITA programs: Monday at 1:30, Using metadata standards in digital libraries. Today at 4:00, LITA President’s program, Tag You’re It, on Social Tagging. Today 1:30; our program. Top Technology Trends and Authority Control programs are also at 1:30.
Jeffrey Beall, NRMIG member and editor of the Journal of Library Metadata (used to be Journal of Internet Cataloging), called for papers on research on library metadata applications.
Election of Officers:
Brian reviewed the slate and called for nominations from the floor. Hearing no new nominations, it was moved and seconded to approve the slate, and then passed by voice vote of the members present:
Officers for 2007-08:
Chair: Louise Ratliff, UCLA
Secretary: Erin Stahlberg, UVA
Program 1: John Chapman, Minnesota
Program 2: Rebeka Irwin, Yale
Publishing 1: Jennifer O’Brien Roper, University of Maryland
Publishing 2: Sai Deng, Wichita State
Intern: Jin Ma, CUNY
CDA Liaison: Greta de Groat
LITA Liaison: Holley Long