Saturday, June 28, 2014 – 4:30-5:30pm
Las Vegas Convention Center, N253
Moving Beyond the “Back Roomâ€: The Expanded Role for Metadata and Catalog Librarians On Campus
Lisa McFall, Metadata and Catalog Librarian, Hamilton College
Catalog and metadata librarians have traditionally been housed in a back room of the library, leaving many people to ponder what exactly the “technical services department†does. The variety of skills needed to bring digital humanities projects to fruition presents the perfect opportunity for catalog and metadata librarians to show exactly what they do and how faculty and students can benefit from their skills.
Hamilton College formed the Digital Humanities Initiative in 2010 after receiving a three-year Mellon Grant. The “collection development team†that was formed as a part of this initiative included members of both the library and the information technology department and was conceived to build collaborations around supporting faculty research and the resulting data collections. One of the primary responsibilities that developed was the metadata and catalog librarian’s role in assisting faculty in thinking about how they envisioned interacting with their information in the digital archive and how that would be reflected in the associated metadata. As each faculty member worked closely with student fellows on their projects, metadata-specific training sessions for students were incorporated into a two-week training program on digital humanities and into the Introduction to Digital Humanities class.
This presentation will provide examples and highlight materials and methods that can be used by metadata and catalog librarians to share their metadata expertise with a broader campus community.
Consultative Metadata Services at Cornell University Library
Jason Kovari, Head of Metadata Services and Web Archivist, Cornell University
Abstract: The complexity of digital research projects and growing interest in making content accessible online has brought an increasing number of consultation requests and collaborative projects to Cornell University Library’s (CUL) Metadata Services unit (http://lts.library.cornell.edu/metadata). Though faculty and graduate student attention to metadata and the library’s role as a collaborator has been on-the-rise, this is not a new phenomenon; since its founding, non-MARC metadata services at CUL have been chiefly consultative, facilitated by embedding metadata librarians within outward-facing virtual service units, such as DCAPS (http://dcaps.library.cornell.edu/) and RDMSG (http://data.research.cornell.edu/).
During the presentation, I will discuss staffing, services and governance structures as well as outreach methods to encourage non-library consultations and collaborations. I will strongly reference a number of projects where CUL’s Metadata Services provided consultative services and collaborative development with non-library groups, likely including “Freedom on the Move”, an in-development digital humanities project concerning runaway slave advertisements; consultation with researchers in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences working to make accessible images and research logs concerning early 20th century Alaskan glacial activity; and more.
