ALA Midwinter Meeting 2011
Report from the ALCTS Metadata Interest Group

and other metadata-related meetings

Jenn Riley, Chair, Metadata Subcommittee, MLA BCC

ALCTS Metadata Interest Group Meeting, January 9, 2011, 8:00-10:00 AM

The MIG meeting at ALA Midwinter 2011 featured two presentations on hot topics in library metadata, followed by a brief business meeting.

In the first presentation, Corey Harper of New York University provided a whirlwind tour of new developments related to Linked Data <http://linkeddata.org/> since the many discussions and presentations on the topic at ALA Annual 2010. Initiatives highlighted include:

· German National Library, Hungarian National Library, and British National Bibliography all releasing RDF Linked Data

· The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF)’s use of Linked Data expanding <http://viaf.org>

· <http://id.loc.gov> adding MARC code lists for countries, geographic areas, and languages to the Linked Data it makes available

· MADS in RDF is open for public comment <http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/rdf/>

· W3C Linked Library Data Incubator Group formed <http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/>

· RDA elements and relationships defined as RDF classes and properties at the Open Metadata Registry <http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm>

· The UK ArchivesHub is working to make its EAD finding aids available as Linked Data <http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/locah/>

· The Europeana project is building on OAI-ORE to expose Linked Data about digital objects <http://version1.europeana.eu/web/guest/news/-/blogs/open-linked-data-and-europeana>

· Ed Summers from the Library of Congress has built Linkypedia as a platform for exploring the Linked Data exposed from Wikipedia articles < http://linkypedia.inkdroid.org/>

· A petition is circulating to create a LITA/ALCTS Linked Library Data Interest Group. More information can be found at < http://kcoyle.net/lld-ala>

The second presentation described the work of the NISO Institutional Identifiers (I2) initiative. Oliver Pesch, co-chair of the I2 group, gave the presentation on behalf of Michael Giarlo. The I2 initiative aims to create a central, interoperable registry of “institution records.” These records would store core metadata about institutions at varying levels of granularity and provide lookup services on this data. Electronic resources licensing would benefit significantly for this work, allowing better structured data about exactly which organization is covered by a given license. ILL is also significantly impacted by this work It is hoped that the data from the I2 registry could also be included in VIAF records for these organizations. More information may be found at <http://www.niso.org/workrooms/i2>.

The business meeting following presentations focused primarily on planning for program submissions for ALA Annual 2011 in New Orleans, June 23-28, 2011. Speakers for a session on metadata for sound recordings, focusing mostly on technical metadata but also on some other varieties, are already lined up. The possibility of also proposing a session on metadata creation tools was raised, though not decided for certain.

An additional report from the Metadata Interest Group meeting can be found on the MIG blog at <http://www.alcts.ala.org/metadatablog/2011/01/metadata-interest-group-at-ala-midwinter-2011-2/>.

ALCTS Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS), Audio Metadata Task Force

The BCC Metadata Subcommittee is partnering with the ALCTS PARS Audio Metadata Task Force to create an online resource helping implementers to select appropriate metadata standards for digital audio projects. The Task Force did not have a formal meeting at Midwinter, but several representatives did meet informally to discuss the future of the group. Plans were made for a “road show” presentation and training session on metadata for digital audio that could be brought to multiple forums, including MLA, OLAC, SAA, AMIA, and state library associations. The Task Force will formally disband at the ALA Annual Meeting in June 2011.

Other ALA Midwinter 2010 Sessions of Interest to MLA Members in the Area of Metadata

The Next Generation Catalog Interest Group meeting featured a presentation from David Lindahl of the University of Rochester on the eXtensible Catalog project. XC is likely known to those interested in music metadata, as it has been presented in a wide variety of forums. The focus of the presentation at the ALA Midwinter meeting 2011 was on the public user interface to the XC system, a set of “data-driven web applications with web forms” that rely on FRBRized structured metadata to perform. The user interface is based on the Drupal content management system, and site administrators can customize the display to a significant extent. Examples of features local implementers have control over are browse indexes (including the ability to combine multiple fields in the underlying data into a single browse) and facet design and display. The presentation also described briefly the XC metadata toolkit, which can map and normalize data from multiple sources into the XC system. The toolkit may in the future include a Linked Data service, exposing XC metadata to the Semantic Web as Linked Open Data. The XC project team believes their platform addresses some key issues facing library metadata: the existence of data silos, metadata quality, diverse metadata formats, and data usability.

An additional list of sessions from ALA Midwinter 2011 of interest to metadata specialists may be found at <http://www.alcts.ala.org/metadatablog/2010/12/ala-midwinter-2011-best-bets-for-metadata-librarians-and-call-for-bloggers/>.