[Metadatalibrarians] Metadatalibrarians Digest, Vol 50, Issue 9

[Greta de Groat]

metadatalibrarians-request at lists.monarchos.com wrote:
> ...
>
> I took this course http://www.amigos.org/?q=node/698 through Amigos and
> it was great.  I learned a lot that I've been able to apply directly.
> Also, lately I've been using the XSLT Cookbook 2.0 as a reference.
>
>   
Does anyone offer something similar online?  I'm also finding that the 
XSLT instructional materials and training seem to be geared towards 
other purposes and it's hard to tease out the bits that are useful for 
our purposes.  Which brings up the larger training issue.  In chatting 
with colleagues, i'm finding that that there are lots of times when 
skills like this come in handy, but it's difficult to find training 
geared towards our specific needs.  It's not like we're going to go back 
to school to learn how to be programmers at this point in our careers, 
but we do need some degree of programming skills.  Look at the job 
advertisements for metadata librarians or digital librarians.   A lot of 
us who have been working as traditional librarians feel completely shut 
out of these jobs because we don't have the specific skills asked for.  
Speaking from a cataloger's viewpoint, we're hearing folks like Karen 
Calhoun (as well as the training coming out from the Catalogers' 
Learning Workshop) that our skills will be needed to manage digital 
projects and do mapping and that sort of thing, and that we'll be 
working with programmers.  But realistically, programmers aren't always 
available.  It may be easy for a cataloger to transition to creating 
metadata records or managing others who are creating them, but we may 
also need to know how to create valid files of records, troubleshooting 
XSLT tranformations, Perl scripting, OAI protocols, mashups, MySQL, 
XQuery, SRU, and it looks like RDF is coming on fast.   And when it 
comes up, we need to know it right now.   Where can we get this kind of 
"just in time" training geared toward the specific needs we have?  The 
W3 tutorials only go so far.  And asking questions on the blogs that 
programmers frequent often gets you answers that you don't have the 
technical expertise to even understand, much less implement.
>
> I'd really like to have a "library" of XSLT scripts used by metadata
> librarians, so we can share/pool our scripts, re-use bits and pieces as
> needed, and share tips.
>
>   
I think this is a great idea.  Where could such a thing be housed?  It 
would also be nice to have a place to ask questions.  For example, the 
question i asked the other day about splitting LCSH headings.  Can i 
split a field at the dashes and separately tag each piece using XSLT? 
(ok, it's probably too much to ask to have the pieces tagged 
*correctly*, but even getting them split would be a step forward). 
>
> I'd like to second/third/fourth MarcEdit. It's a great tool. It was very
> helpful for me to be able to see the before & after of the
> transformations.
>
>   
This is a great tool, but again, if you don't have troubleshooting 
skills, you have no way of knowing why your transform failed.and what to 
do about it.  Was there a problem of some sort with the style sheet?  Do 
you have a namespace problem?  Was the source file invalid?  Was it 
invalid because it was invalid Dublin Core or MODS or whatever or 
because it was invalid XML?   I'm sure there are other problems that i 
can't even imagine.

Greta de Groat
Stanford University Libraries