[Metadatalibrarians] What is a metadata element?

Fri May 1 14:37:28 PDT 2009

Hi Kelley, 

To follow up on Louise's concisely spot-on message, and specifically addressing your second question: metadata elements = attributes in ER modeling terms, as I understand it. A book can be considered to be an entity that has the attribute of dc:title (using DC elements as an example).  The person who authored the book can be considered an entity with the attribute of dc:creator.  The actual person is the entity, not "creator," which is an attribute applied to that entity.  The value of a dc:title attribute, for example, might be "Metadata," and the value of dc:creator might be "Marcia Zeng" or "Zeng, Marcia Lei,1956-" or it could be a URI that references a registered controlled vocabulary term for the person.    

Different metadata element sets = different collections of attributes (or properties).  These are selected and established because they are of value to a particular community or application context.  Whether or not a controlled vocabulary is applied to the form of the name is also a local or consortial decision.  In that case it is a constraint on the form allowed as the value of the attribute.  As I see it, the library cataloging community has agreed on a set of attributes (a combination of AACR2 areas and sub-areas of description + MARC tags/fields) and on a set of several value schemes, such as LCNAF, LCSH, DDC, LCC, etc.  With RDA, this will all be much more explicit. 

And this is all separate from any particular model used for deciding what types of entities are of value to a particular community or application context.  The FRBR model is one of many possible model of entities, attributes, and relationships for the bibliographic universe.  And it is obviously the one that is being used for RDA. 

My two cents; hope it helps a bit, 

Steve Miller 

------------ 
Steven J. Miller, Senior Lecturer 
School of Information Studies 
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 
PO Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201 
Phone: 414-229-6640 
Fax: 414-229-6699 
Email: mll at uwm.edu 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Louise Ratliff" <lratliff at library.ucla.edu> 
To: "A listserv for Metadata Librarians" <metadatalibrarians at lists.monarchos.com> 
Sent: Friday, May 1, 2009 3:19:38 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central 
Subject: Re: [Metadatalibrarians] What is a metadata element? 

Hi, 
  The simplest definition is a "field."  A field contains a value.  A 
MARC tag such as 245 is a field, which contains a value which is the 
title.  A Dublin Core "property" (=field =element) such as CONTRIBUTOR 
contains a value, in this case a name. 
  Does this very simple explanation help?   
Louise 

Louise Ratliff 
Social Sciences Cataloger 
UCLA Library Cataloging & Metadata Center 
Phone: (310) 206-5853 
Fax:   (310) 794-9357 

-----Original Message----- 
From: metadatalibrarians-bounces at lists.monarchos.com 
[mailto:metadatalibrarians-bounces at lists.monarchos.com] On Behalf Of 
McGrath, Kelley C. 
Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 11:26 AM 
To: 'metadatalibrarians at lists.monarchos.com' 
Subject: [Metadatalibrarians] What is a metadata element? 

What is a metadata element? This seems like kind of a stupid question, 
but I am having trouble getting my head around it for some reason so I'm 
hoping someone on this list can set me straight. 

I have poked around and found some definitions: 

Dublin Core: "properties for use in resource description" 
(http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/) 

RDA glossary: "A word, phrase, or group of characters representing a 
distinct unit of bibliographic information." (from the draft at 
http://www.rdaonline.org/constituencyreview/) 

CEN (The European Committee for Standardization) in one of their draft 
documents on cinematographic works defines an element as "A semantic 
unit that is a major property of one or more entities. An element can 
have attributes ([named property whose value domain can be restricted by 
a data type]) and can be composed of sub-elements ([semantic unit that 
is a property of an element, but not a direct property of an entity])." 

Does anyone know of any other definitions that might be helpful? 

I think my sticking points at the moment are two: 

1. Are there any constraints on the kinds of things that can be 
elements? How do you know what to make into an element (presumably 
depends on context, but are there any guidelines anywhere)? Is there a 
standard way of talking about more specific information related to an 
element (attributes, sub-attributes, sub-elements, qualifiers or 
whatever they might be called) and if so can someone point me to a place 
where this is described? 

2. How are elements related to entities, attributes and relationships 
from ER modeling? Obviously metadata elements don't have to be related 
to ER modeling, but if they are, is there a standard way of approaching 
this? Looking at the DC elements, there seem to be things that are both 
entities (creator, contributor) and attributes (title, rights). Are 
there any circumstances under which a relationship would be an element? 

Does whether or not a creator or other person is treated as an entity 
that is related to something or as an attribute depend on whether the 
name is transcribed or uncontrolled (which almost seems to be a sort of 
attribute in the context of traditional library cataloging) or is linked 
to a separate entity record through an identifier or normalized in some 
way (which seems more like a pointer to a related entity)? 

Thank you for any insight you can give me on this. 

Kelley 

-------------------------------------------- 
Kelley McGrath 
Cataloging and Metadata Services Librarian (A/V) 
Bracken Library 
Ball State University 
Muncie, IN 47306 
(765) 285-3350 
kmcgrath at bsu.edu 

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