[Metadatalibrarians] Draft of MIG Minutes from ALA Midwinter 2011

[Aycock, Mary]

Apologies for cross-posting:

Attached and below is a draft of the minutes from the ALA Midwinter 2011 Meeting.

ALCTS Metadata Interest Group Midwinter Minutes
ALA Midwinter 2010
8-10am, Sunday, January 8, 2011
San Diego, California

Present: Jennifer O'Brien Roper (Chair, 2010-2011), Michael Dulock (Chair-Elect, 2010 - 2011), Mary Aycock (Secretary, 2010 - 2011), Rhonda J. Marker (Program Co-Chair, 2009 - 2010), Amanda Harlan (Program Co-Chair, 2010 - 2011), Nathan B. Putnam (CC: DA Liaison, 2010 - 2012), Susan Cheney (LITA Representative, 2010 - 2012), Jenn Riley (Music Library Association Rep, 2010-2012), Kevin Clair (Publications Co-Chair, 2010-2011), Kristin E. Martin (Blog Coordinator, 2008 - 2012)

Total attendees for presentations: 47 people (A few also stayed for the business meeting.)

Two speakers presented, summarized below. Detailed information on these presentations can be found in the MIG blog at: http://www.alcts.ala.org/metadatablog/2011/01/metadata-interest-group-at-ala-midwinter-2011-2/

Corey Harper metadata librarian of New York University presented on "Linked Library Data: 2010-2011 Update." These updates include new developments since ALA Annual 2010 such as:

 *   More national libraries are publishing data.
    *   The German National Library has authority data linking to Wikipedia, DBpedia, and VIAF.
    *   The Hungarian National Library is publishing bibliographic and authority data using Dublin Core, FOAF, and SKOS.
    *   The British National Library provides its data as an RDF download.
 *   There has been growth in the use of linked data, illustrated by a cloud graphic published by the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network.
 *   DBpedia is a site that is increasingly being linked to.
 *   Best practices for libraries and linked data are still in development. There is real value in library data-rich stores of metadata combined with robust, controlled vocabularies.
 *   There is a W3C LLD XG (Library Linked data) incubator group composed of researchers, new graduates, and librarians. The group has begun collecting, curating and clustering over 50 use cases. They will issue a report Summer 2011.
 *   Developments in RDA include the registration of RDA elements, roles, and vocabularies as well as IFLA FRBR and ISBD elements and vocabularies. Discussion is underway of who will maintain the RDA and vocabularies registry.
 *   Linkypedia is not linked data, but illustrates some of the crucial concepts of linked data. This is an alpha project developed by Ed Summers at LC which harvests all the links used in supporting reference in Wikipedia entries. Lots of these citations point back to libraries and museum information.
 *   Many RDF vocabularies for books have not been designed by libraries, such as Zotero, Omeka, Eprints.

Oliver Pesche of EBSCO Information Services spoke on "Institutional Identifiers: NISO I2 Working Group."

The I2 working group was established by NISO in 2008. It is composed of members from all sectors of the information supply chain and chaired by Grace Agnew (Rutgers) and Oliver Pesch (EBSCO). Their charge is to develop a robust, scalable, interoperable standard that would uniquely identify institutions and describe relationships between them. Information on the I2 Working Group can be found on NISO's website: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/i2


Some of the requirements of this standard should be:

*         lightweight to manage

*         re-usable by business sector registries

*         interoperable with legacy applications

Why develop this I2 standard?  An institution is a critical entity in any information model. It often establishes the provenance of digital information. It also has to be global and unambiguous as well as interoperable and unique. It must be able to integrate with existing workflows. It should also support smooth and seamless access to information.

The Group is working under the idea of a central registry, which would

*         assign identifiers to new institution records.

*         store core metadata about those institutions

*         provide lookup services

Thus, a registration agency would be needed that would manage information, including addresses and consortia/IP addresses.

Some draft metadata elements for the I2 standard include:

*         institution identifier

*         name

*         variant name

*         location

*         URL

*         affiliated institution

*         contact information

To prevent duplication of effort, the group looked at a few existing identifiers, including MARC codes, OCLC symbols and the SAN (Standard Address Number). However, they started focusing on exploring collaboration with ISNI: International Standard Name Identifiers. This scope of this identifier is public identification of any entity involved in creation, production, management and content distribution change. It is an actual identifier-a sixteen digit number. ISNI is investigating the possibility of including the identifier in the VIAF authority files.

Business meeting

Program Planning Update (Amanda Harlan and Rhonda Marker)
Amanda reported that they are working on a program for audio metadata and waiting to hear back from one speaker. Mike Casey will give an update on the Audio Engineering Society SC-03-06 Working Group on Digital Library and  Archive Systems. They are looking for a third presenter who can provide practical experience of using the AES draft standard AES-X098B, Audio object structures for preservation and restoration.

Other discussion then focused on the second proposed presentation about metadata creation tools: Rhonda reported that unfortunately, none of the suggestions have panned out. Libraries often invest resources to build these tools but they don't seem sustainable or widely available as open source. There's a market out there for these but very few providers. Discussion centered on whether it would be useful to look at any lessons learned about these.

For the Sunday morning program, various ideas were brainstormed, including:

*         To have tables discussing these metadata tools and have facilitator at each table.

*         Something along an "ask the expert" Q&A session.

Blog Update (Kristin Martin)
Kristin reported that ALA moved the blog and it works well-it has a cleaner update and there is not as much incoming spam.

Efforts to make the blog an active one by encouraging more activity throughout the year did not yield many postings. Perhaps the blog is just a twice a year blog, becoming active before committees? Amanda mention that the Texas Digital Library Metadata Group tries to blog every week, so maybe links to those posts could be posted to the MIG blog. Appreciation was also expressed about Kristin's postings of Best Bets for Metadata Librarians.

Publications Update (Shawn Averkamp and Kevin Clair)
Shawn talked about a few things they have been working on:

*         What does our presence look like on ALA Connect? We want to make sure that all the information the people want to know about our group is on the ALA website and Connect.

*         What else besides programming should be on our site? Links to resources and/or tools relevant to what metadata librarians are working with.

CC:DA Update (Nathan Putnam)
It was a fairly short agenda and they only met yesterday: there was no Monday morning meeting. LC is waiting for the RDA decision.
RDA programming task force will hold two forums at Annual.


LITA Update (Susan Cheney)
Susan reported on upcoming programs at Midwinter that might be of interest to attendees.

Music Library Association Update (Jenn Riley)

*         There is currently a task force from MLA working with LC on form theasauri. One of the problems encountered with music is that both forms and instruments are used in subject headings and genres.  There is talk about creating an instrumentation vocabulary and the need to adjust MARC.

*         MLA is also involved in description of creation of rare materials for music that has been out over a year in draft form.

*         The Metadata Subcommittee in MLA is thinking of working with partnerships with digital preservation groups at ALA.

*         The MLA Annual meeting will be in Philadelphia from February 9-12th.

Meeting adjourned.

Respectfully submitted by Mary Aycock


Mary Aycock (MIG Secretary, 2011)
Digital Resources Cataloger
University of Missouri-Columbia
Columbia, MO 65201
(573) 884-8757
aycockm at missouri.edu<mailto:aycockm at missouri.edu>