Here are five more things that may prove interesting conversation generators:
PBCore is a metadata standard for use with audio visual materials brought to us by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Based on Dublin Core with element sets expanded for improved description of broadcast specific fields, PBCore can be empoyed for digital asset management for any media collection large or small.
What I like most about this standard and the website overal is that it clearly explains how to adapt existing systems to incorporate PBCore to promote greater consistency and allow interoperability and sharing as well as how to go whole hog in creating a system entirely based on PBCore. It all depends on how much metadata is appropriate for your particular application.
PBCore is free for use (Creative Commons license model) and the primary focus is on helping media managers create metadata to improve findability, encourage ease of reuse, and sharing. This standard is simple to use even with a basic Excel spreadsheet and can be used with databases like Filemaker. Many DAM systems can be mapped to the PBCore elements too.
An article in the Daily Pilot explains that the upscale community of Newport Beach is considering closing one of its branches to save money and "to create a place where people want to come and be."
Here's my favorite line:
"By eliminating books and librarians at the building, they hope to adapt to modern times and save money while providing residents services they'll actually use."
Now, I agree that library service of the future will focus much more on content delivery than on actual books, however, don't we still need trained librarians to do the work associated with curating, selecting, purchasing, managing and organizing that content.
Newport Beach would like to save money by eliminating trained reference librarians. The plan is instead to turn part of the Marina Park Community Center into an "electronic library." Simply putting in some terminals with Internet connections and access to some content does not a library make. Thoughts?
Did you know that my favorite Duke University Archives has some of Elizabeth Taylor's print ads in their collection. Take a look at these fantastic shots of the legendary actress.
Here are five LIS topics to amaze and delight your fellow library and information pals.
Happy Thursday!
Are you familiar with DITA? No, not that glamorous pin-up that used to date Marilyn Manson, rather Darwin Information Typing Architecture? Well, The Content Wrangler blog features an article by Paul Wlodarczyk about employing DITA, essentially an XML-based architecture , in conjunction with our old friends metadata and taxonomy, to generally improve findability for content and objects.
This article and all links make a somewhat complex and murky subject seem accessible, examining many specific examples of how DITA could be used and where organizations sometimes fall short (probably because they do not fully understand the power of DITA).
It is eye opening to find out how underutilized the DITA structure can be even when used in enterprise endeavors. Considering that DITA "provides a relatively rich and extensible framework for embedding metadata directly within the XML objects themselves,"the possibilities for improving search and in dynamic publishing and workflow automation should provide suitable enticement.
This article wraps up with a nice succinct list of best practices. I feel like I learned something!
Have you ever seen this clever IMDB to MARC converter? Simply type in the IMDB movie number or title and a MARC record is generated. This is particularly useful for cataloging a DVD collection in a public library, but it inspired me to think about how often times the information we seek already exists. This tool merely reformats the metadata already populating the IMDB record and translates it to MARC.
Think about the possibilities for automatically populating metadata fields in a digital asset management system or in creating a customized database. What other websites might contain hidden gems? Wikipedia, Amazon, Getty Images...
Here are 5 things:
The LibraryThing blog featured a good discussion on Library of Congress Authorities and permalinks recently. Here's the most salient point:
"The core of authority control is a stable identifier, in this case the LCCN, but the LC Authorities catalog can neither be searched by nor linked to by that identifier."
Although this issue was solved for the Subject authorities via the Authorities and Vocabularies site, the name authorities were not included. LibraryAuthoritiesThing is a temporary solve for this allowing the inclusion of a permalink via this tool developed by LibraryThing.
This post also mentioned VIAF, the Virtual International Authority File, an OCLC project aggregating library authority files from around the world. However, these authorities will be copyrighted leading me to a question I often have about commercial taxonomies as well - really, you are copywriting words?
Although I have been writing this blog for some time and doing a lot of professional writing, I am tickled pink to have my very first article in print in the Washington Library Association's Alki journal.
Since this article really is in print, I scanned it and linked a PDF to my website here:
Washington Libraries Reveal Social Media Secrets
The article itself explores the social media strategies and techniques at several large Washington library systems - The Seattle Public Library, King County Library System and the University of Washington Libraries.
Here is an excerpt to peak your interest. Many thanks to Meredith Farkas' amazing class for inspiring the article!
"Have you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall at another library to see how they manage social media outreach? This article goes behind the scenes at several large Washington library systems to uncover challenges, triumphs and tricks of the trade regarding blogs, tweets, and social networks..."
Here are five LIS topics plus one bonus topic to inspire discourse.
BONUS: Would you like to plan ahead for a zombie attack?
Are you interested in metadata for music? Become part of the process by participating in a survey to help inform the creation of a Music Metadata Clearinghouse, a project spearheaded by the Music Library Association (MLA) Bibliographic Control Committee's (BCC) Metadata Subcommittee.
"With this survey we seek to better understand current practices related to the creation and maintenance of music metadata so that we might match information in the Clearinghouse to the most well-defined and strategic needs of the community."
The deadline is March 30th.
Want a quicker music metadata fix? Check out MusicBrainz.
I've recently been thinking a lot about BISAC. BISAC is basically the standard for book retailers, organizing the vast world of the written word into consumer digestible categories. Libraries have adopted it as well, most notably my favorite Anythink Libraries in Colorado.
Here's a great blog post on the project by Vivienne Houghton. Essentially, Anythink used BISAC as the basis for their own word based classification system to replace Dewey, called Wordthink.
I recently began managing a group of unique libraries geared more towards vacationing guests than academic scholarly types. I am developing a category system for these libraries based on a condensed version of BISAC.
What are the advantages for users? Intuitive findability and browsability. Really, it is pretty cool!
Here are some very special LIS things to spark conjecture this weekend:
