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Tag Archives: description

XML Tower of Structural Metadata


Jerome McDonough of the Graduate School of Library & Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign presented a paper this summer at the Balisage conference with the title Structural Metadata and the Social Limitation of Interoperability: A Sociotechnical View of XML and Digital Library Standards Development.1 The title is very hard to penetrate, but the contents of the paper lay bare a theory for why we don’t have large, swirling pools of shared digital objects that cross institutional silo boundaries.

This is a preview of XML Tower of Structural Metadata. Read the full post (588 words, estimated 2:21 mins reading time)
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2008 10 02 Comments (1)

Thumbgrabber: a metadata augmentation tool


Blogging on Peer Review ResearchIn reading a background paper for the American Social History Online portal, I was reacquainted with a paper by Muriel Foulonneau, Thomas Habing and Tim Cole from UIUC called “Automated Capture of Thumbnails and Thumbshots for Use by Metadata Aggregation Services.”1 This is the abstract:

The practice of including thumbnails in short record displays, increasingly common in local implementations, is being adopted by metadata aggregation service providers as well. In addition, thumbnails and Web thumbshots have begun appearing as part of Web search results. This article reports on a project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to make more comprehensible heterogeneous resources available on the UIUC CIC metadata portal by incorporating thumbnails and thumbshots of image and Webpage resources in the context of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. In addition to thumbnails provided by partner data providers, UIUC has developed an automated process to generate thumbnails and thumbshots from the Webpages resources pointed to by the metadata records.

This is a preview of Thumbgrabber: a metadata augmentation tool. Read the full post (314 words, 1 image, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)
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2008 04 29 Comments (0)

Would the Real “Dublin Core” Please Stand Up?


I’ve been following the discussion by Stu Weibel on his blog about the relationship between Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Dublin Core Abstract Model (DCAM), and I think I’m as confused as ever. It comes as a two part posting with comments by Andy Powell Pete Johnston (apologies, Pete), Mikael Nilsson, Jonathan Rochkind, and Ed Summers. Jonathan’s and Ed’s comments describe the same knowledge black hole that I’ve been facing as well; in Ed’s words: “The vocabulary I get–the DCAM is a tougher nut for me to crack.”

This is a preview of Would the Real “Dublin Core” Please Stand Up?. Read the full post (1215 words, estimated 4:52 mins reading time)
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2008 02 18 Comments (9)

Getting On With ‘The Future of Descriptive Enrichment’


Roy Tennant is advocating the phrase “Descriptive Enrichment” over “Bibliographic Control” in response to draft report from the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, and I’m stepping up to say — I’m right there with you, Roy!1 Your analysis reminds me of statements made by David Weinberger in the Google Tech Talk in response to his book Everything is Miscellaneous. David offers new definitions to words that we use regularly: “metadata” is what we know and “data” is what we want to find out. In the talk, he gave an example (29 minutes and 25 seconds into the playback; this link will take you right there) of using something you know — like a quote from a book — to find something you don’t know — like the author — by putting the quote into a search engine. The “metadata” (the quote) was used to find the “data” (the author) that was being sought.

This is a preview of Getting On With ‘The Future of Descriptive Enrichment’. Read the full post (819 words, 1 image, estimated 3:17 mins reading time)
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2007 12 13 Comments (1)

Open Library Demonstration Screencast


Earlier this week, Aaron Swartz of the Internet Archive announced the demonstration website of the Open Library project, a new kind of book catalog that brings together traditional publisher and library bibliographic data in an interface with the user-contributed paradigm of Wikipedia. Okay, I’ll pause for a moment while you parse that last sentence. Think you got it? Read — and watch — further.

This is a preview of Open Library Demonstration Screencast. Read the full post (1994 words, estimated 7:59 mins reading time)
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2007 07 20 Comments (11)

Article-Level OAI-PMH Harvest Available from DOAJ


Earlier this year the DOAJ began offering a new schema for registered articles that significantly improves the value of OAI-PMH harvested article content. Prior to this addition the only scheme available was Dublin Core, which as a metadata schema for describing article content is woefully inadequate. (Dublin Core, of course, was never designed to handle the complexity of the description of an average article.) The new schema (graphically represented here
doajArticles schema image — select thumbnail to see a larger version) includes elements for ISSN/eISSN, volume/issue, start/end page numbers, and author affiliation. There is also a <fullTextUrl> element that is a link to the article content itself (not the splash page of the article on the publisher’s site).

This is a preview of Article-Level OAI-PMH Harvest Available from DOAJ. Read the full post (211 words, 1 image, estimated 51 secs reading time)
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2007 07 11 Comments (8)

Resources for Describing Visual Materials


A recent thread on describing visual materials from the IMAGELIB mailing list sparked the descovery of these resources.

First was this bibliography of thesauri-related materials by Leonard Will of Willpower Information, an information management consultant in the U.K. It looks like a really good synopsis, and will be useful when adding controlled vocabularies to the DRC through MetaBuddy and other tools.

Publications on thesaurus construction and use

- including some references to facet analysis, taxonomies, ontologies, topic maps and related issues

This is a list of printed and electronic publications about the principles of constructing and using information retrieval thesauri. It is not a list of existing thesauri, although some thesauri have been included when they are good examples or illustrate the results of different approaches to thesaurus construction.

This is a preview of Resources for Describing Visual Materials. Read the full post (280 words, estimated 1:07 mins reading time)
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2006 04 06 Comments (1)
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Sunday the 16th of November 2008 at 5:39:42 AM EST (-0500). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/tag/description/

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