The highlights of the past week are around publishing — first with a model proposed by Eric Hellman in which consumers can pool enough money to pay publishers to “set a book free” under a Creative Commons license, then with an announcement by the University of Pittsburgh offering free hosting of open access e-journals. Since we have to be able to describe and find this content, their bibliographic descriptions are important; John Wilkin proposes a model for open access to elements of bibliographic descriptions. Rounding out this week’s topics are a report of a master’s degree program in business using Facebook, and tips for planning an unconference meeting.
Tag Archives: Karen Coyle
Defining Metadata and Making Metadata Accessible
In preparation for the last webinar of the three-part series “Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future“, I’m reading again Karen Coyle‘s “Library Data in a Modern Context” — the first chapter of Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata. Right at the start she has a clear and useful definition of this thing we call “metadata.”
MARC isn’t Dead, but it is a Dead End
This week I sat in on the first of the three “Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future” webinars being hosted by ALA. This one was hosted by Karen Coyle with the title New Models of Metadata where she talked about library-specific efforts such asRDA and FRBR as well as the linked data effort in the wider world of information. There was a great deal of concern expressed in the chat window by participants about the future of cataloging, of cataloguers, and of MARC. The latter brought up memories of Roy Tennant‘s “MARC Must Die” declaration. My take away, though, isn’t that MARC is dead as much as MARC is a dead end.