Tag Archives: metadata

NELLCO’s Universal Search Solution Project

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Boundaries are being blurred between the academic and commercial Web, between library resources, between the citation and the item itself. Students have no patience with these arbitrary boundaries; they want information, and they want it now, wherever it may be located.1

Earlier this year, the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO) announced that they had received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to build a “Universal Search Solution” — a ‘one-box’ search into a unified index of a range of electronic resources. Indexed databases include OPACs, subscription-based resources, and selected free web resources. It is a two year grant to build and implement the tool for NELLCO members and release the code into open source. Index Data will be contracted to build the tool.

This is a preview of NELLCO’s Universal Search Solution Project. Read the full post (816 words, 3:16 minutes estimated reading time)

OAI-ORE Open Meeting, March 3 2008, Johns Hopkins University

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Here is the press release describing the event:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Open Archives Initiative Announces Public Meeting on March 3, 2008 to Release Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications


Ithaca, NY and Los Alamos, NM, October 31, 2007 – On March 3, 2008 the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) will hold a public meeting at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD to introduce the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) specifications. The ORE specifications are developed in response to a significant challenge that has emerged in eScholarship. In contrast to the paper publications of traditional scholarship, or even their digital counterparts, the artifacts of eScholarship are complex aggregations. These aggregations consist of multiple resources with varying media types, semantics types, network locations, and intra- and inter-relationships. The future scholarly communication, research, and higher education infrastructure requires standardized approaches to identify, describe, and exchange these new outputs of scholarship.

This is a preview of OAI-ORE Open Meeting, March 3 2008, Johns Hopkins University. Read the full post (551 words, 1 image, 2:12 minutes estimated reading time)

Solr-ized MARC Record Catalog

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Rob Casson of Miami University announced this weekend the beta availability of their video catalog. In a subsequent posting, Rob describes the user interface elements. Rob and the crew at Miami are seeking feedback on the interface, so if you have some be sure to offer it to them.

A couple of notes on the mechanisms Rob is using. Apache Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library (also an Apache project). You can think of Lucene as the raw indexing and search engine with Solr layered on top to provide a non-Java interface to a rich feature set. What Miami has done is extract all of the bibliographic and related item records out of their Innovative Interface system, written programs to transform that data into XML, indexed it with Solr/Lucene and created a search interface.

This is a preview of Solr-ized MARC Record Catalog. Read the full post (471 words, 2 images, 1:53 minutes estimated reading time)

A Report on Namespaces Used by OAI-PMH Repositories

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I had a need for a survey of the metadata namespaces used by OAI-PMH repositories, so I wrote up a quick shell script and XSLT style sheet to parse through the list of Registered Data Providers at the OpenArchives.org website. The results of this effort are pretty interesting. Some of them:

This is a preview of A Report on Namespaces Used by OAI-PMH Repositories. Read the full post (407 words, 1:38 minutes estimated reading time)

Presentation Summary: “Cross-Repository Semantic Interoperability: the MIT SIMILE Project”

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Richard Rodgers presented this talk based on the work of he and MacKenzie Smith in the Digital Library Research Group at MIT. The original abstract of the presentation was:

Many questions are raised as previously unreachable digital content is found in and among new repositories–is each repository an island or a separately searchable resource? SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in Unlike Environments) has developed an extensive ‘tool chain’ for gathering and manipulating data assets. Richard Rodgers and MacKenzie Smith, MIT, will demonstrate how tools developed by the SIMILE project can be used as powerful instruments for the federation, discovery, exploration, and curation of metadata.

This is a preview of Presentation Summary: “Cross-Repository Semantic Interoperability: the MIT SIMILE Project”. Read the full post (521 words, 2:05 minutes estimated reading time)

Best Practice Proposal for a DESCRIPTION Datastream

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OhioLINK is deep in the process of migrating content from our old Bulldog/Documentum-based system to, well, something else, and we’ve been talking about the treatment of the metadata in the course of the migration. I think it is safe to say that the Bulldog asset management system (and Documentum, which bought and integrated Bulldog into its product line about five years ago) is not really known for its rich handling of metadata. Or at least how the library community thinks of metadata: Dublin Core, MIX, MODS, MARC, VRA Core, PREMIS, FGCD, etc. — all at the same time in the same application engine with structured crosswalks between them. 1 I think it is also safe to say that pure, unqualified Dublin Core, the only datastream that is required for every FEDORA object, does not completely encompass the descriptive fidelity needed for our objects. These observations, combined with reading a mid-term project report from the RepoMMan effort in the U.K., got me thinking about metadata and how we should store it in FEDORA objects. The outcome of that line of thinking is this proposal: “to establish a practice of creating an in-line XML datastream with the label ‘DESCRIPTION’ that contains the primary descriptive metadata for each object.”

This is a preview of Best Practice Proposal for a DESCRIPTION Datastream. Read the full post (754 words, 3:01 minutes estimated reading time)

Can Google be Out-Googled?

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I have been heard to remark to other librarians on occasion a comment along the lines of “Don’t fear Google; Don’t Chase Google; Let’s Out-Google Google!” After allowing the confused stare linger for a moment or the hysterical laughter die down, I explain my thesis: we have something Google doesn’t have — no, it isn’t the selective care with which we select “authoritative” material (the PageRank algorithm does a pretty good job at that); and no, it isn’t our warehouses of books (the Google Book Search project will pretty effectively capture that) — we have faceted metadata. And lots of it.

This is a preview of Can Google be Out-Googled?. Read the full post (1417 words, 3 images, 5:40 minutes estimated reading time)

Representing Collections In FEDORA

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One of the DRC developers had a question recently that sparked a discussion about what to do with collections of objects. In order to answer the question of how to represent the notion of a collection within the repository, we’re going to have to get pretty heavy into RDF: the Resource Description Framework. RDF is a language created by the Worldwide Web Consortium “for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web.” If you already know about RDF — or just want to see what a proposed solution is — you can skip down to the “RDF for Collections in FEDORA” heading.

This is a preview of Representing Collections In FEDORA. Read the full post (881 words, 3:31 minutes estimated reading time)

Automated Faceted Analysis In Google?

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Has anyone else started seeing what looks to be faceted topical headings at the top of Google searches? This past weekend I was the groomsman at my brother’s wedding and had the unfortunate timing to catch a case of conjunctivitis in both eyes the day before the ceremony. (“Does your camera have red-eye reduction setting?” I asked the photographer. She seemed confused, so I continued: “How about pink-eye reduction?” She looked a little closer at my eyes, laughed, and said “That’s what Photoshop is for.”) Wanting to know more, I did what any self-respecting information-finder would do — I asked Google. And here’s what came up.

This is a preview of Automated Faceted Analysis In Google?. Read the full post (236 words, 2 images, 57 seconds estimated reading time)

“Identifiers Roundup” — LITA Standards Interest Group in conjunction with NISO

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This is a report of the presentations from the LITA Standards Interest Group at the ALA Annual Conference, 24-Jul-2006, in New Orleans. Pat Stevens, interim director of NISO, moderated the panel discussion.

ISSN Regina Reynolds, Library of Congress (U.S. ISSN Center)


Structure


There are 80 ISSN centers worldwide with about 150 people associated with the assigning of ISSNs.

The ISSN International Center is located in Paris. It assigns the prefixes to ISSN centers and holds a master copy of descriptive metadata — the “Key Title” plus other metadata elements in MARC format — for every assigned ISSN. It also provides documentation, a manual (about 80-100 pages in length) and support for new centers coming on board.

This is a preview of “Identifiers Roundup” — LITA Standards Interest Group in conjunction with NISO. Read the full post (1730 words, 6:55 minutes estimated reading time)