Metadata is at the core of what libraries do. ("metadata" is one of the most common tags on this here library technology blog.) We gather information about the resources available to patrons, then massage it and slice it and sort it and display it in ways that help patrons find …

ResourceSync -- a joint effort of NISO and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) team with work funded by the Sloan Foundation -- has published a draft specification that I urge members of the library technology community to look at. Building on the OAI-PMH strategies for synchronizing metadata, this project is modern web …

It wasn't too long ago that the music industry was in an uproar about stories of how easy it was to copy digital audio files and make digital copies with high fidelity. It was predicted that we would see the same thing in other media forms, and this week's DLTJ …

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 …

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 …

This is definitely becoming a habit...welcome to the fourth edition of DLTJ's Thursday Threads. Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to DLTJ's Thursday Threads, visit the sign-up page. If you would like …

Did you know that Amazon offers a facility to make corrections to its catalog? Somewhere in the past few months someone mentioned this to me and I tried it out. (Unfortunately, it has been long enough now that I've forgotten who told me; if you are the one, please fess …

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. ((McDonough, J. (2008 …

Earlier this week I received an e-mail from the director of the ISSN International Center announcing a session at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim to talk about the "linking ISSN". Abbreviated ISSN-L, this is a new addition to the revised ISSN standard (ISO 3297, published last August) that allows …

This morning I got an invitation to join ResearcherID, a new author profile service from Thomson Scientific. The service sounds nice enough -- who doesn't want to take steps to avoid confusion between authors? -- and if you have access to other Thomson products (like ISI Web of Knowledge or Web of …

In 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." ((Foulonneau, M., Habing, T.G., Cole, T.W. (2006 …

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. ((Cox, Christopher. An Analysis of the Impact of Federated …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …