lovingly crafting a mountain, not by hand: managing piles of metadata
TRANSCRIPT
Lovingly crafting a mountain, not by hand: managing piles of
metadata
Galen Charlton
2014 BCLA Conference
"View of Mountains in Denali National Park" by Arthur Chapman (CC-SA)https://flic.kr/p/6Z1RY1
“Blue Sky” by Dennis Wong (CC-SA) https://flic.kr/p/4KKaCR
Mountains build themselves
• Billions and billions served
• 2,000,000,000 in OCLC WorldCat as of 4 May 2013
Thousands and thousands served
• The local catalog doesn’t go away
• Depends on how you define “local”
Economics
• Catalogers and metadata librarians don’t grow on trees
• Neither does the money to pay them
• Standards froth is not appealing
• Content creators do grow on trees… in the jungle… in a rainstorm
Where does this put us…
Weeds sprayed in horse pasture by eXtensionHorses CC-BY-SA
https://flic.kr/p/a1e8Ug
Back to the future
• One record at a time isn’t the answer
• “[I]deally, catalogers shouldn't be creators of bibliographic records, but be builders of catalogs – John J. Vosmek on AUTOCAT (http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.education.libraries.autocat/32733)
Approaches
• Throw up our hands
• Hire an army of metadata librarians AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD!
• Google will save us
– Er, no
• Improving our silos
• Building the silo to contain all silos
Discovery
• A little metadata is almost always better than none at all.
• Where’s Waldo?
• More metadata is better, up to a point
• Itarasion
– Itaration
• Iteration
Tool-building
• Tools for the whole catalog
• Borrowing ideas
Programmers’ tools
• Laziness
• Version control
– Easy come, easy go
• Efficient sharing of changes
– Linked Data
• Distribution
DBAs’ tools
• Mass changes
• Storing all the history
• Reports and statistics
Bean-counters’ tools
• What is the bottom line?
– The users
• Ye olde value proposition
– … doesn’t lie in any particular record
The traditional catalogers’ tools
• There’s still a lot to be said for “get it right the first time”
• But it’s time for “don’t get it wrong the first time”
• Consistency
Tools available now
• MARC::Lint
• XC Metadata Services Toolkit
• Traditional record cleanup services
– But efficient for the whole community?
Tools to build or expand on
• Better expression of changes
• Better communication of changes
• Metadata analysis services
• Better viewers
• Even better “record” editors
– Particularly ones that reach out by default
Challenges
• Iteration can look suspiciously like gold-plating
• Iteration of schemata can look suspiciously like bikeshedding
• The real world is, annoyingly, messy
Vocabulary
• Iteration
• Laziness
• Version control
• Distribution
• It takes a village to raise a mountain.
