Tag Archives: metadata

Metadata Work Party Report, By Carol A. Kelly

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Editor’s note: members of Digital Commonwealth’s Outreach Committee organized a metadata work party for Digital Commonwealth members.  Digital Commonwealth would like to thank

  1. the Jacob Edwards Library, Southbridge, Mass., for hosting the event
  2. the staff from the Boston Public Library (Digital Commonwealth’s technology partner) for providing excellent metadata instruction in a friendly manner
  3. the participants, including Carol Kelly, who kindly offered to summarize the event in this blog post.

Additional metadata work parties will be scheduled in the future. Please email nheywood@masshist.org for more information.

If the term “metadata work party” doesn’t excite you then you’d want to skip this workshop.  But if you’re like me and already elbow-deep in digitization, sort of learning new skills as you go and hoping you’re getting it right – this was the place for you.  We understood that the Digital Commonwealth folks were piloting this program with us and planning on offering more of this sort of thing so it’s worth a short critique….it was great.  Does that seem a little too non-evaluative?  Let me add details.

The introduction helped me get a clearer grasp of what the Digital Commonwealth (DC) is doing and how they’ll harvest the metadata we develop in our individual projects. I was especially interested in understanding that the DC can host the metadata for a collection that our home libraries may keep on their server or host the actual collection. We also were reminded that the DC will assist in digitization but that we need to provide the metadata.  Then they got right to the very complete set of links they’d organized for us.

If you’re a librarian, you’ll be familiar with the concept of  “authority” files.  If not, the concept is simple – an authority file lets

Metadata mob
Metadata mobsters

you standardize how you refer to people/places/things so they can be sorted and organized easily.  The workshop offered us links to authority files on, among other things, geographic names, images and the lovely MODS file from the Library of Congress.( Go and look at it http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/)  So rule one in developing metadata – use the authority files!  These links alone were worth the drive to Southbridge.

Then we moved right to the “work” part of the meeting.  Tom Blake, Digital Projects Manager, and Danny Pucci, Lead Digital Projects Librarian, had brought additional BPL staff along, laughingly named the metadata mob.*  As we began creating the metadata for the images we’d brought with us, each group got one of these highly skilled people to sit with us, looking over our shoulders, answering all our particular questions and guiding us to figure out how to bounce between the authority files and the form from the Digital Commonwealth.  There’s nothing like doing something with an expert to coach.  I think we all felt we got it and can easily move from this little workshop to creating good metadata files that will easily translate to the Digital Commonwealth website and provide access to everyone. As I said before – it was a great workshop.

 

By Carol A. Kelly, Member of the Board of the Friends, Sawyer Free Library, Gloucester

 

*Monica Shin, Nichole Shea, and Sarah Hayes

Metadata Creation is a GAAS!

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The following is  a guest post by Amy Benson, who has been working the past year under the auspices of the Boston Public Library to review Digital Commonwealth member metadata issues.

My recent collaboration with the BPL, to prepare metadata from a number of libraries for the Digital Commonwealth Repository, has been a pleasure and a great learning experience. That’s one reason for the title of this post. The other is that each of the letters represents a basic principle to keep in mind when it’s your turn to create new, or enhance existing metadata.

G for Granularity: The discovery is in the details. Use existing local expertise to record place names, people’s names, landmarks, and other specifics. Transcribe text from signs, labels, posters, etc. In short, describe items at the smallest useful level that your resources allow.

A for Automation: Use available tools to facilitate your work. If existing metadata is in a printed document, consider scanning and using OCR to capture the text electronically. If you have data in one system, explore options with a vendor or IT person for exporting and repurposing it.

A for Authority: Follow metadata standards appropriate to the materials you are describing, such as RDA, LCSH, Getty vocabularies, or Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials.

S for Structure: The more structured your data is, the more useful it can be. Splitting first and last names and using start and end dates instead of a date range will yield more powerful search and delivery options. It is much easier to combine data that’s been separated than it is to separate blocks of text. Structure your data by putting each element in a separate spreadsheet cell, by using special punctuation in a text file, or with XML tags.

Following these basic principles when creating metadata is more important than focusing on one metadata schema or tool. Systems come and go, but data endures. Descriptive information written in library hand a hundred+ years ago has been transcribed and enhanced and is helping users locate resources in our online databases today. With the right transformations, the same metadata you create for a local system can be made available in Flickr, the Digital Commonwealth, or the Internet Archive – from pencil and paper to MARC, MODS, JSON, and beyond.

Get more mileage out of the GAAS in your tank and boost the usefulness, flexibility, and longevity of your metadata. Go for Granularity, adopt Automation, respect Authority, set up a solid Structure, and above all, be consistent and enjoy yourself. You are creating a lasting resource to make cultural heritage materials more available and useful to all.

Amy Benson
Librarian/Archivist for Digital Initiatives
Schlesinger Library
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Harvard University

The Accidental Metadatalyst, by Cara Marcus

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This is a guest post presented by Cara Marcus, Director of Library Services, Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital

The Accidental Metadatalyst

When the Boston Public Library announced their grant to digitize local collections and preserve them in the Digital Commonwealth, it seemed like a great opportunity for my small library to create our digital archives. I had worked with teams from BPL on a number of other projects and workgroups, and looked forward to collaborating with their staff on this exciting project. Boston Public Library had state-of-the-art equipment and a whole team of experts, who would work with me every step of the way to provide guidance and counsel.

Joining the Digital Commonwealth was the easy part, but when Thomas Blake, Chrissy Rissmeyer, Danny Pucci, Bahadir Kavlakli, and Jake Sadow first visited my library in 2011 and told me I would be creating metadata, I wondered what I was getting into! While I had catalogued, indexed, abstracted, and classified for decades, I had never actually created metadata. No worries, they told me – I would be given a step-by-step template that would guide me in the process.

The template arrived in easy-to-understand MS Excel, with recommendations and notes for genres, extents and formats. Soon I was delving into a world of tools and standards like the Graphic Materials: Rules for Describing Original Items and Historical Collections and the Library of Congress Name Authority File. While the process took a great deal of time (about a year to create metadata for about 300 materials), the BPL Digital Commonwealth Team was with me every step of the way, answering my questions by phone, email and in person.

I found that completing the metadata was fun, exciting, challenging, and opened up a whole new world. And there were some things I just couldn’t verify, such as photographers from 1917. While most of my genres were photographic prints or book illustrations, I did have some others, such as oil paintings, certificates and architectural drawings, where I had to hunt for the correct metadata in databases.

After I finished and sent in the completed spreadsheet, I received an edited spreadsheet and detailed five page report from Danny, Nicole Shea, Amy Benson and Sarah Emily, where everything was mapped to unique identifiers for each book or image. Their expert advice and recommendations helped me to complete the metadata for over 8,000 fields and prepare the records for the “final send-off”. One of the highlights of the project was bringing the last three books to BPL and getting a guided tour of their impressive digitization lab, cameras and equipment.

Now as I eagerly await my collection to be posted on the Digital Commonwealth, I am already being contacted by researchers who have discovered books the BPL team had posted to the Internet Archives from the Faulkner Hospital Collection. Since these materials were posted in the fall of 2012, they have been downloaded almost 1,500 times. So, accidental metadatalyst or not, the collection has proved discoverable, thanks to the Boston Public Library Digital Commonwealth Team.