

Metadata Matters

Metadata Matters
It's all about the services
	It’s not just me that’s getting old
Having just celebrated (?) another birthday at the tail end of 2015, the topics of age and change have been even more on my mind than usual. And then two events converged. First I had a chat with Ted Fons in a hallway at Midwinter, and he asked about using an older article I’d published [&#8230;]
	Denying the Non-English Speaking World
Not long ago I encountered the analysis of BibFrame published by Rob Sanderson with contributions by a group of well-known librarians. It’s a pretty impressive document&#8211;well organized and clearly referenced. But in fact there’s also a significant amount of personal opinion in it, the nature of which is somewhat masked by the references to others [&#8230;]
	Review of: DRAFT Principles for Evaluating Metadata Standards
Metadata standards is a huge topic and evaluation a difficult task, one I’ve been involved in for quite a while. So I was pretty excited when I saw the link for &#8220;DRAFT Principles for Evaluating Metadata Standards&#8221;, but after reading it? Not so much. If we’re talking about “principles” in the sense of ‘stating-the-obvious-as-a-first-step’, well, [&#8230;]
	The Jane-athons continue!
The Jane-athon series is alive, well, and expanding its original vision. I wrote about the first ‘official’ Jane-athon earlier this year, after the first event at Midwinter 2015. Since then the excitement generated at the first one has spawned others: the Ag-athon in the UK in May 2015, sponsored by CILIP the Maurice Dance in [&#8230;]
	Separating ideology, politics and utility
Those of you who pay attention to politics (no matter where you are) are very likely to be shaking your head over candidates, results or policy. It’s a never ending source of frustration and/or entertainment here in the U.S., and I’ve noticed that the commentators seem to be focusing in on issues of ideology and [&#8230;]
	Semantic Versioning and Vocabularies
A decade ago, when the Open Metadata Registry (OMR) was just being developed as the NSDL Registry, the vocabulary world was a very different place than it is today. At that point we were tightly focussed on SKOS (not fully cooked at that point, but Jon was on the WG that was developing it, so [&#8230;]
	Five Star Vocabulary Use
Most of us in the library and cultural heritage communities interested in metadata are well aware of Tim Berners-Lee’s five star ratings for linked open data (in fact, some of us actually have the mug). The five star rating for LOD, intended to encourage us to follow five basic rules for linked data is useful, [&#8230;]
	What do we mean when we talk about ‘meaning’?
Over the past weekend I participated in a Twitter conversation on the topic of meaning, data, transformation and packaging. The conversation is too long to repost here, but looking from July 11-12 for @metadata_maven should pick most of it up. Aside from my usual frustration at the message limitations in Twitter, there seemed to be [&#8230;]
	Fresh From ALA, What’s New?
In the old days, when I was on MARBI as liaison for AALL, I used to write a fairly detailed report, and after that wrote it up for my Cornell colleagues. The gist of those reports was to describe what happened, and if there might be implications to consider from the decisions. I don’t propose [&#8230;]
	What’s up with this Jane-athon stuff?
The RDA Development Team started talking about developing training for the ‘new’ RDA, with a focus on the vocabularies, in the fall of 2014. We had some notion of what we didn’t want to do: we didn’t want yet another ‘sage on the stage’ event, we wanted to re-purpose the ‘hackathon’ model from a software [&#8230;]