Four sources of metadata about things About Contact Tags Writing Presentations Career Membership *Orweblog Search Search LorcanDempsey.net Home *Classics Books Collaboration Collections Institutions Meta Research/Learning Social Systems UX Four sources of metadata about things Lorcan 20 May 2007 : Read in 3 minutes InstitutionsSocialSystems I think it is useful to think of four sources of descriptive metadata in libraries. These are not mutually exclusive, and one of the interesting questions we have to address is how they will be mobilized effectively together. I don’t have good names for these. How about: professional, contributed, programmatically promoted, and intentional? Professional The curatorial professions have made major investments in knowledge organization, through the development and application of cataloging rules, controlled vocabularies, authorities, gazetteers, and so on. One of our major challenges is releasing the value that has been created through those approaches in web environments. There is much to think about here, and many folks are thinking about it. Currently, these approaches do not tend to work well across silos, they are not made available as web resources themselves so that they can be part of the connected fabric of the web, they only work with the other approaches I mention in particular projects or services, their ‘relating’ power is underused, and higher level services based on data mining or statistical analysis are limited. Now, these types of issues are being addressed, but are some way from routine systemwide application. I believe that these approaches will continue, within a reconfigured system, and we need to make that data work harder. My personal view is that the curatorial professions need to invest more in the shared production of resources which identify and describe authors, subjects, places, time periods, and works. Contributed A major phenomenon of recent years has been the emergence of many sites which invite, aggregate and mine data contributed by users, and mobilize that data to rank, recommend and relate resources. These include, for example, Flickr, LibraryThing, and Connotea. These services have a different focus, and create real value in the way that they organize resources. They also have value in that they reveal relations between people. Libraries have begun to experiment with these approaches, but individual libraries may not have the scale to iron out local or personal idiosyncrasy or emphasis. This is another area which lends itself to shared attention. There are real advantages to be gained. So, for example, as we digitize photographic and other community collections, we will want to mobilize knowledge about those collections that does not exist within the library. Or, if you think about a service like Worldcat Identities, at some stage we will want to allow those ‘identities’ themselves to comment, augment, amend. What this means is that we will have to get rather more sophisticated about managing assertions about resources from different sources. Programmatically promoted We are handling more digital materials, where it is possible to programmatically identify and promote metadata from resources themselves or groups of resources. We will also do more to mine collections, including collections of metadata, to discern pattern and relations. We are increasingly familiar with clustering, entity identification, automatic classification and other approaches. Look at the home page for books that Google is creating to see a resource created from mining Scholar, Google Book Search, and big Google to deliver a range of related materials. Intentional I have used this term to refer to the data that we are collecting about use and usage. Pagerank is based on aggregate linking choices. Amazon recommendations are based on aggregate purchase choices. We use holdings data in ranking algorithms, which aggregates selection choices of libraries. This type of data has emerged as a central factor in the major web presences as they seek to provide useful paths through massive amounts of data. To repeat, these approaches are not mutually exclusive and will increasingly be deployed alongside each other. For example, authority lists may support programmatic identification of personal or place names in large text resources. The shared interests revealed in social networking applications may be abstracted into a form of intentional data to drive recommendations or ‘related work’ services. Patterns of association and interaction will develop between tags and subject headings. And so on. Much of our discussion pits these approaches against each other. This seems like the wrong approach. Clearly there will always be choices about where one invests effort, especially as the network continues to reconfigure what we do, but the starting point should be how we create better services and what approaches support that, and not a ‘techeological’ position around one or other approach which confuses ideology and technology. Related entries: All that is solid melts into flows Circulating intentional data InstitutionsSocialSystems Comment? Comments Sign in or become a LorcanDempsey.net member to comment. See Membership page for more detail. Send a log in link Great! Please check your inbox (or spam folder) for a log in link. Something didn't work. Please try again. Lorcan Responsible for Membership and Research at OCLC, serving libraries around the world. You might also like The library network and the scholarly record The library community is a highly interconnected one. Networks are motivated both by library mission and effective management of resources. This trend will accelerate as the Internet favors shared services, and libraries will see more benefit in building such shared services. The Hathi Trust is an important example. The growth Lorcan 13 Feb 2011 Institutions Stuff as a service ... First, a note on a couple of recent media experiences … We went to The boat that rocked (aka Pirate Radio) recently and were determined to enjoy it. For those that don’t know, it is a movie set in 1966 on a ‘pirate radio’ ship broadcasting Lorcan 13 Dec 2009 Books Featured Posts Two metadata directions 14 Jul 2021 Working with Ghost: a review 26 Apr 2021 Collection directions accelerated? Pandemic effects. 19 May 2020 Memory institutions redux: pluralizing memories and a stay against forgetting 07 Dec 2018 The powers of library consortia 1: how consortia scale capacity, learning, innovation and influence 28 Feb 2018 News Presentation: Two Metadata Directions 29 Jul 2021 A new web presence: transitions and towers 19 Apr 2021 Presentation: College, consortium, collaboration, collective collection 21 Jan 2021 Interesting? Get updates! Your email address Signup Please check your inbox and click the link to confirm your subscription. Please enter a valid email address! An error occurred, please try again later. Tags Systems Institutions UX Books Research/Learning Social Collections *Classics Meta Collaboration Navigation About Membership Contact Blog posts Newsletter Interesting? Get updates! Your email address Signup Please check your inbox and click the link to confirm your subscription. Please enter a valid email address! An error occurred, please try again later. 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