Interesting Links

Since June of 2013 I’ve been volunteering with, and later working for, Portland State University’s library. I’ve mainly been working with their open access repository called PDXScholar. Here’s a link to their homepage: PDXScholar Their description of their site describes in detail the services they provide and the sorts of resources available. I think it’s a wonderful resource for information.

I’ve had the opportunity to work on several projects and pages. These are mainly through the direction of the Archives department at PSU. My contribution usually involves organization, metadata creation, and uploading into PDXScholar. The types of information documents I’ve worked with is varied. Here’s a list, organized by media type.

-Photo/Text: Verdell Burdine and Otto G. Rutherford Family Collection, which includes family photos, the Portland NAACP Scrapbook, the Women’s organization: the Culture Club and a series of videos about the collection called “Say We Are Here.” PSU Viking Yearbooks Portland State University’s yearbooks from 1946 to 1962.

-Audio: Oregon Public Speakers, a large selection of historical speakers who visited the campus Sustainability History Project, a capstone class where students interviewed members of the region involved in sustainability.

-Audio/Visual: Gift of the Word, a collection of manuscripts, videos, and an exhibit catalog.

Metadata

Sitting down in front of a library computer and opening their OPAC system, or Online Public Access Catalog, usually means searching for a specific item, or browsing.

The records that come up on the computer show a very basic set of information about the book in question. Common fields are things like title, the year of publication, the subject, the author, etc. The metadata contained in a record represents the book without having to have the book in front of you.

Consider the difference between an issue of a magazine, a book, and a music cd. Those records would look slightly different. The magazine requires an issue number, while the book and cd do not, just to site one example.

The function of metadata is to describe the object to the user in a very useful manner. One where you could easily create a citation from just the information in the record.

There are several different types of metadata, called schemas. They are usually divided up by user and also object type.

Within a metadata record there can be different types of information. Not just descriptive data about the object, but also technical metadata or administrative metadata that includes things like file type. Metadata records can also include useful items like rights management information, and preservation information.

Museums use their own metadata schemas to catalog their holdings, for example. Their collections have a different set of requirements for their users. They need to include materials, as well as the title and creator.

One long standing type of metadata is the Dewey Decimal System, with it’s card catalog providing relevant information. The tiny 3x5 cards were far easier to rearrange than moving the actual books around.

Practically any collection of objects, such as music files, photographs, artwork, video, and web created documents, like this one, have their own metadata standards. In fact, there are sometimes several metadata schemas to choose from.

Dublin Core, DC, is a popular metadata schema, with it’s basic 15 elements and it’s clear data dictionary illustrating exactly what goes where.

Metadata creation is a key component of library cataloging. One long standing type is MARC, Machine Readable Cataloging, which was created at the dawn of the digital age, in the 1960s.

A key difference between DC and MARC is that MARC titles its fields with numbers. The title field is labeled 245. DC uses commonly used words for its field names, so the title field is simply - title.

There are some very interesting new metadata schemas that are up and coming in the field, such as RDA, and several that make use of XML.

One note for new researchers interested in exploring this topic; there are many acronyms. MIX, MODS, TEI, EAD, DC, MARC, and more. All in all, it’s good to remember the definition of metadata - data about data.

Want to know more?

Here are some resources:

San Jose State University’s MLIS program is all online. Read more about it here: SJSU’s School of Library and Information Science: Prospective Students

Library of Congress Authorities, for vocabulary control, LOC Link