Archive for the ‘metadata’ Category
Position announcement: Metadata Librarians, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY
Job posting below:
Cornell University Library seeks two creative, productive librarians who will explore, lead, and collaborate on diverse projects. The successful candidates will work at the intersection of many user-focused services and projects, which may include technical services, archives, data curation, and digital libraries. One librarian will primarily work on projects related to the humanities and special collections, and the other position will include responsibilities related to e-science and research data. The successful candidates will be comfortable in exploring emerging technologies and standards for description and access, and they will welcome working in a collegial and collaborative environment. The positions will be an integral part of the newly merged Cataloging and Metadata Services division, a team evolving and expanding to meet users’ needs for the discovery and delivery of resources.
Position Description:
Under the general direction of the Assistant Director, Cataloging and Metadata Services, the Metadata Librarians provide metadata consultation, design, and development services to facilitate the use of digital and analog information for research and education. These
librarians work simultaneously on various metadata projects, collaborating closely with staff throughout Central Library Operations, Digital Scholarship Services, Information Technology, and various special collections units to enhance access to the library’s collections. The Metadata Librarians participate in the library’s research and development efforts and in local and national discussions relating to the access, retrieval, description, preservation, and management of objects in digital collection systems. The librarians play an active role in professional organizations inside and outside of the Cornell University Library community.
Duties and responsibilities may include:
* Participate in Cornell University Library initiatives related to the discovery of digital resources.
* Consult with Cornell’s faculty, staff, and community partners on a variety of metadata and information organization and access needs.
* Recommend, design, and implement appropriate metadata schemes for digital library projects.
* Draft metadata components of grant proposals.
* Assist Cornell researchers in the preparation of data management plans.
* Establish workflows for metadata creation or capture.
* Suggest methods for streamlining or automating metadata creation and management, using various tools for metadata manipulation and scripting.
* Collaborate with database management staff on batch processing projects.
* Assess and work to improve access to resources such as e-books, CUL web sites, and locally-created digital collections.
* Advise on digital preservation strategies, including metadata used for CUL digital repositories.
* Serve as a resource to departments and staff on issues related to metadata and digital initiatives.
* Create and maintain local documentation on metadata standards and metadata application guidelines.
* Train cataloging and metadata staff to use tools and standards required for projects.
* Actively participate in Central Library Operations, library-wide, 2CUL (partnership with Columbia University), and national working groups, task forces, and committees.
* Monitor and contribute to the development of local, national, and international metadata standards and trends.
* Actively seek to participate in library’s role in digital humanities and/or research data projects when possible.
Knowledge/Experience Requirements:
Required:
* ALA-accredited MLS or equivalent or advanced degree.
* Subject expertise in a humanities or science field.
* Working knowledge of a variety of metadata standards (e.g. Dublin Core, VRA Core, EAD, METS, EML, DDI, FGDC Biological Data Profile) and best practices for managing digital collections.
* Interest in metadata issues and emerging technologies.
* Aptitude for learning digital collection management, electronic resource management, and metadata standards and formats.
* Demonstrated experience with a range of software applications, including those supporting the development of digital libraries.
* Excellent collegial, communication, and analytic skills, including the ability to work well within a team environment with diverse groups of library staff.
* Evidence of an ability to plan, analyze, and solve problems creatively, flexibly, and resourcefully.
* Interest in professional development activities, including research and participation in professional organizations.
* Strong service orientation and interest in library users’ values and needs.
Preferred:
* Working knowledge of the use of cataloging principles, standards, and tools, as well as understanding of controlled vocabularies, thesauri, taxonomies, and ontologies.
* Understanding of archival description and/or experience using EAD.
* Knowledge of data sets in all formats.
* Experience with XML editing and XSLT.
* Experience with scripting and programming languages (Java, Perl, or Python).
* Prior professional experience in an academic or special library.
* Project management skills and experience.
Background: Cornell University is an Ivy League comprehensive research university located in Ithaca in the scenic Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. The town and university offer a unique cosmopolitan and international atmosphere in a beautiful natural setting of waterfalls, gorges, and lakes. The university comprises 14 schools with over 2,700 faculty members and nearly 21,600 students enrolled in undergraduate, graduate and professional schools. The Cornell University Library is a vigorous professional organization with a strong track record in innovation and service quality. It contains nearly 8 million printed volumes, 99,000 current serials in print or online, over 600,000 additional networked electronic resources, and rich materials in other formats. The Library was a recipient of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Excellence in Academic Libraries Award in 2002.
Benefits: Comprehensive benefits package including 22 vacation days, 11 paid holidays, health insurance, life insurance, and university retirement contributions (TIAA-CREF and other options). Professional travel funding available.
Application Procedure: Applications requested by November 1, 2010. To apply for this position go to http://www.ohr.cornell.edu/jobs/, search under the job category of Librarians, and select posting number 13419. Follow the instructions for online submission. Please include a cover letter, resume, and the names, phone numbers, and addresses for three references. Please indicate in your cover letter whether you are interested in the humanities position or the science-oriented position. Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. Salary will be competitive and commensurate with experience. Visa sponsorship is not available for this position. Cornell University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer strongly committed to diversity. We value qualified candidates who can bring to our community a variety of backgrounds and experiences.
Open Source METS Metadata Editor
Open Source METS Metadata Editor: Download
About the Open Source METS Metadata Editor
One of the newest of the continual upgrades to the UF Digital Collections is online metadata editing. To make that fully operational our programmer, Mark Sullivan, revised the current standalone METS Metadata Editor application to ensure it remained in parallel. In doing so, Mark noticed that he could quickly adapt our METS Metadata Editor to serve the needs of all of the State University Libraries in Florida. Mark made those updates and the METS Metadata Editor is now available for download here.
The METS Metadata Editor is an Open Source .NET application and features:
- METS Object and METS Reader
- Good object-oriented example, plug and play for .NET users
- METS mappings
- MARC ? METS/MODS ? MARC
- METS/MODS ? Greenstone file
- METS/MODS ? Dublin Core (could easily include Dublin core ? METS/MODS)
The METS Metadata Editor is available as an Open Source download for the Windows application from here.
In the near future, the code for the METS Metadata Editor Web application will also be available for download. The code for the METS Metadata Editor Web application is already powering online metadata editing for the UF Digital Collections, but it’s still new and we’re gathering and incorporating user feedback to further optimize the interface right now. Once released, the METS Editor Web Application will allow users to enter and edit METS files. It probably will not include a logon system, but will instead save into a folder by IP or session number. Then, users will be able to create an item, view it, edit it, download METS, MARC, etc. A bulk importer from MARC and spreadsheets will also be available as a bundled part of the standalone and web application. The Digital Library Center already uses the importer as part of our production toolkit.
As we release more Open Source tools, please note that we’re revising our documentation but it may have different names for some of the same tools until we finish editing. The different names are all for our production toolkit, which is sometimes referred to as the DLC Toolkit, the UFDC Toolkit, the Digital Library of the Caribbean or dLOC Toolkit, and the SobekCM Toolkit. The SobekCM Toolkit has many names because the coding is brilliantly architected and modular, with the same code powering multiple tools and customized tool sets, multiple production scenarios, and multiple versions of the same applications customized for the different user groups. Translating among the names our users know for their tools and the system components causes confusion, so we’re now referring to the collections by their names and the system-parts by the name SobekCM. The CM is for collection and content management, and Sobek is the name of an Egyptian crocodile god (because even crocodiles are Gators in Gainesville).
To help aid with any possible confusion on terminology, we have definition pages for general terms and for specific metadata fields. We’re still working on the pages for the metadata fields, because they provide a lot more than just a definition.
Each of the definitional metadata pages includes:
- Definition(s)
- Form Element
- Best Practices
- Examples
- UFDC / MODS Encoding
- Metadata Mapping
- Links to reference materials
Examples in process:
Mobile World Congress
The Mobile World Congress is coming up soon (February 11-14) and it should lead to exciting new advances for libraries, and general mobile users as well. A recent AP story covered the rise of geotagging photos and creating mashups from the geographically referenced photos. While this is wonderful for small projects and for much larger projects (of the scale that will later build into Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web), it’s also great for the middle area of development where academic institutions like libraries are slowly building geographical information into our collections.
It’s great to see a friend’s vacation images tagged with locations, but it’s much more interesting to see all of the historical photos from a library or museum collection all geographically referenced so that everyone can browse spatially through the photos of the past. In order to make this possible, the collectio owner’s either need to build all of that information after the fact–which is a monumental task, especially for underfunded academic institutions–or that information needs to be collected in a systematic manner when it’s created and that’s where the Mobile World Congress can help.
The Mobile World Congress showcases the work of the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) Association, which serves over 82% of the world’s mobile users. The GSM Association is currently focused on enhancing services for existing users and on enabling access for new users by delivering services to new areas. This means that it’s poised to help academic institutions on two fronts, by enabling more services like georeferencing photos for more users and by bring phone service to more areas creating access to extend and use research. With seminars on topics like “Open Connectivity” which seeks universal standards for interoperability, the work at the Mobile World Congress will definitely help some of the current or coming needs for libraries and museums in terms of cataloging, describing, and connecting material to users within the best possible interfaces for usability and extensibility. The GSMA Global Mobile Awards categories show some of the areas being explored, and hopefully soon more will be added that reflect the growing needs and possibilities for connecting with library and museum archives.
A Lump of Kryptonite by Any Other Name
The discovery of Kryptonite, or at least a new mineral matching the chemistry described in Superman Returns, was found earlier this year. As a feral librarian (a librarian who hasn’t attended library school) I haven’t had a cataloging course, so I’m curious as to how articles on the new mineral will be cataloged for both its scientific and humanistic uses. Articles on a regular new mineral would just need to be listed via scientific categories, or so I’d think. But the hierarchical nature of subject headings would seem strange–at least to me–if the full scientific and full literary/popular culture hierarchy were included in the same manner. However, the popular culture study might intersect with the scientific so it could also be beneficial to list both on even footing.