The CIC Metadata Portal: A Collaborative Effort in the Area of Digital Libraries (original) (raw)
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Science & Technology Libraries, 2007
The CIC consortium includes 12 major Midwestern Universities. Their libraries have decided to share the cost of a joint project (2003)(2004)(2006) aimed at better understanding the mechanisms by which emerging technologies and standards can facilitate metadata sharing and the creation of value-added services for their users. The CIC metadata portal project has performed advanced work in the area of Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, collection level descriptions, metadata transformation and enrichment, practices and usability of metadata standards. It has provided an opportunity for increased collaboration between CIC academic libraries and a way to highlight the wealth of digital resources held by the participating libraries. This article describes the project and enumerates project accomplishments. The project has helped to better the way in which partner institutions share information about digital content and provide access to digital resources. Four content provider of the project highlight different aspects of the project and the practical benefits they found in the collaboration.
The growing amount of digital resources on the web and in libraries have been rapidly changing the ways data is organized, shared and discovered, and the Metadata Librarians’ roles and practices have been constantly reshaped under this larger environment. In light of related literature and the author’s experiences in web archiving and working with several digital repositories including CONTENTdm, Islandora, Digital Commons, DSpace and Omeka, this presentation will discuss the ongoing changes in metadata practices in various areas, such as identity management, authority control, repository design and capability, metadata, its presentation and discovery, and linked data. It will also reflect on the metadata practices in the library community and the web practices in classifying and discovering data, and explore the web’s impact on library cataloging and the metadata profession. The changing environment and practices call for the Metadata Librarian’s flexibility in working with different digital library systems and personnel from other departments, an open mindset, and new understandings and skill sets related to vocabulary management, document encoding, data processing, and innovative ways of or semi-auto cataloging and classification.
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2001
This paper provides a report of work in progress to implement integrated access to multiple digital collections that are described using a variety of metadata formats. Using the emerging resource discovery and digital library management system, ENCompass, a team at Cornell University Library is experimenting with a new discovery system model. The model uses simple, "pidgin" metadata at the collection management level, but combines this simple layer with other metadata for describing specific resources, to enable users not only to discover relevant collections, but also to conduct deep searches. The authors frame their ENCompass activity report to illustrate the principle of modularity-as described by Lagoze-in which a metadata format tailored for simplicity (Dublin Core) is used alongside other, more complex metadata formats.
Metadata for digital libraries: state of the art and future directions
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At a time when digitization technology has become well established in library operations, the need for a degree of standardization of metadata practices has become more acute, in order to ensure digital libraries the degree of interoperability long established in traditional libraries. The complex metadata requirements of digital objects, which include descriptive, administrative and structural metadata, have so far mitigated against the emergence of a single standard. However, a set of already existing standards, all based on XML architectures, can be combined to produce a coherent, integrated metadata strategy.
Metadata practices in digital libraries
Proceedings of the International Seminar ‘Vision 2021: the role of libraries for building digital Bangladesh, 2011
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A focus of digital libraries, particularly since the advent of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, is aggregating from multiple collections metadata describing digital content. However, the quality and interoperability of the metadata often prevents such aggregations from offering much more than very simple search and discovery services. Shareable metadata is metadata which can be understood and used outside of its local environment by aggregators to provide more advanced services. This paper describes shareable metadata, its characteristics, and its importance to digital library development, as well as barriers and challenges to its implementation.
The Stanford Digital Library Metadata Architecture
International Journal on Digital Libraries, 1997
The overall goal of the Stanford Digital Library project is to provide an infrastructure that affords interoperability among heterogeneous, autonomous digital library services. These services include both search services and remotely usable information processing facilities. In this paper, we survey and categorize the metadata required for a diverse set of Stanford Digital Library services that we have built. We then propose an extensible metadata architecture that meets these requirements. Our metadata architecture fits into our established infrastructure and promotes interoperability among existing and de-facto metadata standards. Several pieces of this architecture are implemented; others are under construction. The architecture includes attribute model proxies, attribute model translation services, metadata information facilities for search services, and local metadata repositories. In presenting and discussing the pieces of the architecture, we show how they address our motivating requirements. Together, these components provide, exchange, and describe metadata for information objects and metadata for information services. We also consider how our architecture relates to prior, relevant work on these two types of metadata.