Metadata Minion

Burnhill, Peter. “Tales from the Keepers Registry: Serial Issues About Archiving and the Web.” Elsevier, 2013. Archival collections are increasingly held in digital form. They are not taking up valuable space, but they also seem invisible and remote – out of sight, out of mind. It is therefore hard to see what digital items are deteriorating before it is too late. This article describes the efforts of the Keeper’s Registry, which supports long-term access by keeping a registry of items and the institution maintaining them. The article is separated into what the author calls three “stories”: (1) the development of the Keeper’s Registry, (2) metadata issues, and (3) what the future holds for the Keeper’s Registry and the bigger picture of archiving web content. The Keeper’s Registry is a product of the PEPRS project (Pilot an E-journal Preservation Registry Service). The Registry allows users to discover who is preserving an e-journal by searching the title or ISSN of a serial....

    In the digital era, some titles in library science have been rebranded. An association with data and computing is expected to attract prestige and money. LIS programs are becoming iSchools, and LIS graduates are more frequently pursuing jobs like “data architect,” “digital librarian,” or “digital preservationist.” Sometimes these positions are rebranded versions of the same thing, but sometimes they are truly new jobs. Cocciolo’s article discusses the “digital asset manager” and how this position collides with that of the archivist. He carries out a case study at an art museum with one digital asset manager and two archivists. The digital asset manager was brought on in 2012 to manage the digital asset management (DAM) software. At first, the digital asset manager worked solely with the photography department, since DAM is most established in digital photography. Tensions arose, however, when the DAM spread to other departments throughout the museum. Essential...

“Pictures into Words” by Brian Stewart describes a study comparing user indexing, i.e. crowdsourced tagging, with professional indexing. The article first summarizes Panofsky’s and Shatford’s methods for classifying images. Panofsky outlined three levels of subject matter/meaning: Pre-iconographical description (objects or events)  Iconographical analysis (themes) Iconographical interpretation (meaning)  Shatford emphasized two dimensions of images, ‘of’ and ‘about’ (sometimes called an image’s ofness and aboutness .) Shatford also defined four facets of an image: who, what, where, and when. Stewart argues that indexers have traditionally taken a positivist approach by labeling mostly specific, objective subjects. Today, however, users are in greater need of abstract subjects (interpretive indexing). The article gives the example of abstract subjects like “happy” or “peace.” Part I of the study examined 11 professional indexers. Stewart broke down the subject t...

Archivists in the digital age are seeing an exponentially increasing amount of data with a decreasing lifespan. In “Preservation Challenges in the Digital Age,” Bernadette Houghton addresses this fundamental problem and ten challenges facing archivists. The difference between print technology and digital technology is that books both store and represent text and are relatively stable.  With digital technology, the storage and representation of text is done in separate operations, that is, text is encoded and then retrieved for use through various mediums. Robert Darnton talks about this concept in The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. Archivists must preserve digital material itself and the infrastructure that renders the material readable. Houghton also introduces a third aspect, that of preserving the original user experience. The first example I thought of was playing Sonic the Hedgehog on computers and keyboards from the late 1990s. Houghton’s ten challenges are summar...

Digital libraries like the DPLA , Europeana , the World Digital Library , and the National Library of France's Gallica (just to name a few) are trying to make cultural heritage not only accessible to those looking for it, but also something one could stumble upon during a web search. Metadata gives institutions the ability to make the DPLA's record of a 1983 interview with Elie Wiesel just as discoverable as his interview with Oprah on YouTube.  Don't get me wrong - I love Oprah and I love YouTube. But YouTube videos aren't made and published with longevity in mind. The DPLA fosters a better balance between preservation and access - it gives PR to smaller cultural heritage institutions and their collections across the country.  The DPLA increases the number of "hits" institutions receive on their websites by means of good, interoperable metadata.  Interoperability - "The ability of multiple systems with different hardware and software platforms...