Metadata Committee, Sept. 21, 2009

Present: Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Marshall Breeding, Zora Breeding, Ronee Francis, Mary Charles Lasater, Jake Schaub, Bill Walker, Pete Wilson, Roberta Winjum.

Roberta reported on the recent TechForce retreat, held on Sept. 11. The first part of the retreat was spent on an “environmental scan.” Members of TechForce made presentations of what each had found out about a different library’s technical services department. There were few particularly surprising revelations from this. Outsourcing, differing ways of organizing people and work, and the collaboration between California state university libraries were mentioned. Roberta noted that our opportunities for collaboration with other Tennessee libraries are somewhat limited in comparison. In the second part of the meeting, the retreaters went over a list of ideas for improving efficiency in technical services and looked at statistics documenting the decrease in traditional tasks of the department. We talked about the fact that these decreases are offset by newer tasks which are not yet well counted, such as record loads and authority follow-up, DiscoverArchive metadata, special metadata projects, etc. Roberta said that TechForce will start considering one interesting efficiency idea per meeting. Based on the example at one of the universities studied, TechForce is also considering changing the name of the Cataloging and Authorities Team to Metadata, Authorities, and Cataloging, or “MAC.” We talked about how there isn’t really any overall management of digital projects and associated metadata. There seemed to be some consensus that the Metadata Committee should, for now at least, handle broad decisions related to metadata in DiscoverArchive and other library-related projects, but should not get bogged down in details of every individual project. The group discussed Roberta’s tentative notion of a new “Digital Project Coordinator” position, which might or might not be a full-time responsibility. This position would coordinate work on digital projects, consult on new ones, be a conduit of communication between different groups of people working on the same or similar projects, and help to prioritize work. The position would not necessarily be concerned with just metadata per se. Some discussion about the many sources and repositories of digital information around campus followed, with some emphasis on the 2 terabytes of files managed without much metadata by ITS. Ronee said that we, ITS, Public Affairs, and the many other producers of metadata really need to coordinate efforts better.

Mary Charles and Ronee reported on the latest developments in DiscoverLibrary and DiscoverArchive. Mary Charles said that the DiscoverLibrary production group will meet again next week. Several proposals for changes to DL, including the addition of the serial set records and displaying a geographic facet, are waiting on approval. The mapping group is working on uniform titles and FRBR issues. They are especially concentrating on keeping records from being drawn into incorrect FRBR groups, feeling this is more of a problem than inadvertently leaving a record out of an appropriate FRBR group. Dale is having problems setting up DiscoverArchive to be part of DiscoverLibrary.

Minutes submitted by Pete Wilson.