Metadata Committee Progress Report--March 2006
The activities of the Metadata Committee in the past six months served the strategic goal of building a powerful infrastructure for digital collections and services and the “next step” of being a learning organization in which staff acquire new skills at an increased pace to keep current with technological change.
Our charge in brief is to develop knowledge and skills related to metadata, identify and support existing metadata projects, and plan for the changing role of Acorn. Throughout our discussions, we are trying to move the focus away from Acorn and toward other metadata initiatives and opportunities. This report describes our accomplishments as they fit the framework of goals, next steps, and our charge. Major decisions/accomplishments appear in bold.
We spent several committee meetings familiarizing ourselves with the library’s existing digital collections, what they contain, their metadata structures, and how they were designed and created, as committee members build the knowledge and skills needed to participate in the development of the library’s digital infrastructure.
To broaden our knowledge of current metadata applications in the library, we saw demos by our committee members of various digital collections:
- Marshall Breeding--Ecclesiastical Source for Slave Societies, TV News Archives, and the Art and Art History Image Collection
- Teresa Gray--Heard Library Photographic Archive
- Catherine Gick--Global Music Archive
- Nancy Boggess-Korekach--ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) project
- Roberta Winjum--VU-e-Archive
Subsequent committee discussions touched on how we could be involved in making these digital collections more available and widely known within the Vanderbilt Library community and beyond. We considered the role of our committee in respect to these and future digital collections, and we feel that in part, it is to serve as a consulting body and to assist in metadata design/creation. For example, the committee has established a Project Team to explore issues with workflow and consistency for the ETD database.
Regarding the future role of Acorn: Some meeting discussions touched upon how our online catalog and resources can fit current user expectations, in light of the Google-ization of America. Although we began to delve into more detailed issues and concerns of Acorn functionality and features, the Strategy and Planning Council made it clear to us that they would prefer that the people who identify Acorn problems be empowered to make the decisions on what to do about them with consultation, but without bringing these concerns to a committee or project team. This will result in quicker problem resolution and begin to move us away from our focus on Acorn. To further simplify decision-making, we are developing a policy for Acorn bibliographic content, formally establishing what kinds of bibliographic information Acorn will include, as we begin to create guidelines for its future role. Nevertheless, in the absence of any other appropriate library-wide group, it was requested that Acorn cataloging training, including training in the Java Client, should be addressed by the Metadata Committee. This will be an upcoming activity.
Over the next six months, we will continue developing deeper knowledge of metadata schema, and standards, as we broaden the committee’s involvement in digital projects.