Coral Hess

From Border Crossings (which I rather liked, in the sense that I'd like to sit down and chat with the author over a beer, despite the article's constant references to things I knew nothing about), "The answer [to the problem of metadata creation by untrained users] is that almost nobody will spend the time, and probably the majority of those who do are in the business of creating metadata-spam. Creating good quality metadata is challenging, and users are unlikely to have the knowledge or patience to do it very well, let alone fit it into an appropriate context with related resources. Our expectations to the contrary seem touchingly naïve in retrospect." -- Really? I thought we'd been finding the opposite. At least, that's what I recall Weinberger stating, in Everything is Miscellaneous. Del.icio.us was given as a specific example, wherever I saw that (although I have some doubts, I admit). Perhaps that's worth another look.

"People have to know and trust one another, which generally requires face-to-face engagement: transporting ourselves and our ideas to other time zones, surviving frequent-flyer-flues, finding the means to support travel costs, and missing baseball games of our children." -- My pulling out this quote is less relevant to metadata and more relevant to my opinions about the "online collaborative experience" Pitt tries to sell. More on that later, without the 2670 tag.

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"Although metadata is arguably a much less familiar term among creators and consumers of networked digital content who are not information professionals per se, these same individuals are increasingly adept at creating, exploiting, and assessing user-contributed metadata such as Web page title tags, folksonomies, and social bookmarks." -- Oh, hey, Introduction to Metadata suggests that maybe users aren't so bad at this. There you go, then; the truth is somewhere up in the air.

Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) -- Want to find out more about this.

"As enunciated in Principle 6 of "Practical Principles for Metadata Creation and Maintenance" (p. 72), there is no single metadata standard that is adequate for describing all types of collections and materials; selection of the most appropriate suite of metadata standards and tools, and creation of clean, consistent metadata according to those standards, not only will enable good descriptions of specific collection materials but also will make it possible to map metadata created according to different community-specific standards, thus furthering the goal of interoperability..." -- Well, that isn't good news, precisely. I admit, I love panaceas.

I liked this reading; it contained loads of useful information and was both accessible and scholarly--a tricky thing to pull off. (Not sure I feel the need to drink beer with the author, though.)

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I liked how the book reading (I won't bother with bibliographic information here; nobody who doesn't already know this stuff will care to go find the source) said AACR2 is "almost persnickety." Just "almost." Right.

LaTeX is fantastic, by the way.

I also liked the discussion of automatic recognition and extraction of metadata. I wonder how much of this will be considered relevant for, for instance, our midterm...

Labels: 2670