Monday Morning Blog

Ever since I had the chance to change my focus in library work 8 years ago, I wanted to be where the action was.   I had spent many years working in public services and had enjoyed doing reference work in the era before people Googled everything.   However, when the reference desk started to get quiet, I knew that it was time to move on.   I didn’t know where I was going to but I knew that I was going to go to a place where I was needed and could help to be part of building whatever the future would be.   I kept my mind open to opportunities and felt that I likely would work in the area of electronic resources or electronic information in general.   When an opportunity came up to develop my skills in the area of cataloguing and metadata librarianship, I jumped on it.   At the time it made sense to me that if people want to do most of their searching for themselves, we have to have better and more agile metadata than we did at the time and I wanted to be...

When I was at ALA MidWinter 2015, I attended the FRBR Interest Group meeting which was discussing the topic of whether or not FRBR was dead.   At the meeting, it was revealed that while some felt that BIBFRAME supersedes the FRBR model and makes it irrelevant, there are others who feel that FRBR is an essential model for teaching RDA and linked data concepts (at least as it relates to library data) as well as for using "cataloguer's judgement".  I tend to fall into the latter category of librarians.  At the end of the meeting, the conclusion was that the interest group should not fold and that FRBR still lives - although it is need of updating and enriching. I attended the same interest group meeting at Midwinter 2016 to find another discussion of FRBR and the new Library Reference Model (LRM).  As it turns out, some attendees were aware the LRM had been released a few months earlier but nobody who spoke seemed to b...

Wow, time sure goes fast.   No wonder I got behind in writing my posts in the last year or so.   Now I have a bit list of topics which I have intended to write about but never got around to, some of which have since become irrelevant.   So, a few are easy to cross off the list. There’s one topic which I see has been mentioned in some form more than once on the list.   As I was making an attempt to preview the April updates to the RDA Toolkit, I realized that I had not yet looked at the February 2016 updates.   (for those of you who want to check-out the April changes, they are found here:   http://www.rda-rsc.org/sites/all/files/RDA-changes-2015-proposals.pdf ).   As I got over various twinges of frustration at my realization that I remain forever behind in reading the updates, I was reminded of the theme that I had found running across the various possible blog topics I had listed.   This theme was essentially the challenge of keeping up wi...

Strings versus things – this is a common debate/discussion in cataloging circles lately.   The idea that a string of text which represents or describes something is more difficult to construct and less versatile relative to an assigned code which can be mapped to represent the “thing” is not a new idea. The reality is that there is a long tradition of “string creation” in the realm of library metadata.   The science of creating metadata for libraries had its origin in a time before the invention of electronic computers.   The earliest metadata was recorded by human beings on paper or in a paper-based location; coded using human language; and read and interpreted directly by the human eye.   Humans read and can readily make sense of words and sentences.   Words and sentences are made up of strings of text.   In order to make sense of the strings of text, they are typically organized in a certain way (e.g. ISBD).    When the MARC standard was de...

Way back in Metadata Update #13 (Feb 14 2013 http://donnaefrederick.blogspot.ca/2013/02/metadata-update-13-identifiers.html ), I spoke briefly about the role and importance of identifiers in online electronic information.   Three years later, it has proven that the talk about identifiers wasn’t a splash in the pan. They were the talk of the town at ALA Midwinter once again.   As libraries experimented with BIBFRAME and moved from BF 1.0 to BF 2.0 and linked data work moved from the theoretical LD4L to the practical LD4P, certain things about library data and the wider information environment, things that we have “sort of known” for a long time, have gradually started to come into much clearer focus and we are starting to understand what they really mean for the day to day work of creating and managing metadata.   One of those “things” is the importance of identifiers. Libraries have long made use of the concept of controlled vocabularies where a single word, phras...

It's been a little over a month since I was at ALA Midwinter in Boston and I've been thinking about the key messages that I came away with this year.  I don't think that there is any question that there was a lot of talk about "strings v things" and the increasing importance of "identities".  However, what were the bigger messages?  I did have to take my time and think through the issues and discussions!  There was a lot to consider.  In the end, this is what I concluded: 1)  Libraries have talked about modernizing their metadata, replacing MARC and entering the global information environment for a very long time.  Now we are actually doing it.  It is real, things are happening.  You don't even have to look too long to find evidence of it - if you know what you know where and how to look. 2)  Libraries have used the same models and concepts for a very long time and have massive amounts of metadata which reflect the traditional wa...

I intended to post this quite a while back but was distracted from the task.  By the way, you might gather that this post was written for a blog besides this one.  It is true that it was but it was rejected.  However, I think that my readers would still find it interesting.  So, here it goes: What I am writing today is not what I first imagined reflects a real-life challenge faced by many of our colleagues across the globe.   This challenge isn’t a new discovery by any means but perhaps what my post can bring to the understanding is a different context and perspective.   It is the challenge of finding a place to begin to research when a person feels surrounded by external and internal pressures for productivity; overwhelmed by change; confused by conflicting information and priorities; concerned about a lack of experience with doing research; and unnerved at the thought of having your first attempts at publishing research scrutinized.   W...