Workshop Lecture Notes (see on VISTA8)

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Metadata for Digital Collections

Graduate Workshop (1 credit hour)
Marcia Lei Zeng, Ph.D.
SLIS, KSU

Intended Audience:

Practicing library and information professionals and anyone who is involved in establishing digital collections in distinct information communities for the purposes of managing, publishing, and preserving documents in the digital environment.

Goals and Objectives:

Metadata is a critical mechanism in digital collections. Metadata describes the attributes of a resource, where the resource may consist of bibliographical objects, archival inventories and registers, geospatial objects, museum and visual resources, learning objects, and datasets. This workshop examines the role of metadata in the digital environment. The main focuses will be given to 1) the applications of metadata standards for distinct domains and information communities and 2) the creation of application profiles according to local needs. Issues in metadata interoperability, vocabulary control, quality control and evaluation, and the practices in Linked Data-enabled metadata encoding will also be discussed.

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to: 
*  understand the principles, concepts, and types of metadata;
*  explore various operational and proposed metadata standards for specific domains;
*  understand different issues in the applications of metadata standards in a larger context of a project, a community, and the society;
*  gain experience in applying selected metadata standards to the creation of metadata records, with and without computer programs;
*  become capable of developing metadata element sets and creating application profiles by designing, evaluating, and modifying metadata elements according to local needs;
*  implement metadata decisions in a digital library project; and
* examine issues related to interoperability, controlled vocabularies, and application profiles, and Linked Data-enabled metadata encoding. 

Workshop Outline and Assignments

See Lecture Notes for details on VISTA8

Pre-workshop assignments: (6 hours)

1. Readings (Choose read the chapter listed under "Introductory level" and answer the questions (link from VISTA site)

• Introductory level
  • Chapter 1 of: Zeng, Marcia Lei & Jian Qin. 2008.6. Metadata. New York, NY: Neal-Schuman.
    Chapter 1 is available at: http://www.neal-schuman.com/sandbox/images/pdf/9781555706357.pdf
    
    
• Advanced level
• Duval, Erik, Wayne Hodgins, Stuart Sutton, Stuart L. Weibel (2002). Metadata Principles and Practicalities. D-Lib Magazine 8(4) URL: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april02/weibel/04weibel.html
  
  
• Caplan, Pris cilla (2000). International metadata initiatives: lessons in bibliographic control. Paper presented at: Conference on Bibliographic Control in the New Millennium, Library of Congress, November, 2000.
  URL: http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/caplan_paper.html
  
  
• Gilliland, Anne (2008). Setting the Stage. In: Murtha Baca ed.: Introduction to Metadata, Pathway to Digital Information. Version 3.0; Getty Information Institute. URL: http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/intrometadata/setting.html
  
  
• NISO Framework Advisory Group. (2007). "Metadata". In: A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections. 3rd ed. Priscilla Caplan, Grace Agnew, Murtha Baca, Carl Fleischhauer, Tony Gill, Ingrid Hsieh-Yee, Jill Koelling, Christie Stephenson, and Karen A . Wetzel. URL: http://framework.niso.org/node/24

2. Every participant must identify a digital collection (to be built or already exists)and bring the case into the workshop. This digital collection will be the one that goes into the final project.

If you do not have a case, please take the case I prepared.

Day 1. Metadata Basics

• Metadata development overview
• Metadata records
• Metadata types and functions
• Current operational and proposed metadata standards
• Metadata record creation and tools

Day 2. Working with metadata for your digital collection (Advanced)

• Decisions for your digital collection
• Working with standards and developing application profiles
• Metadata value space
• Metadata interoperability
• Metadata in practice
• The Vision of the Semantic Web and Linked Data

Final project (See details on VISTA8)

Last updated: 2011-02-11

©Marcia Lei Zeng, 2001-2011

email: mzeng@kent.edu

Website: http://www.slis.kent.edu/~mzeng/