Responding to my classmate’s post about metadata for school librarians. I completely agree with everything she said and I really do think that this is important. So much is moving towards a digital format. As a young reader I always used our school library to get my next favorite book. I used the card catalog, the librarian for Reader’s Advisory, or just browsed the stacks. With things continually moving away from analog it will be important to keep things organized. Young will want to find e-books similar to their interests. I think it is critical to stay current and provide the best metadata we can to link similar data. It might be melodramatic to say but young readers could depend on metadata specialists doing their jobs in a high quality manner.
Response to sindeesblog on NSA Replication. Wow. That’s scary how easy it is. When you put it in dollar amounts like that it seems insanely cheap to do some serious collection/storage of data. I wonder how quickly this escalates too. Recent history says that computer technology will continue to advance an extremely fast pace (see Moore’s law). How easy, and cheap will it have to become before the general populace take notice that there is serious potential for abuse by whoever wants to. Most of the web, metadata topics, and the broader digital world is still a kind of Wild West with little to no legislation.
I am reflecting on my repository presentation a couple weeks ago. Since it has been a few weeks I feel like I can relax a little about it. But right after my presentation I was pretty upset. This is the second time a SLIS presentation of mine that hasn’t gone right because of something totally unneccessary. In particular the sound quality has been terrible while I was speaking. I really enjoyed the topic I was speaking about and felt completely sabotaged by technology. What can you do? I even had borrowed an Ethernet cord specifically for future presentations after my first mishap with this problem last semester. I definitely have had my fair share of disappointments with Blackboard. I still hope everyone got to see my screencast. I think it gives a lot better intro to the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest repository than my pppt presentation did. I thought it was particularly interesting that a lot of the right side content metadata in records actually link to other repositories managed by the University of Washington not just the AIPN. If anybody has yet to see it you can link to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgY6-MefrQM
Several hours ago I finished the football image indexing. That was quite the task. Something that seems really banal when I think about it now and should be common sense is that if you are copying and pasting the same phrase over and over again you better have the original spelled correctly with correct grammar. I was nearly done with my indexing on all the football images and I realized I had misspelled some of my subject headings. And then I realized I had done it in every image! Took me 20 extra minutes to go back and fix each of the elements. The whole process took a lot longer than I thought it would. I should mention I was one of the player names element guideline writers so I thought I had a leg up on everyone with that element. I’m sure that I took just as long with it as everybody else if not longer. More on that in a bit. The Depol images were definitely a refreshing break from the football images– and I love football! The Depol images were very interesting in that Depol covered a very wide range of subjects he chose to engrave. Fascinating work. I feel like after seeing his work he would’ve been a really interesting person to talk to.
Since we have been working on the image indexing project we were given on own Dublin Core elements. My assigned element was “Contributor”. That was before we voted against its inclusion a couple weeks ago. Don’t get me wrong, I was certainly against keeping it as well. It was a lot of fun to throw around ideas about the element and who thought it was deserving of keeping. Since a lot of us knew nothing about Dublin Core and element sets before this class I think a lot of us thought it was impossible to choose NOT to include an element. But in reality these schemas are very customizable. What would be interesting is to see how the contributor element would actually be used and not thrown out. I mean in other indexing contexts. Because in almost all definitions including the Dublin Core official site the Contributor element has the exact same definition as Creator. And most of the specific repositories define contributor as having to be someone who contributes to the ‘intellectual content’ of something. Curious indeed. I will continue looking for sightings of contributor elements in the future; we missed out on it this time around.
Here is the DC element set and definitions.
Blogging on Blogging
I think I am following the trend of some of my classmate and blogging about blogging (metablogging?). This semester I’ve been terrible at keeping up. I have not liked it all. Of course whenever I actually sit down and read other folks blogs I am extremely impressed. All of my classmates have made very intelligent observations and asked poignant questions concerning metadata and related topics. It has left me feeling like I missed out on participating in the dialogue more frequently. I am a very visual learner. Seeing someone’s face and shaking their hand helps me connect a lot easier. So this is maybe less about the blogging and my difficulties with online learning in general. Either way I think the PLN/PWN is valuable; it is obviously the direction that a lot of educational institutions are exploring and I need to be much more savvy about it than I have. Thank you to everyone for all their contributions to the class discussions. I’ve got some peers worth listening to.
Not going to pretend: This post has a completely self-serving agenda. I am curious how others in the class are describing the skills they have learned in this course in their resume/cover letters (if at all). I have heard that some people describe some of their LIS coursework on their resume but it doesn’t seem to be standard practice at all. I currently have “image indexing projecting” as a bullet point under my Skills on my resume. Other than that I didn’t really get into anything else. I imagine if people are applying to metadata specialist positions then of course you want to somehow show that you have some experience with this stuff. I am mostly applying to instruction and reference librarian positions but I want to point out that I am familiar with this topic…any thoughts on what I should and shouldn’t do with this?
Side question: Any thoughts on how I can stay current with this topic while I’m on the job search? Of course read journals (the open access ones I can get my hands on at least). Are there any crowdsourcing metadata projects I should know about?
Here is my follow up to my original post about the mystery Depol engraving with no subject data given. I think I can add to what we know about it. In my first post I forgot to include my evidence. Here is the only other place on the web that has the exact image we are indexing. Go about a third of the way down and you will see it.
And if you do a general image search of Mark Twain you will not have a problem finding several photographs of him. You will notice that he has a distinctively thick mustache in photographs. And wavy hair. I think these two characteristics are well represented in the Depol’s engraving and point to it being him.
rgourlay 