Monday Morning Blog

MOOCs are a hot topic in higher education today.   A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course.   I have been trying out various MOOCs for almost exactly two years since I was first invited to attend one in the fall of 2011 on the Coursera platform which was offered by Professor Ng at Stanford University.   Since then I’ve sampled about a dozen different courses, completely finished 5 and have become a Coursera Community Teaching Assistant for one course. The media has a lot to say about MOOCs and here is a typical example: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303759604579093400834738972.html So, what do MOOCs have to do with metadata and why is it the topic of one of my updates?   I’m taking an amazing class on Metadata via Coursera being offered by Jeffrey Pomerantz of the library school at UNC Chapel Hill:   https://www.coursera.org/#course/metadata .   The course will be starting week 7 next week so it’s nearly over.   But, I recommend keeping an eye out for it on Co

There hasn't been much new in the library world of metadata to report on or discuss over the summer.  I think that most of us have been busying learning, updating and applying much of what I have discussed already.  Of course, there was an update to RDA early in July but in the big scheme of all of the change that has been happening, things have been relatively quiet. However, it appears that since late spring the popular media, particularly in the U.S., has become quite interested in the topic of metadata.  I know that I have heard stories on CBC radio more than once where metadata has been the topic of discussion.  One of the big questions that comes up is what metadata is.  So, it is a term that has worked its way into the vocabulary of many North Americans even if most are still not entirely clear as to what it means.  I think that a summary of how the media is describing it is  "it is not actually our phone conversations themselves but information about the phone calls

There haven't been a lot of news on the metadata front for libraries over the summer.  While people have been busy learning and applying the new standards, reading the updates, and being busy catching up on things in general, we haven't seen much that is entirely new.  However, there has been a lot of buzz about metadata in the popular, especially U.S., media about metadata and how it can be collected and used by governments and others to track what we do and what our relationships are. Here is a 6 minute pod-cast from NPR radio which talks about both the U.S. government use of metadata and cell phone calls and how even our gmail metadata can be used to get a sense of what a person's relationships are and how they are progressing: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/08/22/214172709/how-a-look-at-your-gmail-reveals-the-power-of-metadata If you were able to do my mini-MOOC, you will likely see that there is some similarity between the sorts of conclusions th

Today I watched a video for a memorial for MARC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1EL76yfeVs&feature=youtu.be . It brought to mind the question of whether or not MARC is really dead or dying.   Or, is AACR2 dead or dying?   Many people would say yes.   Many people would say that both have been dead for a long time and they just haven’t fallen down yet.   This point of view has merit because both MARC and AACR2 had become technologically irrelevant in many ways starting in the 1980s.     There are others who say that MARC and AACR2 will never die because there are millions of library catalogue records all over the world that have been created using these two standards.   Many of these records are owned and used by very small libraries in small organizations.   Some of the records are likely still in card catalogue cards.   This point of view has merit too.   It’s very unlikely that every library is going to have the resources or the interest in moving away from th

So lately I've been busy basically taking one Coursera MOOC after the other.  I'm learning a lot and amazed that the quality of classes I am getting for free. So, I put together my own little mini MOOC for folks interested in where the big picutre of data and metadata might be going.  There are no assignments, tests or discussion forums.  Instead, I have put together a collection of videos that you can watch (maybe one a day or one every couple of days) that discuss some of the thinking and technologies that are themes in discussions about where metadata and discovery in libraries are likely going.  I've organized the list from the most wide ranging and general to the most specific and library-related. For the first three videos, I attended these sessions live and I've selected them because they are the best of the type that I have seen yet. For the last 2 BIBFRAME videos, I didn't attend these particular sessions but I attended similar sessions at ALA MidWint

So with all of the excitement of implementing RDA, holidays, lots of snow and going to ALA MidWinter, the Monday Morning blog is getting a little behind!  Better late than never. Today's update is on the role of identifiers in our work.  Here's a nice little article from a Scientific American blogger than briefly discusses why identifiers in general are useful: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/2013/02/07/on-identifiers-doi-isbn-casrn-ssn-issn-etc/ We already know how handy ISBNs and ISSNs are.   In an electronic environment where websites and publishers change from time to time, the introduction of the DOI has been a significant advance.   I wish that a field for the DOI would be introduced into MARC as a core element (where a DOI for an electronic document exists) and that it would be used consistently.   Another type of identifier I wanted to talk about is identifiers for persons, places, organizations, meetings, etc.   In traditional terms, we t