Cataloging Futures

New blog focuses on RDA and FRBR

Here's another new cataloging blog off to a great start. Jennifer Eustis just started writing the Celeripedean blog and is planning on focusing on cataloging, RDA, and FRBR. Topics near and dear to this blogger's heart :)

New blog: Resource Description and Access: ALA Rep notes

If you've been reading Planet Cataloging, you've seen John Attig's posts fly by. He's the American Library Association (ALA) representative to the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA (JSC). And the good news is: John is sharing his notes from the recently JSC meeting held this month in Chicago. So, if you are interested in the ongoing development of RDA this is another good resource to check out.

Writing about the role of metadata librarians

While trying to write an article about the future of libraries and the role of metadata, I discovered a really great post that Jenn Riley wrote back in 2006: On metadata "experts". It's well worth reading.

You know with blogging we're always look for the "new". But it also seems worthwhile to link to older posts that deserve to be re-read or read for the first time.

Kelley McGrath on FRBR

Hey, Kelley McGrath is the guest blogger over at the Content Management Connection Daniel Tunkelang's The Noisy Channel blog. Kelley gives a nice overview of FRBR for a broader audience.

Library of Congress MARC => RDF/RDA/FRBR

Rob Styles and Bill Denton have already pointed this out: Alistair Miles has converted Library of Congress MARC data to RDF using RDA/FRBR schemas. It's interesting to see RDA come alive, so to speak, in an actual RDF metadata structure.

Peter Brantley: "We are all presses now"

Been reading about the future of print newspapers lately. I really like this post by Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation: Getting it out together. He has some interesting things to say about library standards:

As I listened to these reporters conceive new stories, wondering where they could obtain the technical expertise to help them build narratives constructed from linked data, I began to understand something new: all of us – museums, libraries, newspapers, archives – we are all presses now. We are all working with this explosion of data, some of it our own, some of it (much of it) outside of ourselves; figuring out how to link these data together, or permit others to link it together, so new stories can be told.

We must tell stories for everyone, not just for ourselves. And for libraries, that means staying away from baroque library standards; weird metadata protocols and data exchange standards that no-one else uses. It means taking only the best of what we’ve developed, the work that is most flexible and lightweight, such as OpenURL, OAI-PMH, and Dublin Core, and integrating it with RSS and ATOM; OAuth and OpenID; Sitemap and OpenSearch. [emphasis mine]

Anything that is complicated must be left behind. Anything that serves only our own needs – such as complex inter-repository sharing – cannot be a priority. Those needs, important as they remain, must be met more simply. Most important: exposing as much of our data – stories, reporting, datasets, archives – as we can, and working to enable the integration of other data residing outside ourselves—that is the work of libraries. Museums. Archives. Presses.

Our job is not to deliver packaged information to carefully chosen audiences; our job is to enable information and data to be used by the greatest possible public.

It means libraries not only working among themselves, but making themselves available to journalists in new ways, not merely through their collections, but through their data, through their people and their skills, all working together to enable the telling of stories. Libraries should reach out to the new generation of public presses, local museums, and archives: not wait to be contacted. Because we are all presses now.