- Email: [email protected]
Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians
and a focus on the success of faculty and students underscore the examples. Themes of leadership dominate the fourth section, illustrating the nature and challenges of leadership. Strategies to become effective leaders are described and illustrated. Interestingly, a chapter is devoted to the “peculiar leadership challenges” of internal candidates for directorships of academic libraries. The fifth section, “Anticipating what’s next: leadership for digital initiatives” looks at the future and covers digital libraries, the scholar’s portal, and issues of scholarly communication. Leadership, Higher Education, and the Information Age provides numerous examples of actual and potential collaborations between librarians or information professionals and information technology professionals. Practical examples illustrate the importance and dynamic nature of organizational cultures that emphasize the strategic relevance of the relationships between academic libraries and computing organizations. The success of students and scholars underscores effective collaborations between academic libraries and computing organizations. Although the section on leadership informs, its content is not particularly new or inspiring. Also, the chapter on the challenges faced by internal candidates for directorships appears to be out of context. Leadership, Higher Education, and the Information Age is recommended for academic librarians interested in the relationships between academic libraries and computing organizations. The information on organizational cultures is especially relevant.—Donald G. Frank, Assistant Director for Public Services, Millar Library, 951 SW Hall, Portland State University, Portland, OR 97207-1151, 具[email protected]典. Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians, by Priscilla Caplan. Chicago: American Library Association, 2003. 192 p. $42.00. ISBN 0-83890-847-0. LC 2002151683. Priscilla Caplan, Assistant Director for Digital Library Services at the Florida Center for Library Automation, has produced here a most useful reference work. Noting that the volume is intended to serve as an “introduction to metadata for librarians and others working in a library environment. . ., not a comprehensive catalog of metadata schemes” (p. vii), Caplan devotes her first chapter to providing an overview of library metadata broadly construed. Using the denotational definition of metadata (“data used to describe other data”1) as a point of departure, Caplan quickly makes the point that different communities define the word differently. The context within which it is used, moreover, can likewise alter its definition. For purposes of this volume, Caplan settles upon “structured information about an information resource of any media type or format” (p. 3) as her working definition, noting that “structured” means, in this context, “recorded in accordance with some documented metadata scheme.” (p. 3) While I’ve always been partial to Clifford Lynch’s rather more informal (and evocative) “cloud of collateral information around a data object,”1 Caplan’s is the more conventionally accepted definition. The rest of Caplan’s overview is very much informed by her accurate observation that “. . .the most useful discussions of metadata are not concerned with what it applies to but
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rather with what it is intended to accomplish.” (p. 3) She describes in broad-brush strokes the three general metadata types— descriptive, administrative, and structural—and their intended ends: ●
● ●
descriptive: discovery, identification, selection, collocation, acquisition, evaluation, linkage, and usability administrative: facilitating resource management structural: enabling use
She differentiates clearly and usefully between metadata schemes and metadata profiles. Metadata schemes—“sets of metadata elements and rules for their use that have been defined for a particular purpose” (p. 5)—specify for a particular metadata set its semantics, its content rules, and its syntax. That is, a metadata scheme specifies the meaning of its individual metadata elements, how the values of those elements are selected and represented, and how the elements are encoded in machine-readable form. (p. 6 –7) Metadata profiles, meanwhile, are “formally developed specifications that limit and clarify the use of a metadata scheme for a specific user community.” (p. 7) Having noted previously that the early Dublin Core initiative (1995) “served as an agent of cross-fertilization between the library and Web communities, and was able to energize the library community with new concepts and terminology” (p. 2)—a rather more bi-directional situation in my opinion than Caplan’s characterization might lead one to believe— Caplan closes her opening chapter with as good a four paragraph summary as I’ve read of the four bibliographic entities comprehended by IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (work, expression, manifestation, and item) and summarizes well in but a single paragraph what library catalogers who have struggled with for over a decade now have come to refer to as the multiple versions problem (or MulVer), now “FRBR-ized” as the Multiple Manifestations problem. The chapter closes with the first of a series of useful Readings lists, and these lists occur throughout the book. Syntax and content rules are the focus of two chapters (chapts. 2 and 3) that discuss MARC, HTML, SGML, RDF, controlled vocabularies, classification schemes (LCC, DDC, UDC), and Identifiers from ISBNs to URLs. Interoperability and metadata in the context of the Web are the focus of two chapters (chapts. 4 and 5) that discuss union catalogs, crosssystem searching (Z39.50 and ZING), crosswalks, registries, Internet search engines (Google, and so forth), domain-specific search engines, channels, and Deep and Semantic Web issues. Caplan demonstrates in these discussions a real gift for condensing a wealth of material into digestible (in both senses of the word) increments. Chapters 7-15 provide overviews of several metadata schemes either commonly encountered in the library community or otherwise of relevance therein, including the TEI Header, the Dublin Core, EAD, metadata for Art/Architecture (VRA Core, and so forth), metadata for government information (GILS, and so forth), metadata for Education (GEM, and so forth), ONIX, metadata for Geospatial and Environmental Resources (FGDC’s CSDGM, and so forth), and DDI (the Data Documentation Initiative for social sciences datasets). Chapters 16-18 consider various issues related to administrative metadata (A-Core, and so forth),
structural metadata (“describes the internal organization of a resource” (p. 158), and rights metadata (OEB, and so forth). Again, Caplan’s facility for distilling complex issues intelligibly and intelligently stands her in very good stead in these chapters. The volume closes with a good and useful glossary and index. Perceptive readers will have noticed that I skipped Chapter 6 in the foregoing. This is Caplan’s chapter on Library Cataloging and is the one place in the volume she stumbles. In her acknowledgments, Caplan thanks Harvard’s Charles Spouses “who once suggested it might be more productive for me to learn something about library cataloging than to continue to complain that I didn’t understand it.” (p. ix) While Chapter 6 demonstrates that Caplan has taken Spouses’ suggestion to heart, it likewise demonstrates that biases die hard. On page 57, Caplan notes that “many involved in metadata initiatives take it as axiomatic that traditional library cataloging is too complex to be performed by nonprofessionals and too expensive to be practically applied to many types of resources. These complaints cannot be dismissed out of hand.” Indeed so. Unfortunately, Caplan neglects to note that nowhere have these complaints been taken more seriously than in the cataloging community itself. In 1993, the Cooperative Cataloging Council assembled by the Library of Congress adopted the following as its top-most goal: “Together, increase the timely availability of bibliographic and authority records by cataloging more items, by producing cataloging that is widely available for sharing and use by others, and by cataloging in a more cost-effective manner.”2 This has remained the highest priority goal of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), into which the Cooperative Cataloging Council grew. The PCC, in turn, has in the ensuing decade developed Core Record standards3 for 11 material types—including books, continuing resources, cartographic materials, collections, electronic resources, graphic materials, and so forth—as a consequence of which annual PCC monographic cataloging productivity has increased by almost 450% since 1995. Moreover, a good deal of conceptual thought has gone into rethinking cataloging in the digital age, thought manifest in a number of publications notably absent from Caplan’s Chapter 6 Reading list, including: Delsey, Tom. The Logical Structure of the Anglo American Cataloguing Rules – Parts I and II. August 1998 and January 1999. Available at http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/jsc/aacrint.pdf and http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/jsc/ aacrint2.pdf, respectively. (accessed on 8/17/03). Schottlaender, Brian E. C., editors. The Future of the Descriptive Cataloging Rules: Proceedings of the AACR2000 Preconference. Chicago: American Library Association, 1997. Weihs, Jean, editor. The Principles and Future of AACR: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR: Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 23/25, 1997. Ottawa: Canadian Library Association; London: Library Association Publishing; Chicago: American Library Association, 1998.
These publications, and the discussions that occasioned them, make clear that the complexity and expense of library cataloging are not being “dismissed out of hand,” least of all by the cataloging community. This “stumble” notwithstanding, Caplan’s volume is a cogent and successful introduction to a complex and rapidly evolving aspect of the information universe, and as such, a
welcome addition to the literature and my bookshelf.–Brian E. C. Schottlaender, University Librarian, UCSD Libraries, 9500 Gilman Drive 0175G, La Jolla, CA 92093-0175 ⬍[email protected]⬎.
NOTES
AND
REFERENCES
1. Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access. Task Force on Metadata. Final Report (June 2000)Available at http://www. ala.org/cfapps/archive.cfm?path@003dalcts/organization/ccs/ ccda/tf-meta6.html(accessed on 8/17/03). 2. Cooperative Cataloging Council Meeting, Library of Congress, April 22, 1993, Summary Report. Available at http://www.loc.gov/ catdir/pcc/archive/cccsumrpt.html (accessed on 8/17/03). 3. Introduction to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging BIBCO Core Record Standards. Available at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/ pcc/bibco/coreintro.html (accessed on 8/17/03).
Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential, edited by Dieter Fensel, James A Hendler, Henry Lieberman and Wolfgang Wahlster. Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press, 2002. 392p. $40.00. ISBN 0-26206-232-1. It’s likely that most of us library and information science (LIS) professionals and researchers have heard about the Semantic Web, but less likely that we have delved into readings on its development or actively engaged in its construction—a situation that is likely to change as this phenomenon unfolds. To get a grasp of the Semantic Web, there is a fairly landmark Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, inventor of the current Web, along with colleagues Hendler and Lassila (2001).1 As the Semantic Web unfolds, popular press articles have also appeared in newspapers and other magazines, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), home of the Semantic Web, provides an excellent Web site linking to important documents and resources (http://www.w3.org/ 2001/sw/) (accessed on 6/19/03). Within our immediate neighborhood, conferences are now including tracks for papers devoted to the Semantic Web (for example, The 2001 Dublin Core Conference included a track with papers on the Semantic Web). Also of note is the special issue of Information Research edited by Terrence A. Brooks (2002) and a special section of a recent ASIST Bulletin guest edited by Jane Greenberg (2003) both devoted to the Semantic Web.2 All this information is useful and helps us to learn about the Semantic Web, but we are in need of a scholarly book— one we can read, contemplate, and identify where our special LIS skills and knowledge will be needed in this new domain. Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential answers this need. Published this year (2003) by MIT Press, Spinning the Semantic Web is a scholarly, well-written, and welcomed monograph. The forward, written by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web and visionary behind the Semantic Web, tells us that the contents of this book stem from papers given at a conference in 1999.3 Berners-Lee tells readers that “the scene is changing very quickly” and that it’s “essential” to check the W3C Web site (http://www.w3c.org) (accessed on 6/19/03) and the Semantic Web Activity homepage, noted above, to follow the Semantic Web’s development (p. xii). He also
November 2003 419
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The Journal of Academic Librarianship
rather with what it is intended to accomplish.” (p. 3) She describes in broad-brush strokes the three general metadata types— descriptive, administrative, and structural—and their intended ends: ●
● ●
descriptive: discovery, identification, selection, collocation, acquisition, evaluation, linkage, and usability administrative: facilitating resource management structural: enabling use
She differentiates clearly and usefully between metadata schemes and metadata profiles. Metadata schemes—“sets of metadata elements and rules for their use that have been defined for a particular purpose” (p. 5)—specify for a particular metadata set its semantics, its content rules, and its syntax. That is, a metadata scheme specifies the meaning of its individual metadata elements, how the values of those elements are selected and represented, and how the elements are encoded in machine-readable form. (p. 6 –7) Metadata profiles, meanwhile, are “formally developed specifications that limit and clarify the use of a metadata scheme for a specific user community.” (p. 7) Having noted previously that the early Dublin Core initiative (1995) “served as an agent of cross-fertilization between the library and Web communities, and was able to energize the library community with new concepts and terminology” (p. 2)—a rather more bi-directional situation in my opinion than Caplan’s characterization might lead one to believe— Caplan closes her opening chapter with as good a four paragraph summary as I’ve read of the four bibliographic entities comprehended by IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (work, expression, manifestation, and item) and summarizes well in but a single paragraph what library catalogers who have struggled with for over a decade now have come to refer to as the multiple versions problem (or MulVer), now “FRBR-ized” as the Multiple Manifestations problem. The chapter closes with the first of a series of useful Readings lists, and these lists occur throughout the book. Syntax and content rules are the focus of two chapters (chapts. 2 and 3) that discuss MARC, HTML, SGML, RDF, controlled vocabularies, classification schemes (LCC, DDC, UDC), and Identifiers from ISBNs to URLs. Interoperability and metadata in the context of the Web are the focus of two chapters (chapts. 4 and 5) that discuss union catalogs, crosssystem searching (Z39.50 and ZING), crosswalks, registries, Internet search engines (Google, and so forth), domain-specific search engines, channels, and Deep and Semantic Web issues. Caplan demonstrates in these discussions a real gift for condensing a wealth of material into digestible (in both senses of the word) increments. Chapters 7-15 provide overviews of several metadata schemes either commonly encountered in the library community or otherwise of relevance therein, including the TEI Header, the Dublin Core, EAD, metadata for Art/Architecture (VRA Core, and so forth), metadata for government information (GILS, and so forth), metadata for Education (GEM, and so forth), ONIX, metadata for Geospatial and Environmental Resources (FGDC’s CSDGM, and so forth), and DDI (the Data Documentation Initiative for social sciences datasets). Chapters 16-18 consider various issues related to administrative metadata (A-Core, and so forth),
structural metadata (“describes the internal organization of a resource” (p. 158), and rights metadata (OEB, and so forth). Again, Caplan’s facility for distilling complex issues intelligibly and intelligently stands her in very good stead in these chapters. The volume closes with a good and useful glossary and index. Perceptive readers will have noticed that I skipped Chapter 6 in the foregoing. This is Caplan’s chapter on Library Cataloging and is the one place in the volume she stumbles. In her acknowledgments, Caplan thanks Harvard’s Charles Spouses “who once suggested it might be more productive for me to learn something about library cataloging than to continue to complain that I didn’t understand it.” (p. ix) While Chapter 6 demonstrates that Caplan has taken Spouses’ suggestion to heart, it likewise demonstrates that biases die hard. On page 57, Caplan notes that “many involved in metadata initiatives take it as axiomatic that traditional library cataloging is too complex to be performed by nonprofessionals and too expensive to be practically applied to many types of resources. These complaints cannot be dismissed out of hand.” Indeed so. Unfortunately, Caplan neglects to note that nowhere have these complaints been taken more seriously than in the cataloging community itself. In 1993, the Cooperative Cataloging Council assembled by the Library of Congress adopted the following as its top-most goal: “Together, increase the timely availability of bibliographic and authority records by cataloging more items, by producing cataloging that is widely available for sharing and use by others, and by cataloging in a more cost-effective manner.”2 This has remained the highest priority goal of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), into which the Cooperative Cataloging Council grew. The PCC, in turn, has in the ensuing decade developed Core Record standards3 for 11 material types—including books, continuing resources, cartographic materials, collections, electronic resources, graphic materials, and so forth—as a consequence of which annual PCC monographic cataloging productivity has increased by almost 450% since 1995. Moreover, a good deal of conceptual thought has gone into rethinking cataloging in the digital age, thought manifest in a number of publications notably absent from Caplan’s Chapter 6 Reading list, including: Delsey, Tom. The Logical Structure of the Anglo American Cataloguing Rules – Parts I and II. August 1998 and January 1999. Available at http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/jsc/aacrint.pdf and http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/jsc/ aacrint2.pdf, respectively. (accessed on 8/17/03). Schottlaender, Brian E. C., editors. The Future of the Descriptive Cataloging Rules: Proceedings of the AACR2000 Preconference. Chicago: American Library Association, 1997. Weihs, Jean, editor. The Principles and Future of AACR: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR: Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 23/25, 1997. Ottawa: Canadian Library Association; London: Library Association Publishing; Chicago: American Library Association, 1998.
These publications, and the discussions that occasioned them, make clear that the complexity and expense of library cataloging are not being “dismissed out of hand,” least of all by the cataloging community. This “stumble” notwithstanding, Caplan’s volume is a cogent and successful introduction to a complex and rapidly evolving aspect of the information universe, and as such, a
welcome addition to the literature and my bookshelf.–Brian E. C. Schottlaender, University Librarian, UCSD Libraries, 9500 Gilman Drive 0175G, La Jolla, CA 92093-0175 ⬍[email protected]⬎.
NOTES
AND
REFERENCES
1. Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access. Task Force on Metadata. Final Report (June 2000)Available at http://www. ala.org/cfapps/archive.cfm?path@003dalcts/organization/ccs/ ccda/tf-meta6.html(accessed on 8/17/03). 2. Cooperative Cataloging Council Meeting, Library of Congress, April 22, 1993, Summary Report. Available at http://www.loc.gov/ catdir/pcc/archive/cccsumrpt.html (accessed on 8/17/03). 3. Introduction to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging BIBCO Core Record Standards. Available at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/ pcc/bibco/coreintro.html (accessed on 8/17/03).
Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential, edited by Dieter Fensel, James A Hendler, Henry Lieberman and Wolfgang Wahlster. Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press, 2002. 392p. $40.00. ISBN 0-26206-232-1. It’s likely that most of us library and information science (LIS) professionals and researchers have heard about the Semantic Web, but less likely that we have delved into readings on its development or actively engaged in its construction—a situation that is likely to change as this phenomenon unfolds. To get a grasp of the Semantic Web, there is a fairly landmark Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, inventor of the current Web, along with colleagues Hendler and Lassila (2001).1 As the Semantic Web unfolds, popular press articles have also appeared in newspapers and other magazines, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), home of the Semantic Web, provides an excellent Web site linking to important documents and resources (http://www.w3.org/ 2001/sw/) (accessed on 6/19/03). Within our immediate neighborhood, conferences are now including tracks for papers devoted to the Semantic Web (for example, The 2001 Dublin Core Conference included a track with papers on the Semantic Web). Also of note is the special issue of Information Research edited by Terrence A. Brooks (2002) and a special section of a recent ASIST Bulletin guest edited by Jane Greenberg (2003) both devoted to the Semantic Web.2 All this information is useful and helps us to learn about the Semantic Web, but we are in need of a scholarly book— one we can read, contemplate, and identify where our special LIS skills and knowledge will be needed in this new domain. Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential answers this need. Published this year (2003) by MIT Press, Spinning the Semantic Web is a scholarly, well-written, and welcomed monograph. The forward, written by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web and visionary behind the Semantic Web, tells us that the contents of this book stem from papers given at a conference in 1999.3 Berners-Lee tells readers that “the scene is changing very quickly” and that it’s “essential” to check the W3C Web site (http://www.w3c.org) (accessed on 6/19/03) and the Semantic Web Activity homepage, noted above, to follow the Semantic Web’s development (p. xii). He also
November 2003 419