Gail Hodge

Metadata for electronic information resources: From variety to interoperability

Metadata serves several purposes. It supports resource discovery, locates the actual digital resource by inclusion of a digital identifier, organizes electronic resources bringing similar resources together and distinguishing dissimilar resources, provides administrative information for controlling the digital library, and provides technical, preservation and rights management information needed to support immediate and long-term permanent access. There are a variety of metadata schemes that serve different purposes for different object types, subjects and audiences. With disparate metadata schemes, ensuring that information collected in a specific scheme by one organization for a particular purpose can be exchanged, transferred or used by another organization for a different purpose becomes an issue. Metadata frameworks, crosswalks, and registries are ways to achieve interoperability. Controlled terminologies add more precise meaning to metadata. The integration of controlled terminologies and metadata schemes is key to the development of the Semantic Web.

Electronic collection management and electronic information services

As the life cycle of information products has become increasingly digital from “cradle to grave”, the nature of electronic information management has dramatically changed. These changes have brought new strategies and methods as well as new issues and challenges. At the bottom line the services are increasingly delivered to a desktop from distributed publishers or information providers. Information organizations act either as primary information providers or as brokers between the user and the primary service provider. This paper covers developments in the factors and strategies affecting collection management and access. It discusses major trends in electronic user services including electronic information delivery, information discovery and electronic reference. Finally, it addresses the challenges in user and personnel education in response to this electronic environment and an increasingly information literate user population.

Digital gazetteers: integration into distributed digital library services

This NKOS workshop for JCDL (the 5th in the series: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/) will focus on work-in-progress on gazetteer services and gazetteer-related projects in connection with distributed digital library services. It builds on the Digital Gazetteer Information Exchange (DGIE) workshop funded by the NSF in October 1999.Digital gazetteers are specialized KOS that map placenames and types of places to map-based locations and thus integrate word-based georeferencing to map-based georeferencing. The format consists of invited and selected presentations and discussion sessions, with the goal of developing collaborations for future research and development.Participants may provide handouts describing their own gazetteer and other NKOS related projects and will be given the opportunity to introduce their work and their interests briefly.

Formats for digital preservation: A review of alternatives and issues

Digital formats are acceptable means of preserving Government information. However, with the variety of digital formats available, the question arises as to which format should be used. Therefore, CENDI, an interagency group of scientific and technical information managers within the US Government, reviewed alternative digital formats and the issues related to them. The study was conducted in the interest of implementing best practices in information life-cycle management, to dispel any misunderstandings related to digital formats, and to provide scientific and technical information agencies with enough information so they can determine the most appropriate preservation format for their environment. Four formats commonly used or being considered for use by CENDI agencies and other organizations for preserving documents, TIFF, PDF, PDF/A, and XML, were reviewed. A previous assessment of these formats, which was conducted by the Library of Congress (LC) as part of a more comprehensive evaluation of LC collections, is put in the context of the CENDI agencies. The technical, quality, and functionality factors are described as part of a framework for deciding the appropriateness of a particular format or multiple formats. The decision about the appropriate format is an important component of a preservation plan that must be balanced with other components such as available resources and sustainability.

Building a meaningful Web: from traditional knowledge organization systems to new semantic tools

The Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS) workshop is focused on the transformation of traditional knowledge organization systems (KOSs) to new forms of knowledge representation that are being developed to support a more semantic-based, meaningful Web environment. The goal was to identify principles from more traditional practices that can contribute to the design of new knowledge-organization systems and ways to exploit the extensive intellectual capital available in traditional KOSs when developing new KOS tools. We describe the development of specific Web service functionality applicable to KOSs. The benefits of this service-based approach and the possibility of universal or community-based KOS services were explored. NKOS is an ad hoc group devoted to the discussion of KOSs as networked interactive information services to support the description and retrieval of diverse information resources through the Internet.

A Metadata Element Set for Project Documentation

ABSTRACT NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a large engineering enterprise which designs and develops instruments and unmanned spacecraft, with the majority of its work performed through projects and project teams. Project documentation is organized in separate project library systems making it difficult to discover resources across project libraries, to share knowledge and to support long-term preservation of and access to the information. The “Goddard Core,” based on qualified Dublin Core with extensions, was developed to support evaluation and resource discovery of project-oriented information across project libraries. Broader issues for project management metadata are also examined.

Net gain via knowledge organization: classification and productivity

The benefits of knowledge organization (KO) systems have been documented by many (e.g., Hodge, 2000; Hjorland, 2008; Abbas, 2010). Despite known advantages, KO investment appears to vary widely among and within industry, research, and educational communities. Data specific to KO investment and the impacts (gains and losses) is limited. The societal benefits of improving KO systems may thus be under-appreciated, both within and beyond the field. This panel addresses a need for discussion on KO investment and impacts. The panel brings together experts and researchers who are either on-the-front-line addressing KO in operational systems, or researching aspects of KO development and investment. Topics covered include taxonomies and constant state of change; impacts of risk and KO; the notion of KO capital; and classification and productivity. The panel moderator will facilitate a discussion on evaluation approaches for gaining insight into the economic impacts of KO.

Panel: Semantic metadata as linked data building blocks

In the Linked Data movement, value vocabularies (such as the Linked Data version of a thesaurus or a classification scheme) and metadata element sets (which are generally made concrete through RDF Schemas or OWL ontologies) have become the building blocks of any dataset that joins the CKAN Linked Data hub of the Open Knowledge Foundation (2012). Evidence can be seen either from analyzing the datasets in the Data Hub or by browsing through the long list of the value vocabularies and metadata element sets included in one of the three deliverables of the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group Final Report (2011). This panel will introduce the concept of semantic metadata and the two types of vocabularies involved, discuss how value vocabularies are transformed in order for machine to process and understand, present new use cases of the conventional knowledge organization systems (KOS) in the Semantic Web environment, and report the findings regarding publishing semantic assets, describing and accessing them, and enabling their interoperability in the Semantic Web environment.

The public domain under pressure. Sponsored by SIG IFP, III, STI

Public domain information, whether limited to judicial decisions or extended to all government-authored or sponsored works, has been expounded as a means of ensuring a knowledgeable citizenry, promoting economic advancement, and ensuring that publicly funded information is not “double taxed”. However, the public domain has come under increased pressures as the global information economy changes. The speakers in this session will address these pressures from a number of different national and disciplinary views.

Preservation of and permanent access to electronic information resources: A system perspective

The rapid growth in the creation and dissemination of electronic information has emphasized the digital environment’s speed and ease of dissemination with little regard for its long-term preservation and access. To some extent, electronic libraries, that is those libraries that are moving toward provision of materials in electronic form, have been swept up in this attitude as well. Electronic information includes a variety of object types such as electronic journals, e-books, databases, data sets, reference works, and web sites, which are born digital or which have their primary version in digital form.