Week 3 Reading Notes LIS 2600

I have to say right off the bat that this week's readings were particularly dry and difficult for me to remain engaged in. I think metadata, while important, is probably the least appealing aspect of a library career for me. My notes will thus be equally dry, so please forgive me.

http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/intrometadata/setting.html

-Describes metadata as “the sum total of what one can say about any information object at any level of aggregation.”

-Defines information object as “anything that can be addressed and manipulated as a discrete entity by a human being or an information system. The object may comprise a single item, it may be an aggregate of many items, or it may be the entire database or record-keeping system.”

-                         -  3 features: Content, Context, Structure

o   Argues that all 3 of these should be reflected through metadata

For librarians, metadata is the “value-added” info they create to “arrange, describe, track, and otherwise enhance access to information objects and the physical collections related to those objects.”

Interesting criticism that hierarchical metadata aids only the scholarly user. Online situations will need a more accessible structure b/c they won’t be mediated by a reference librarian.

I like the idea of user-created metadata – tagging. While quality control is an issue, I feel like (especially in a digital environment), if someone knows what they are looking for, an object that has every possible tag will make it easier to retrieve. If someone does not know what they are looking for, multiple tags will be useful in a different way because a useful object will show up in the results despite a perhaps otherwise ineffective search term. 

http://dublincore.org/1999/06/06-overview/

DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) seeks to foster consensus across disciplines “for the discovery-oriented description of diverse resources in an electronic environment.”

-          Primarily been focused on semantic clarification of the Dublin Core Element Set and id of common cross-domain qualifiers to support richer descriptive requirements.

This seems like an interesting initiative, but I am not tech-savvy enough to understand the implications of it. I think anything that looks for the common ground across disciplines is useful though, because if people need information about a certain subject they are unlikely to look in any other subject, despite the fact that there is much important cross-over...

http://www.hsl.unc.edu/Services/Tutorials/ENDNOTE/intro.htm

EndNote X5: Introduction:

EndNote is a bibliographic software program

Can be used to search for literature, develop a personal library of references, and create citations for papers/publications.

I find it annoying to try to learn software that I don't own - I learn more easily by messing around with it. Watching videos and reading about how to do things I can't do isn't useful to me. 

It would be helpful to have a better introduction to things like this - perhaps Zheu could write a line or two about what we should be trying to gain from looking at these tutorials, and to what in our future as librarians this knowledge would apply.