Metadata Call 2021-06-22

Owned by Anna Goslen
Last updated: Jun 22, 2021
3 min read

Time: 2:00pm-3:00pm Eastern

Call-In Info: https://zoom.us/j/211033358?pwd=WERUdnBWeHRqRVBRMmlOVWU3SlN0QT09
Community Notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fa5xp7cfn2ZvyQJHYLPsFEzqYRVEIIgCu-qkBVxZo98/edit?usp=sharing

Moderator(s): Anna Goslen
Notetaker: Nora Z.


Attendees:

  • Anna Goslen (UNC-Chapel Hill)

  • Julie Hardesty (Indiana University)

  • Nora Zimmerman (Lafayette)

  • Jen Young (Northwestern)

  • Heather Greer Klein (Samvera)

  • Ryan Wick (Oregon State University)

  • Annamarie Klose (Ohio State University)

  • Sarah Seymore (University of Oregon)

Agenda:

  • Subgroup Reports

    • URI Selection Working Group

      • No update, but they do plan to meet this summer to discuss the community vocabulary manager

  • Roadmaps Alignment Group Update

    • Plan to meet with Partners next month to go over data that has been gathered from the community about projects and priorities, in order to coordinate work.

  • Issues/Questions

    • Knowledge base - question about frequency, timelines for updating. There is open PR for updating the MAP. Who to ask? Previously there was a working group doing this work. No longer meeting? Was this the Documentation WG? 

      • Bring this up on Tech call? That seems like a good place to start. There is a larger conversation about how to keep PRs from falling through the cracks generally, good to consider the knowledge base specifically. 

      • Ryan: helps if tagged with version. Workflow and roles for reviewing pull requests and merging them are not clear. 

      • Jen: At Northwestern, they are using github repo for documentation, in conjunction with a tool called Poetry that helps to manage updates and merging.

    • Julie: consider attending Dev congress week of July 12. Broader audience than devs.

    • Annamarie: Previously, SMIG has discussed the widespread community use of the edtf-humanize gem.  Are there any plans to add this to the community roadmap, so that it can be incorporated into the Hyrax codebase? Would it be helpful for her to make an issue on github? 

      • Ryan: how does this gem handle dates that are not valid edtf? It could activate when dates are valid edtf. 

        • Incorporation of gems into an application codebase can have buggy unintended consequences

      • Julie: Backwards compatibility and the out-of-the-box behavior would have to be considered

  • Discussion Topics

    • Continued from last month’s meeting, Hyrax issue review: help prioritize open issues that are labeled ‘metadata’

    • Work through the remaining 3.x issues labeled ‘metadata’. For each issue: is this still needed? Comments/context needed? Priority?

      • https://github.com/samvera/hyrax/issues/395

        • SMIG has recently made the recommendation (for issue #4781) that Creator, Contributor, and Title are the multi-value fields where ordering would matter most; but this order would be context-dependent, rather than purely alphabetical. 

        • Would it be desirable for alphasort to be a fallback for field ordering, where user-supplied order is not possible? 

          • No; group consensus is that alphasort is not necessarily better than the out-of-the-box chaos of RDF nonsorting. 

          • Alphasort implies an order and context that is artificial. If this is desirable to a local instance, it could be done locally. 

        • Anna G. will summarize this discussion and post a comment.

        • Issue rationale is that folks may want to add html/markdown style formatting to fields, e.g. italics, line breaks. 

        • Annamarie: there are other fields, for example bibliographic_citation and abstract, where this could also apply and be useful.  

        • Anna: concern that these formatting tags have problematic implications for long-term metadata usability and interoperability. 

        • Is Hyrax rich text editing available for use with metadata? Or just for web pages? Whitelist of tags to use may vary between institutions. This complex formatting seems more appropriate to a digital exhibit versus an item record in a repository. 

          • Use cases for this feature would be helpful, if it were to be pursued.

      • Neither of these two issues seem to be very high priority for Hyrax development but we will share these questions and discussion points.

    • Remaining issues not marked 3.x. Are there any issues labeled ‘Backlog’ that should actually be 3.x?

      • Julie: Maintenance WG issue testers are going through based on the labels that have been applied and testing them in nurax.dev. Haven’t gotten into looking at those issues labeled metadata yet, in order to determine if they are so old that they aren’t relevant anymore. 

        • Focus is on fixing Geonames bugginess. 

        • Julie: this will likely be added to 3.x as a project

  • Next call: July 27th, 2-3pm EST