Metadata Call 2015-03-17

Time: 9:00am PDT / Noon EDT

Call-In Info: 1-530-881-1400, access code 651025

Moderator: Karen Estlund (Univ. Oregon)

Notetaker: Esmé Cowles

Attendees: 

• Karen Estlund

• Esmé Cowles
• Nick Ruest
• Jon Stroop
• Chrissy Rissmeyer
• Sharon Farnel
• Eric James
• Corey Harper
• Julie Hardesty
• Carolyn Hannsen
• Aaron Coburn

Agenda:

1. Review Samvera Metadata Interest Group
2. Set deliverables & timelines (including in-person meeting discussions)
3. Additional Items
4. Review next steps
   
   

 

Minutes

 

1. Goals & scope
   1. Karen: Comes out of Code4Lib discussions: how do we make this understandable to new people?
   2. Esme: Getting down to individual fields, predicates, etc. and agreeing at this level will increase interoperability and ability to share code
   3. Chrissy: Crosswalks between various formats and the recommendations could help people by not having to start from scratch
   4. Jon: Technical metadata more of a blocker for me
   5. Esme: Agree that technical metadata is narrower and a good place to start
   6. Corey: Descriptive more critical and time-pressing for some – making it up as we go along
   7. Karen: Maybe we should consider forming subgroups to tackle different pieces?
   8. Nick: Ties in with the Fedora 4 Audit service being developed now, which will impact the technical metadata
   9. Esme: Also some issues with technical metadata in Fedora 4
   10. Corey: Actually, we're interested in technical metadata too, so maybe that's just as pressing as the descriptive metadata questions
2. Formats:
   
   1. Descriptive: DC, MARC, MODS/MADS (incl. RDF), VRA Core, BIBFRAME, Schema.org
   2. Technical: PROV-O, PREMIS
   3. Rights:
3. Questions:
   1. Do we target Fedora 4 exclusively?  Fedora 3?  Marmotta?
      1. Esme: Fedora 4 and Marmotta should be pretty compatible, bigger question about Fedora 3.
      2. Karen: Should focus on Fedora 4, provides guidance for Fedora 3 though.
      3. Sharon: Should focus on helping newcomers adopt linked data
      4. Karen: So we should focus on Fedora 4 and helping newcomers adopt it, with secondary goals for helping it fit with other platforms, including Fedora 3.
   2. Do we target Linked Data?  Or support file-based metadata too?
4. Deliverables & timelines
   1. Recommendations for Fedora 3 and how it fits in with these recommendations
   2. Base technical metadata application profile
      1. Is everybody OK with FITS?
      2. It has had gotten out of date and maybe using component parts (DROID, PRONOM, JHove)
      3. This may be better now, good place to start
   3. Recommendations for tools for technical metadata generation, esp. for newcomers
      1. This can be part of the tech metadata profile: we're working in the FITS context, so recommend using it
   4. Recommendations for rights metadata, including outlining difference between rights and access control
   5. Structural?
      1. Might be too soon to work on this
      2. But examples of how it would be implemented
      3. This would be very useful for the sprint Penn State is organizing
         1. Maybe the other way around – use the sprint output to guide more specific example building?
         2. Or iterate to find differences of interpretation and resolve them?
   6. Descriptive metadata recommendations
      1. Very important, but also controversial
      2. The elephant in the room
      3. There will always be multiple different standards in use, should focus on interoperability between them – models should have some common baseline
      4. We should involve our metadata librarians and user stories in this process since they are key to working through these issues
   7. Recommendations for working with nested RDF/XML, using multiple vocabularies on the same resources, how these impact metadata mapping to Fedora 4, etc.
   8. Recommendations for how metadata maps into Solr for discovery – is that done in Ruby or in some separate process? How does caching of linked data work?  Lots of people working on this, but it would be great to recommend one approach and document it for new adopters.
5. Next steps
   
   1. Karen will put out a broader call with better-defined scope and objectives, including asking people to sign up for Technical, Rights, Descriptive, and Linked Data working groups.