web-ifying

In collaboration with the the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York and the Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY), METRO is pleased to present “Semantic Web for Librarians & Special Collections” with Corey Harper, Metadata Services Librarian from New York University.

Discovery systems and library web interfaces increasingly need to make use of metadata in a variety of formats and from myriad sources. With existing library technology, this is only possible through metadata harvesting and normalization, federated search, or some combination of the two. Both of these solutions are post-hoc, and don’t scale to the growing volume of data newly becoming available. Additionally, none of the standard library methods for metadata interoperability allow re-combining fragments of metadata at a finer granularity than the metadata record. This talk will focus on the technologies, philosophies and data models underpinning the Semantic Web and will demonstrate how these principles can improve metadata interoperability across library repositories and beyond.

Looking at library metadata in a broader context and “web-ifying” it has the potential to allow libraries to more effectively re-purpose and re-use their own data and more easily integrate new data sources into our discovery environments. Additionally, publishing linked data allows others on the web to make innovative and effective use of librarian-created metadata such as controlled vocabularies and authority control schemes to allow for re-combining fragments of metadata at a finer degree of granularity than the metadata record.

Corey A Harper has been the Metadata Services Librarian at NYU since early 2007. Much of that time has been spent on an ILS migration, and on the implementation and upkeep of a next-generation Enterprise Search System: ExLibris’ Primo. This experience has further convinced him of the need for more rigorous data modeling and the use of common web protocols to support metadata interoperability. Prior to coming to NYU, Corey was nearly-a-cataloger-but-instead-a-Metadata-Librarian, as well as a Digital Library Developer and accidentally a systems librarian at the University of Oregon.

Date: Thursday, April 8, 2010

Time: 10:30 – 12:00 pm

Place: The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room (9100, 9th Floor), 365 Fifth Avenue, between 34th and 35th Streets.

Fee: $25.00 for METRO and ART members; $40 for non-members

Registration: http://bit.ly/bcsgII

via techMETRO.

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