Visit http://metadata.library.cornell.edu/metadata.html for an incredible source of information on metadata.
3 Essential Action Items
3 Essential action items identified by ACRL that academic libraries must take in order to meet the necessary transformation for the future are:
- move beyond being perceived primarily as the place for books
- the culture of academic libraries needs to replace the dominant attitudes of ownership and control with a penchant for useful services and guidance
- academic libraries must descend from what many people see as ‘an encreasingly isolated perch of presumed privilege’ (in the old days we called the Ivory Tower) and enter the rough and tumble fray to develop and deploy information services for a new age
Timeliness of communication is a must.
Fundamental changes in technology, research, teaching, and learning have created a very different context for the missions of academic libraries.
Part of the challenge is that academic libraries were defined primarily as places that held print resources - now most scholarly information is shunted about as digital. “In many respects the academic library has become transparent” - visits to the library are infrequent but access to the digital resources that are funded out of the libraries budget are constant.
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/future/changingroles.htm
ETG - the final post?
I am sorry to have the 2.0 learning come to an end. It was an extremely positive experience . The concepts were clearly presented and the tools introduced at a good speed - although I will go back to fully explore many of the tools that I did not have time to fully explore.
I was surprised at how easy many of the 2.0 tools were to use (excellent presentations on the part of the ETG Groups) and how many tools were available that I had not been exposed to. I would not hesitate to try others both at work and in my at home web work. I will also continue to blog in several areas/topics.
The social aspects of the technologies were my favorite - I had used many tools, such as Facebook and Second Life, before the ETG activities were introduced so having other staff members join in was great. The shared learning added to the positive experience.
I was most surprised at how much I enjoyed the gaming . Most of my past gaming experience was simply a means of communicating with my children and not necessarily my choice of games. The game I chose and played via ETG was both addictive and fun. I asked my teenager son if he had ever played it and he replied ‘No why would I?’ - perhaps a slight generation gap.
The only suggestion I have for futher sessions is to have more demo sessions - perhaps at lunch to accomodate those of us with little time…
Thanks for the positive learning experience. I will definitely participate in future sessions. Congrats on a well run program.
Browser 411
411 indeed - I now have too many options on Firefox and Explorer!
The process was enlightening, I had no idea that so many add ons were available. Started with adding the weather and moved on… and tried many. Will explore the ’uninstall’ feature next week for the features I find I am not using, as my response time has slowed.
Many of the add ons I tried were fun (such as the appearance of my browser-changed the colour and appearance of the icons many times) other add ons I will use daily. Found Wiktor’s bookmarklets to be very useful. I am looking forward to using the Web Developer on my pottery webpage at home.
Facebook and Myspace
Have been forced to use facebook since September as it is the sole form of communication used by my son. He no longer uses email/phone and as a result I am the ‘communication channel’ with rest of my family (who do not subscribe to Facebook)
Facebook is certainly a more social and diverse tool than emailing - but I find it takes more time as I am always switching from email to facebook and back again, and the messages are not indexed as I might expect.
Recently subscribed to myspace and immediately made friends with Tom who was there to answer all my ‘myspace’ questions. Very social software! Invited several facebook friends to join and will compare the two social networks.
snipshot to print
Small pot
Big pot
Very very easy!! to capure and manipulate images, send them to Flickr and post other places! Will use this frequently. What a super feature.
Gaming
Gaming was a pleasant surprise. With the exception of the wii, it has been years since I have used the computer or electronic device for anything but work. I tried the arcade game - bricks of egypt, as from the title it appeared to have a historical relevance(not so). I limited myself to 10 minutes and enjoyed it very much.
It is essential to introduce gaming concepts in our 2.0 library to communicate with our users.
Interesting Metadata post
Exert from Diane Hillmann’s “Building Metadata Application Profiles”, a 3-day course at the University of New Brunswick Electronic Text Centre’s Summer Seminar Series.
1) Reduce the number of “left-side” attributes and put your effort into adding specificity and granularity to the “right-side” values (left and right sides of the ‘=’ sign, that is). Basically, using standardized (Dublin Core) element names and taking advantage of the flexibility of Dublin Core’s various mechanisms for qualifying the elements promotes good “dumbing down” to unqualified Dublin Core.
2) Eveyone thinks “their stuff” is special and they therefore need to invent a new element set. In Diane’s experience, it is rare that a particular community cannot find encoding schemes and vocabularies that are publicly available and reusable. Finding application profiles, encoding schemes, and vocabularies can be challenging but there are a number of efforts underway to develop registries to facilitate sharing and reusing this information.
3) Share your application profile so others can benefit from your work. Part of sharing is documenting, which also has significant benefits to your own (or your successors’) use of your application profile.
5) Do not develop your application profile to compensate for deficiencies in your application. This is a no-brainer but people tend to include elements taylored to the search and retrieval system they are currently using. Robust metadata that is developed independent of particular applications will be much easier to migrate and to use in different contexts than metadata that is tied to particular software applications.
6) Do not include administrative metadata in your application profile. Application profiles should define how we describe resources, not records. Identifier elements should be used to tie resources to administrative metadata.
Tagging
Searched metadata on Delicious and received 19,769 colourful results - good tags– found it very user friendly.
Searched the same term on google and found received 63,700,000 results in a less colourful display more like a dictionary. I did find the same results that I had searching Delicious and loads more…
