(This week's reading gave me some pretty awful cataloging flashbacks - all of those acronyms came rushing back in a flood. AACR, MARC, & RDA, oh my! After a 2 year stint in cataloging, I knew that I was better suited for reference work. To all of those aspiring catalogers out there, I salute you!)
Database/ Wikipedia
This article was a fairly straight-forward explanation of what databases are (a collection of data), their varieties & how they're used. I've used with relational database management systems & software (Access, SQL), but I don't have that much experience with object DMS.
Introduction to Metadata / Gilliland & An Overview of the Dublin Core Data Model / Miller
Metadata is basically, "data about data." This term is used to describe how an object (or set of objects) is classified or found or managed in a specific setting/organization. In many academic libraries, Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is used, while some school & public libraries use Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). A lucky few of us who work in special libraries end up creating special in-house systems. Tagging in user-generated environments (blogs, wikis, etc) comes pretty close to what metadata is about. Having good metadata is enormously important for accessibility, whether you are in an academic, public or special library. Let's say you are searching for an Italian cookbook in your library. You've checked the online catalog & found the call number associated with "cooking, Italian" is TX723. In LCSH, TX means "home economics" and the number range 642-840 describes specific methods or varieties of cooking. If the online catalog has more complete records available for public view, you can also see author & publisher information, physical details about the item (format, pages, illustrations, photos), physical location, & other classification schemes. On the cataloger side, one can see all of that information as well as machine readable fields (MARC) that make that item accessible to external databases. The public can see Batali, Mario in the Author field, while a cataloger or external database can see his name in the 100 field represented this way: 100 1 Batali, Mario.
Unfortunately, as thorough as it is, LCSH (or any other cataloging scheme) can't possibly accurately describe data for every discipline. That's where the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative comes in. This initiative is proposing standardized metadata that can be used across disciplines, languages & also internationally. As you can see from my lengthy LCSH example above, each information community has their own language & terms that may not easily or ever translate to another community - even if they're describing the same objects. The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set is the basic set of fifteen components used for resource description, ranging from "creator" to "type."
Tracy,
ReplyDeleteWell-put -- your overview of the metadata topics is really clear. I think you're right to emphasize the way different communities will have different terms. To make things even more complicated, it might not even be a different word, but different concepts. I wonder how we can best address the "lost in translation" problem as LIS professionals.