techMETRO

VRA Core Session to Cover Metadata for Cultural Materials on May 9

 Join us at METRO on Monday, May 9^th to learn more about a topic that is of growing importance to anyone who deals with cultural materials in image archives, museums, or digital libraries.  VRA Core, a metadata standard for the description of images and works of art and culture, will be the central focus of this workshop as instructor Elisa Lanzi leads participants through a discussion of its major aspects, benefits, and more.  To learn more and register for “VRA Core: an Introduction to Metadata for Cultural Materials,” please visit http://www.metro.org/en/cev/61.

Description:

The VRA Core is a metadata standard for the description of images and works of art and culture.  The standard is hosted by the Library of Congress Network Development and MARC Standards Office in partnership with the Visual Resources Association. Our workshop will cover the overall benefits of using the VRA Core in order to ensure streamlined inputting of crucial information about works and images and to improve searching and user understanding.  Participants will have an opportunity to learn and experience best practices for cultural cataloguing using VRA Core and related standards, such as Cataloging Cultural Objects.  The workshop introduces participants to the major aspects of VRA Core including:  the basic element set, the use of authorities and controlled vocabularies, and the VRA Core schema for sharable metadata. Focusing on the decision-making process for creating descriptions, the workshop agenda includes real-life examples, presentations, and group exercises. The instructor will gather workshop participant questions and topics of concern ahead of time.

Who should attend:

Cataloguers and collection managers who deal with cultural materials in image archives, museums, and digital libraries.  This workshop assumes that the participant has little or no familiarity with VRA Core but has some familiarity with descriptive practice.

By the end of this program, participants will:

• understand the conceptual model of the VRA Core
• know how the VRA Core relates to other metadata standards
• learn about diverse cataloging situations for cultural materials
• be able to apply the basic elements of VRA Core practice

Please contact Laura Forshay at lforshay@metro.org with any questions.

 

METRO Lecture to Address Libraries’ Role in the Linked Data Movement on May 5

Join us at METRO on May 5^th for the latest installment of our lecture series. Returning instructor Dr. Marcia Zeng will introduce participants to the Linked Data movement and how it can help us make connections to form a much broader data universe.  As demands for digital data continue to increase rapidly, Linked Data could drastically change the way we access information on a daily basis.  Join us for “Enriching Metadata Services through Linked Data” and gain a better understanding of its possible applications in your library. 

Description:
The Linked Open Data project has exceeded 200 very large datasets within two years. Among them are a growing number of datasets provided by libraries and archives, the data.gov dataset of the U.S. government which host the largest open collections of RDF datasets in the world, as well as large media’s resources (e.g., BBC, New York Times), social sciences, publications, and scientific datasets.  The Linked Data movement is about using the Web to connect related data formerly isolated in small or large repositories (often called “silos”) and not previously linked. Linked Data is also about using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods.  This session aims to help open our minds and eyes to reach a much more diverse data universe, and to consider more effectively providing services to library users through enhancing metadata services or digital collections with Linked Data technologies and resources.  The workshop will explain the principles, concepts, and the potential usage of the Linked Data in libraries of all sizes.  It will not cover technical implementation topics.

To learn more or to register, please visit http://www.metro.org/en/cev/46.

To register for Dr. Zeng’s Introduction to Metadata for Digital Collections workshop (May 3 & 4), please visit http://www.metro.org/en/cev/45. 

 

Upcoming Program at Brooklyn Public Lib to Feature LOC Recollection Project

Received word about this great program from Micah Vandegrift:  

From Records to Data: Seeing and Sharing Digital Cultural Heritage Collections Differently With Recollection

Date: Thursday, May 19th, 3:00-4:30

Location: Brooklyn Public Library - Central Branch
Dr. S. Stevan Dweck Center for Contemporary Culture

Abstract:
In the library, archives, and museum world we have a tendency to think about things in digital collections as “objects” or “records.” In many ways we bring the strengths and limitations of thinking about this information like cards in a catalog as opposed to data in a database. This demonstration will walk through how Recollection, a free and open source web application, is being developed to help us see our data differently, and ultimately make it as easy as possible for us to share those new ways of seeing our collections with any and everyone. Briefly, Recollection is a free open source platform for generating and customizing views (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow scholars, librarians and curators to explore digital collections in novel and intuitive ways. This demonstration will show how content stewards can ingest collections from spreadsheets, sets of MODS records, or RSS and Atom feeds and then generate a range of interactive visualizations, including charts and maps, as well as sophisticated faceted browsing interfaces for users of their digital collections. It will conclude by showing how users can use simply copy-paste from Recollection to embed visualizations and interfaces anywhere on the Web. Recollection is under active development by NDIIPP partner, Zepheira, LLC . If you are interested in participating in the Recollection beta please contact NDIIPPaccess at loc.gov and we can create an account for you.
 
Bio:
Trevor Owens is a Digital Archivist with the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) at the Library of Congress and a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University. Before coming to the Library of Congress he worked as the community lead for the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media and before that for the Games, Learning, and Society Conference. At the Library of Congress he is involved in a range of software projects related to discovery and access of digital cultural heritage collections.

CFP for Recent Developments in the Design, Construction and Evaluation of Digital Libraries

My co-editor on Digitization in the Real World is working on a new book that readers might be interested in: 

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

Proposal Submission Deadline: April 16, 2011

Recent Developments in the Design, Construction and Evaluation of Digital Libraries

A book edited by Dr. Colleen Cool and Dr. Kwong Bor Ng
Queens College, City University of New York

Introduction

Over the past two decades there has been an evolutionary change in the world of libraries from mostly print based collections to today’s current environment in which the phrase digital library is no longer new, but rather, is synonymous with library itself.  Scholars and practicing librarians continually grapple with issues and challenges as the digital library continues to evolve and change the library landscape. Chapters  in this volume will address recent developments in the design, construction and evaluation of digital libraries in a variety of library environments. Emphasis will be on practical strategies and lessons learned from real world case studies. A context for understanding current trends will be created by an introductory historical framework that discusses the evolution of digital libraries and a unifying framework that looks at digital library users, content and evaluation. Authors will include academics and practicing professionals, with strong representation from the international community.

Objective

This volume will include the diverse writings of designers, content builders and evaluation specialists in the digital libraries arena, in order that scholars and practitioners have a unified and better understanding of this multifaceted topic area. This work will inform both theory and practice, with the following objectives:

• Presenting a critical analysis of the subject to assist faculty and practicing librarians;
• Presenting  case studies displaying innovation and creative use of technology in libraries in and outside of the United States?
• Bringing  to the attention of scholars and practitioners the global perspectives on digital libraries represented in these practical case studies;
• Synthesizing  current approaches to the evaluation of digital libraries, from both user and system oriented approaches;

Target Audience

The target audience of this book will be composed of professionals and researchers working in the field of digital libraries and electronic archives. Moreover, this book will provide faculty and graduate students in LIS programs a thorough and comprehensive reference for teaching and learning of the growing area of digital librarianship.

Recommended topics discussed in the case studies include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Competing concepts of the digital library
• Essential components of a digital library
• Evaluation metrics and library services of digital library
• Approaches to user-centered digital library design, lessons learned and challenges ahead
• For whom are digital libraries being created, and for what purpose?
• Digital libraries for Individuals, Communities and Societies
• Digital collection building, collection development policy and content management
• Techniques for creating collections
• Traditional and novel methods for evaluating digital libraries from system-oriented and user-centric perspectives
• Library services in digital library environments
• Changes and future challenges in digital librarianship
• Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before April 21, 2011, a 2-3 page chapter proposal clearly explaining the objective and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by June 1, 2011 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters (7000+ words) are expected to be submitted by Aug 16, 2011. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global, publisher of the “Information Science Reference”, as part of the book series, Advances in Library Information Science (ALIS), edited by Mirela Roncevic.  For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com.

Proposals for chapters should be sent to both:

Colleen Cool:  colleen.cool@gmail.com

Kwong bor Ng: kbng@qc.edu

 

Upcoming Special Interest Group Meeting to Feature New CONTENTdm Version

Digitization SIG Meeting: Introducing the Newly Re-designed OCLC CONTENTdm

 Date: May 16, 2011
Time: 10am-12pm
Location: Metropolitan New York Library Council, 57 East 11th Street, 4th Floor New York, NY 10003-4605

Suzanne Butte from OCLC will provide an overview/demonstration of the significant changes with the release of CONTENTdm Version 6 – most notably the new end-user interface and Website configuration tools.    She will also briefly review additional changes/enhancements that have occurred with CONTENTdm 6 and previous releases. 

To register, go to http://www.metro.org/en/cev/67

 

New York Academy of Medicine Library Hosts (Free) Wireless Networking Class

Readers might be interested in a free workshop on building and designing a wireless network in a library environment. Here are the details from the registration page.  

Date: April 22, 2011 
Time: 2:00PM - 4:00PM

The class is scheduled on Fridays from 2:00pm to 4:00pm for four weeks, starting April 22, 2011.

Speaker: Yixiong Xu, CISSP

Sponsored by: The New York Academy of Medicine

Location: The New York Academy of Medicine, 1216 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, New York, NY 10029

The New York Academy of Medicine will host a series of classes on how to build and design your wireless network. The class is free to all member libraries of NLM and METRO members who are interested.

The class targets the following people, who are interested in learning how to set up wireless network at a library environment, but

1. Who do not know where to look for the materials.
2. Who know where to get the material but having problems to digest the materials.
3. Who can digest the materials but having trouble to connect the knowledge to the wireless equipment.
4. Who know the wireless equipment but do not know how to merge them to a real IT network.
5. Even people know all the above, each institution is unique. The discussion in the class is the best way on how to improve themselves.

Registration Information
Cost: Free

 

Still Time to Register for "Information Architecture and Interaction Design" Next Week

Next Friday, April 15th, returning instructor Dr. David Walczyk will be presenting a new workshop at METRO.  "Information Architecture and Interaction Design" will introduce participants to a new way to understand and work with information using digital technologies. 

As media change, information changes, and so must the people working with it. Information architecture (IA), and by extension interaction design (IxD), are the foundations of librarianship. This has always been so. Understanding new mediums of communication and their advantage and disadvantages for encapsulating information has always been a primary responsibility of information professionals.  Using a case study methodology, this workshop will introduce participants to the field of IA/IxD. We will begin by reviewing the perceptual model necessary for thinking and working with IA/IxD. We will then apply this model to the process of IA/IxD by reviewing a case study from start to finish. We will conclude with an in-class exercise that tests our understanding of the perceptual model and our capacity to employ it.

By the end of this program, participants will:

• Have developed the core leadership skills necessary for working with IA’s/IxD consultants and employees
• Have learned the perceptual model required for understanding and working with IA/IxD
• Know the core language used within IA/IxD
• Become familiar with the framework for doing IA/IxD

To learn more or to register, please visit http://www.metro.org/en/cev/51.

Please contact Laura Forshay at lforshay@metro.org, 212.228.2320 x10 with any questions.

METRO Collaborative Digitization Grant Applications, Information Available

Applications for METRO's 2011 digitization grants program are now available on the METRO website. The 2011 Digital METRO New York program is focused on supporting collaborative digitization projects between METRO member institutions. The purpose of the funding is to facilitate the collaboration between two or more institutions converting regionally significant non-digital materials to digital format -- thereby enhancing the availability of the information resources to METRO members. Additionally, this program will also assist members in preparing for future larger-scale collaborative digitization projects.

METRO member institutions located in New York City and Westchester County are eligible to apply for up to $25,000 to fund collaborative projects between two or more institutions. METRO has allocated approximately $70,000 for the 2011/2012 grant cycle. Funding is open for all types of materials including text, photographs, postcards, maps, newspapers, two- and three-dimensional objects, audio, video, etc. You can read more about current 2010/2011 grantees here and download the application for 2011/2012 here.

INFORMATION SESSION RECORDING
Watch a 30 minute webinar hosted by METRO on April 5, 2011 about the grant program and process.

 

ALSO OF NOTE:
METRO will be hosting a webinar titled "Keys to Successful Digital Collaboration on Friday June 3, 2011 with presenter Liz Bishoff. Learn more and register here.

Can You Identify this New York City Building?

A visitor to the New York Heritage site (a project to which METRO members contribute), asked if we could help identify the name and location of a building her sister painted. Here's an excerpt from her note and the painting. Can you help us crowdsource more information about this building? Does it even exist in NYC? Is it just a design sketch? Let us know in the comments.

My sister was a watercolor artist and painted this building that is somewhere in Manhatten. I remember her mentioning it was a historic building. Would you maybe recognize it? If so, I would very much appreciate its name and address."

The building was painted in the 1980's by Ruta Odrach (1953-1993) who studied architecture at the Pratt Institute. She remained in NY until her death.

 

Columbia Assessment Forum on April 12 to Focus on Ithaka Survey

From a recent posting to the metro-l listserv:

The Columbia University Libraries Assessment Working Group is pleased to announce our next Assessment Forum, "Findings from Ithaka S+R's Library Survey 2010" with Roger Schonfeld, Director of Research at Ithaka. (http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research)

"Today, Ithaka S+R is publicly releasing their Library Survey 2010: Insights From U.S. Academic Library Directors, and it is now available from our website at http://bit.ly/eBdWYd. The Library Survey aims to help academic libraries and other members of the higher education community understand the changing role of the library and how to adapt strategically to an increasingly digital environment.  This survey focuses on strategies that directors are pursuing for their libraries, the management of library collections, the development of new digital collections, and the creation of new services to meet changing user needs. The Library Survey complements our Faculty Survey 2009, together exploring the attitudes and habits of university and college faculty members in their use of information resources, their perceptions of the academic library, and their views on scholarly communications, as well as the strategies, services, and collections provided by academic libraries to meet these and other campus needs."

Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Time: 9:30am - 11:00am
Location: Butler Library, room 203

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP to assessment@columbia.edu