Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Introductory Post

Hello Klub Katalog Blog readers! This is my first post. Last week I started a new job at a digital archive and I'm currently feeling out my new role. It’s a brand new position and they’ve never had someone on staff with an information/library science background before. At this point, there’s no set job description, nor does anyone know exactly what I should be doing, including me. This is both exciting and terrifying.

I guess you could call me the Klub Katalog digital librarian, or the digital archivist, or, god-forbid, the cybrarian.

Right now I’m feeling like the Accidental Metadata Librarian. My archive is developing a whole new database and content management system. Part of the process (my part) is revamping all of the old legacy metadata. They’ve been using Dublin Core, albeit an idiosyncratic local interpretation of Dublin Core. There are no controlled vocabularies or authority lists. There are only minimal formatting and syntax guidelines. Student interns have been doing much of the cataloging for 10+ years. They want to expose their metadata through OAI-PMH.

It's both exciting and terrifying.

2 comments:

  1. You're awesome. What's OAI-PMH? (Another way to say Oompah Loompah, right?)

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's both an amazingly hard to say acronym and a protocol for sharing metadata. I don't understand the technical aspects very well yet, but a lot of institutional repositories use it to create union catalogs, federated searches, and the like.

    My archive wanting to implement it is... ambitious. I appreciate their vision.

    ReplyDelete