When I read the title “Digital Learning Object Repositories” it reminded me of the first keynote at a conference I attended last month, Library Technology Conference at Macalester College in Saint Paul. At around the 35:00 mark of Courtney Greene McDonald’s keynote, she talks about libraries creating shared personas, especially for the (as yet) unskilled novice researchers so we can spend more of our time focusing on the users with more unique interests. Don’t reinvent the wheel, y’all! It was a great keynote, as was Bohyun Kim’s. Both are recorded here, if you have some free time (ha, what is that???) I highly recommend them. I need to carve out some time to re-watch them myself and catch all the things I missed the first go-around!
Learning Objects
I’m reading about learning objects for this week’s readings and am wondering how they are *really* different than things educators have been doing for years. I would guess there’s some amount of interchangeability (that’s probably not a word…) in lesson plans so that you can swap things like these out. Is it the metadata aspect that makes this “new”? It’ll hopefully become clearer as I read more, but always love hearing from you all as well.
On an unrelated note, that Sodium-Potassium Pump really brings me back to my biology days!! #scienceiscool
Image Indexing Guidelines: Publisher First Draft
Hey y’all! The first draft of my image indexing guidelines for the Publisher element are up on the wiki: http://indexing-football-images-ls566-spring2015.wikispaces.com/Publisher+Element
Thoughts are welcome! Specifically, I made the element optional because that’s how most (all) of the other guidelines I looked at did it, but in our case, all of the photos will be published by the Paul W. Bryant Museum, so we’ll know the publisher in each case. I can definitely see how it would be okay to have it as required because of this. What do y’all think? I also didn’t think this element needed to be repeatable, but I could for sure be swayed on that stance.
Big Data
How does our work with library metadata interact with companies exploring Big Data opportunities? A few of my friends work for a company called Bright Planet. When they first started there in 2011, I had no idea what they did, but thought it sounded really cool! I feel like I should have them re-explain their company’s projects because we may be able to have some really cool conversations about Big Data and libraries!
Image Indexing: Publisher Element
I think I’ve got a pretty good start on the Image Indexing Guidelines for the Publisher element. It’s a pretty straightforward element, but what was really helpful was visiting each of the links on the wiki homepage and seeing how the Publisher element was used in real world projects for each instance. I actually took a screenshot of the Publisher element for each link and printed them out, then went about taking bits and pieces of each that would work for our project. I think our group will be able to use this for all of the elements we have, but will probably have to do a bit more digging for Daniel’s element as it’s a bit more complicated.
“Browsing” in the Digital Age
Yesterday I attended a lecture at the University of South Dakota, where I work, from Phi Beta Kappa scholar William Arms, Professor Emeritus of Computing and Information Science from Cornell University. He is a fascinating man who was part of the computing world as it was coming to be, working with such cool people as Steve Jobs & Larry Page. It was a great lecture on the future of academic libraries in the digital age. Many things from the lecture caught my attention, but one “prediction” from Dr. Arms has been rolling around in my brain. He said something to the effect of future library users will find their library information almost entirely online, with the exception of small special collections and library archives. Now, I completely agree. However, a few of the librarians in the audience were like, yeah but browsing! How will people browse! You can’t browse online. This has been what I’ve been mulling over for the last day and a half. I mean, on the one hand, I totally get browsing. For pleasure reading/public library needs, I could browse for an hour, easily, and walk away with things I’d never thought of. But I can’t remember ever going to a library to browse for academic research in my last 6 years of higher education. I start with the databases. I enter in random-ish search strings until I find something that may work and I work from its citations and subject headings or keywords that occur to me after reading a piece and I go from there. I’ve been required to go to something like 4 introduction library instruction sessions as a student, so I’d like to think something from those stuck (the librarians were fabulous!). I think with linked open data, the semantic web, RDA and all of the library of the future stuff we’ve got going on, this is more and more how browsing is going to work. Today’s users generally feel more comfortable with this type of searching/browsing than trouping through the dusty books in an academic library (my allergies can attest that I get to call academic library books dusty even though I love libraries). It’s not that I dislike paper books, I love ’em. They’re on my Christmas and birthday wish lists every year, and I’m enjoying curating my personal library as a real-live-almost-librarian-grown-up. But I think it’s hard for some in the library and academic worlds to look outside of their nostalgia and idea of browsing. When I’m clicking around on the internet and on databases finding articles and interesting tidbits and even scrolling through Pinterest, that’s all browsing. It just doesn’t look like it used to. I’m pretty confident that this is the way browsing is going to evolve. That’s why our metadata and linked open data and semantic web and RDA and all that lovely stuff is so, so important! 🙂
Metadata Entry Guidelines from the Minnesota Digital Library
Both last week before our “Survivor” class session and since then, I’ve visited the Minnesota Reflections Metadata Entry Guidelines. The link to the Minnesota Digital Library is listed in our wiki. Searching the website and looking through this document has really helped me to understand what metadata entry looks like in real life! I would recommend looking over some of the sections in the document as we prepare for the coming weeks.
As an added bonus, I feel a surge of Minnesota pride every time I look at the MDL 😉 🙂 ❤
Karen Coyle & Legacy Data
I’m listening to the Karen Coyle interview on legacy data and modern data. I’m excited about the prospect of libraries using Linked Data and BIBFRAME and being more discoverable. But I can’t quite wrap my head around URI’s. Do they link to somewhere? If so, who is in charge of those “authority files”. Does anyone have a good overview on how URI’s work/what they look like in real life?
EDIT:
…she addresses my question later in the podcast, but I’m still wondering where the URI “points” too. If I clicked on an author’s name, does it bring me to an authority file that describes to me who the author is and contains links that link back to this person’s URI?
EDIT 2:
Apparently I’m live-blogging trying to understand this 😛 I’m watching this presentation and finding it helpful: https://vimeo.com/115088888
I guess one of my big questions is: will different communities use the *same* URI’s for the same people? Are we just (ha, just) trying to focus on the library? Or are we trying to coordinate with people outside libraries/archives/museums?
Harnessing the Power of Metadata
Last Wednesday after we finished class, I set about making my grocery list so I could fit in a shopping trip before I went to bed. My life is insane-busy this semester, something I’m not fond of, and as I was perusing my Pinterest boards to figure out what to cook this week, it occurred to me that gathering the ingredients for each of these recipes was one of the most annoying parts. As a millennial who was forced to start cooking for myself just as Pinterest was exploding onto the social media scene, this is the primary means with which I decide what to eat. It occurred to me that in one of our earlier readings (I can’t remember which…) it said blog writers are able to “tag” their ingredient lists with metadata that tells the website which words are ingredients. It sure would be handy if somebody would make me a website that I could enter my 5 blog post recipes into and it would aggregate the ingredients into a list for me!! Real-life, non-library uses for metadata are fun.
(Disclaimer, I realize someone’s probably already done something like this, but I haven’t found it, so they’re not marketing it very well 😉 )
Social Media’s Effect
The readings for this week have me thinking about the effect of social media a lot. Of course, it’s a trendy thing to think about right now, but I think we’re still caught up in the middle of it. One of the readings, I can’t remember which, stated that user tagging can be a threat to information professionals, but I don’t think this is true. I think we need to encourage participation from others who may have more knowledge than we do and collaborate with them. It makes me think of the librarian Facebook group ALA Think Tank. Questions and posts are constantly being asked and the comment threads are huge. No one is really “getting” anything out of offering their advice or experience, except that they can then get the same thing from others in the group. It seems groups such as these on different social media sites on different topics could be a wealth of knowledge for libraries trying to find the origins of their more elusive materials in their digital collections. I’ll be anxious to see if this becomes a trend!
As a PS, after I wrote this and continued reading other links for this week’s class, I wanted to point out that I’m not in favor of eliminating traditional cataloging and indexing and metadata in favor of this, but rather we, as librarians, should use social media as another source of information to inform our work. Folksonomies like this will always be cheaper than traditional library methods of organization, but they will always lack the consistency (and thoroughness) that is required of large scale efforts to organize human knowledge.
The Story Doesn't Have to End at "The End" 