Next Generation Metadata: a radical shift to the way libraries share knowledge

Skills

Educating and training catalogers is a live issue in the metadata community. Both new professionals and experienced catalogers need new skills to successfully transition to the emerging linked data environment. Catalogers are learning about and experimenting with the use of persistent identifiers to link their metadata to the larger Web of data. They enrich their authorities with data from external sources to add finer granularity and specificity to their descriptions. They innovate while remaining responsible for traditional bibliographic control of collections.

How are leaders facilitating that shift? Read this extract on ‘Preparing for Future Staffing Requirements’ (also available in Spanish and Italian)*.

The publication of the full report triggered a series of roundtable discussions in 2021 which were recorded and summarized. Take a closer look at the outputs from these discussions.

* If your computer settings download the report directly, rather than opening in your browser, please go to page 36 (EN), 57 (ES) or 38 (IT) for the extract on 'Preparing for Future Staffing Requirements'.

Developing Diversity

Description, subject analysis, classification, authority control, and cataloging practices are part of a powerful naming and labeling process in bibliographic and archival description. Collections’ metadata include outdated and racist terminology that cause harm and contributes to experiences, memories, and achievements of communities being mischaracterized or overlooked.

To address these harmful practices, OCLC was awarded a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Reimagine Descriptive Workflows by collaborating with a diverse group of experts, practitioners, and community members to determine ways to improve descriptive practices, tools, infrastructure, and workflows in libraries and archives.

Working in consultation with Shift Collective, OCLC hosted a conversation among community stakeholders who discussed how to address the systemic issues of bias and inequity within our current collection description infrastructure. The input from the convening and subsequent conversations with advisory group leaders was synthesized into a community agenda that provides two action pathways:

• A guiding framework for making necessary, fundamental shifts both in organizational culture and individual mindset to enact transformative and sustainable change in the descriptive process.
• Recommendations for operational changes that organizations can make to reimagine descriptive practices in their local and global contexts.

Read the full report Reimagine Descriptive Workflows: A Community-informed Agenda for Reparative and Inclusive Descriptive Practice

Partnership

Think about the relationship between research data and bibliographic data as a microcosm of the wider linked data network. Each is underpinned by different stakeholders, policies, and practices which makes technical connectivity a challenging prospect.

For technical interoperability between data platforms to be successful, there must be social interoperability. Metadata managers within institutions must extend themselves beyond the realm of data stewardship and form solid working relationships across individuals and organizational units that promote collaboration, communication, and mutual understanding.

The transition towards entification will be driven by a cultural shift in patterns of working as well as technical innovation.

Check out ‘Fill your social interoperability toolbox’ for links to useful resources in this area.

Where is OCLC going next?

OCLC Research has conducted over a decade of linked data research, publishing data to the web, testing workflows, and demonstrating the utility of metadata entities. In 2020, with financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that research culminated in a commitment to build a persistent, shared, and centralized entity management infrastructure for library linked data work.

OCLC Research staff supported the planning, architecture, data identification, extraction, and transformation that took place to make this service a reality. OCLC has also collaborated closely with the library community throughout this initiative in consultation with advisory group member institutions.

When completed, this infrastructure will include easily accessible authoritative descriptions of works and persons, enhanced and managed by OCLC and the library community. Connections to other external vocabularies will place library collections in a broader context across the web.

The infrastructure will fulfill the demand for persistent URIs in OCLC’s linked data and create a “point of need” service for ID creation. It will also link library data to non-library data and local data to shared data in ways that traditional cataloging has never supported. The system will operate at scale and complement other (transnational, national, regional, and institutional) library linked data initiatives such as the LD4P Grant, BIBFRAME implementations, IFLA LRM implementations such as the national Bibliographic Transition Program in France, and more.