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Daily Archives: April 12, 2023

Metadata Interoperability at OLAC

Posted on April 12, 2023 by Hugh Paterson III
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This week we had a lecture on metadata interoperability. Interoperability is a major theme of Gary Simons work on OLAC. It was the keyword or concept that he used to push the social behavior requirements related to the activities around, in, and at language archives.

I think that across the history of OLAC there have been various understandings on the kinds of metadata needed to describe language resources. That is, discovery is the architectural goal of OLAC, but other requirements also exist. In the beginning of OLAC many of the participants were looking at OLAC for a complete solution to the kinds of metadata they should be collecting and using. The other requirements upon resource stewards have always meant additional fields in diverse institutional contexts. The freedom to explore these other requirements has not always been explored or embraced by stewards. Some have seen OLAC as an all or nothing involvement. Maybe the fear has been that there will be divergence from a communal norm.

However, my perspective is that it is quite normal for each institution to have its own metadata schema or application profile some portion of which gets shared with OLAC.

With this as background then, with the assumption that different management practices will produce different metadata schemes it seems reasonable that each institution should update their schema from time to time. This implies that metadata quality in terms of coverage or "encoding" is a moving target. Another implication then, is that even in fields which are shared with the OLAC aggregator and are defined in the OLAC metadata application profile, that those fields may have different internal syntax at different providers or at different time depths of the records creation.

The ISO639-3 field is one evidence of evolutionary change. This standard has fields which split and merge from time to time. Associating a records time of creation with a version of an institutions metadata schema is a useful dynamic when evaluating a record's quality.

The question is how should a record and the version of its applicable metadata profile be associated in the OLAC context? How should this information be communicated to record viewers?

The answer is rather straightforward, but requires two parts. The first part requires a modification to the archive profile to have two information bits:

  1. The name of the native application profile at the data provider
  2. A link to the native metadata application profile documentation

The documentation should be in a publicly accessible place so that the provided metadata makes sense. There are several ways this could be accomplished one way is to create a manifestation record for each iteration of the application profile. These could be related into a collection or they could have a single relation.

which in the listSet

The OLAC OAI record should have in its source in the first harvest the name and version of the native metadata schema used for the generation of the record. The link to the native version of the providers metadata schema's documentation should be provided in the archive section of the OAI describer.

Some utilities in OAI can modify data, some can be servers only, some havesters only, some harvesters and servers.

Some OAI providers are

Using record sets:

OLAC could allow end-users to dynamically create sets of records for export using the setSpec part of OAI. Playing with this and audience interest might create some social interest.

Posted in Meta-data | Tagged in_Obsidian, OAI-PMH, OLAC, R-90, setSpec | Leave a reply

Dublin Core Acronyms

Posted on April 12, 2023 by Hugh Paterson III
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DC = Dublin Core: This may refer to simple Dublin Core which, depending on the time of writing may refer to the original 15 elements. See Phelps (2012)
DCMI = Dublin Core Metadata Initiative as used by Cole (2002), later changed to Dublin Core Metadata Innovation; but the term innovation does not appear on the current-(2022/2023) Dublin Core website, or it's parent organization ASIS&T.

DCMI Name on ASIS&T website.

DCMI Name on Dublin Core website.

QDC = Qualified Dublin Core as used by Cole (2002).
DCMES = Dublin Core Metadata Element Set: Generally this means the 18 elements 15 of which are in the DC 1.1 namespace and the other three in the DCTERMS namespace. In prefered parlance elements are known as properties, however due to the historical practice of using Dublin Core within an XML context and seeing these properties used XML elements, the term elements was applied. In my opinion, choosing a term like "properties" from the parlance of RDF is just as jaded. Used for example by Ward (2004), Saadat Alijani & Jowkar (2009), Phelps (2012), Jackson et al (2008), and Nevile & Lissonnet (2004).
DCMS = Dublin Core Metadata Standard. See Eckert et al (2009) and Quam (2001).
DCMES 1.1 = Dublin Core Metadata Element Set; Simple Dublin Core. See also this (DC Website) and this (OLAC).
DCTERMS = Dublin Core Terms or Qualified Dublin Core.

Cole, Timothy W. 2002. “Qualified Dublin Core Metadata for Online Journal Articles.” OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 18 (2). MCB UP Ltd: 79–87. doi:10.1108/10650750210430141.

Eckert, K., Pfeffer, M., & Stuckenschmidt, H. (2009). A Unified Approach for Representing Metametadata. International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, pp. 21–29. Retrieved from https://dcpapers.dublincore.org/pubs/article/view/973

Jackson, Amy S., Myung-Ja Han, Kurt Groetsch, Megan Mustafoff, and Timothy W. Cole. 2008. “Dublin Core Metadata Harvested Through OAI-PMH.” Journal of Library Metadata 8 (1). Routledge: 5–21. doi:10.1300/J517v08n01_02.

Phelps, Tyler Elisabeth. 2012. “An Evaluation of Metadata and Dublin Core Use in Web-Based Resources.” Libri 62 (4). doi:10.1515/libri-2012-0025.

Nevile, L., & Lissonnet, S. (2004). The Case for a Person/Agent Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, . Retrieved from https://dcpapers.dublincore.org/pubs/article/view/780

Quam, Eileen. 2001. “Informing and Evaluating a Metadata Initiative: Usability and Metadata Studies in Minnesota’s Foundations Project.” Government Information Quarterly 18 (3): 181–94. doi:10.1016/S0740-624X(01)00075-2.

Saadat Alijani, Alireza, and Abdolrasool Jowkar. 2009. “Dublin Core Metadata Element Set Usage in National Libraries’ Web Sites.” The Electronic Library 27 (3). Emerald Group Publishing Limited: 441–47. doi:10.1108/02640470910966880.

Ward, Jewel. 2004. “Unqualified Dublin Core Usage in OAI‐PMH Data Providers.” OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 20 (1): 40–47. doi:10.1108/10650750410527322.

Posted in Meta-data | Tagged Dublin core, in_Obsidian | Leave a reply

Activity

April 2023
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I’ve been saying

  • Chasing subsets
  • New mouse buttons
  • Moving Apple notes
  • Academic Heritage in MARC records
  • Converting DC Subjects to Schema.org
  • Language Documentation Gear
  • Serials, MARC Records and RDA Core
  • Font Modulator
  • OLAC CMS options via XML
  • OLAC Collection Description and Linked Data Terms
  • Zotero Plugins
  • OLAC and User Tasks

Say What?

  • David Clews on German Waters
  • Jeff Pitts on Kinder Eier
  • Jeff on Plasticification of soil
  • Thoughts on file formats and file names in language documentation projects and archiving | The Journeyler on The Workflow Management for Linguists
  • Hugh Paterson III on Types of Linguistic Maps: The Mapping of linguistic Features and Researcher Interactivity

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