Tag Archives: metadata

Of-ness in audio recordings

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Subject analysis is very interesting. In a recent investigation into a theory of subject analysis, I was introduced to the concepts of: "about-ness", "is-ness", "of-ness".

Sometimes I wonder if linguists defy standard practices in subject representation, of if they define what a general population holds as a challenge with subject analysis in cataloging.

I harken to the OLAC application profile, which is based on Dublin Core. Dublin Core does not scope the subject element to "about-ness" analysis. UNT curriculum, informed and based (in structure) on Steven J. Miller', Metadata for Digital Collections: A How-To-Do-It Manual. The issue at hand is that for linguists, about-ness is only relevant for Information resources representing analysis. For other kinds of resources such as primary oral texts, or narratives captured via video which are often the object analyzed and discussed in information resources representing analysis, the primary view on subjecthood is through of-ness. As far as I know no-one has discussed audio and of-ness descriptions of audio.

It also makes me wonder if genre is mostly about utility and not about a binding style. To this end then a scholar looking for a phonology corpus, is looking for what—a combination of things—a MIMEType, with a relationship to another MIMEType, with an of-ness of a kind and a subject of "phonology".

By splitting up the concepts of: "about-ness", "is-ness", and "of-ness" it provides analytical space for more articulate descriptions in the dc:description field. But when it comes to language materials, the question is: is language a subject by virtue of "of-ness" or by virtue of "about-ness"? There are several implications here:

  1. The description field ought to be re-thought.
  2. The subject field ought to be re-thought.
  3. Some searches by linguists are likely the concatenation of two or three factors: A relationship between two records, and a subject of a kind and a subject of a different kind.

Quantitative Analysis of Metadata Errors

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Various approaches to metadata quality assessment divide the assessment criteria into sections. For example accuracy, consistency, and completeness. However, one should ask if a quantitative approach to metadata quality assessment is better than a qualitative approach. Some may point out that the two are not mutually exclusive, and therefore not in direct competition with each other. However, I wonder if this is true. For example, if one has limited reading time does one benefit more from reading the percentage of errors relative to another error type or does one learn more by reading about the assumed noncompliance or disharmony across metadata records?

The second point in suggesting that a qualitative description of metadata quality might be better that a quantitative description is related to root causes — presumably the purposes of the investigation in the first place.

It seems to me that a quantitative approach makes the data the discussion and ignores the methods by which the data got into the observed format. For example, what were the human factors under which the metadata was produced? What was the workflow? What was the target metadata scheme at the time the records were created? What was the management implemented checking process, i.e. what were they checking for, or their metrics for success?

A qualitative analysis can show where the current process meets the management considerations. Essentially this is problem-solution fit analysis, where metadata quality is a trailing performance indicator for business processes. However, it gets interesting here because the prevailing thought is that metadata is also the way that a customers are serviced through the organization. That is, it is like a loss-leader product in that it is a product to get a customer to the main product.

Purely quantitative analysis simply announces that issues exist within a relative order. It doesn’t seek to explain the short comings using a contextual analysis.

Dynamic collections aren’t.

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Some years ago, scholars were debating the definition of collection. In an archival sense, and the more traditional sense, a collection refers to a direct or accumulating set of resources. In a library sense a collection may wax and wane depending on the Curation of the collection. So what is a digital collection? Especially in an aggregator of metadata?

To this question I have given some thought. The DCMIType “collection” is ambiguous on this point. Aggregations seem not to be the same as “collection” in that they are continuously updating, and may be different for different viewers! However, essentially this is the same definition that is used in libraries.

After about a year and a half of thinking about this traveling point how to do it I think I have a solution. Aggregations such as those through OAI or RSS, are not collections at all. Rather, aggregations are a view through a dynamic access point. RDA and IFLA – LRM are two models that use the concept of access points. Aggregations, in this sense of access point, our temporary applications of an access point to a resource. In RDA and IFLA – LRM these access points are hard coded on the record. This need not be the case all the time in an information retrieval system. Information retrial system can have there own coded access points independent of the data they are operation on. In this way the information retrieval system might mitigate the possible limits in the information structure of the information being retrieved. It validates the autonomy of the information retrieval system from the information.

This sort of solution preserves the definition of collection bringing sanity to the concept of collection.

Mode vs. Medium

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Two terms which seem to be very confusable to me are Medium and Mode.

Medium relates to Format and the carrier. whereas mode is more like the classification of mediums by how they are experience. Mode related to the mode of communication. For example, Visual, linguistics, spatial, aural, or gestural.

Mode is also not to be confused with mode of issuance, which relates to if the resource is released as a single unit or a multipart unit—often over time.

Rights Metadata and Rights Vocabularies

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In the fall term of 2022 I took a course on Metadata at UNT. In that course I encountered an interesting Rights Metadata schema create my the California Digital Libraries Project called copyrightMD. This schema is interesting because it articulates where a resource was created.

his is currently on the web here:
https://cdlib.org/groups/rights-management-group-copyrightmd/
But that website seems to not render 100% so I looked it up in the Internet Archive here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20220119153216mp_/https://cdlib.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/copyrightMD_user_guidelines.pdf

CopyrightMD Has been mentioned in the following academic publications:

I find the list of rights metadata schemas list in the library guide at UCF very helpful:

https://guides.ucf.edu/metadata/adminMetadata

For rights metadata, the common metadata standards such as Dublin Core include a “rights” field. Any known intellectual property rights held for the data, including access rights and rights holder, can be specified in that field. Some digital repositories provide an opportunity to assign a Creative Commons license to the materials or datasets deposited in the repository.

There are other Right Metadata standards including CopyrightMD, METSRights, ONIX For Publications Licenses, Open Digital Rights Language and XrML.

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_REL

However I found that the MEts Rights schema was not linked appropriately:
https://www.loc.gov/standards/rights/
https://www.loc.gov/standards/rights/METSRights.xsd
https://www.loc.gov/standards/rights/2005version/METSRights.xsd

I personally find the statements at rightsstatements.org to be limiting:
https://rightsstatements.org/en/

The educational use permitted one is very confusing: https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/?language=en

Note that Creative Commons used to have one like this but they did away with the whole educational use series of licenses, but I can't find them at the moment. I would have thought they might have been here: https://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses/

http://web.archive.org/web/20100101121150/https://learn.creativecommons.org/
http://web.archive.org/web/20080714211609/http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8235
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/I_want_to_make_sure_that_the_OER_I_create_are_used_only_for_truly_educational_purposes._That_means_I_should_limit_my_works_to_%E2%80%9Ceducational_use_only,%E2%80%9D_right%3F

Creative Commons Welcomes David Wiley as Educational Use License Project Lead

Real problems with academics using CC licenses:
https://smcclatchy.github.io/exp-design/LICENSE.html
Copyfraud: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228219706_Copyfraud August 2005New York University law review (1950) 81(3)
See also: 10.5334/jcms.1021217
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275440056_The_Public_Domain_vs_the_Museum_The_Limits_of_Copyright_and_Reproductions_of_Two-dimensional_Works_of_Art
see also: 10.1002/meet.14504701045
see also: 10.2139/ssrn.1806809
see also: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308339459_Museums_Property_Rights_and_Photographs_of_Works_of_Art_Why_Reproduction_Through_Photograph_Should_Be_Free

see also: 10.1515/9783110732009-010 — 8 Rights Issues in the Digitization of Library Collections

~~~~
OER Notes:

U.S. Department of Education Open Licensing Rule Now in Effect


https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_and_Open_Educational_Resources
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/OER_Project

OLAC query needs

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The following example points to the need for users to be able to sort collection by license, relationships, and extent.

I am looking for large spoken corpora of spontaneous speech in any
language (ideally > 100 hours) with a time-aligned transcription. I am
not committed to a specific genre as long as it is spontaneous speech.
It should be available as a download (for research, no commercial use),
ideally free but I may be able to pay for it as well.

HTML Metadata tags and Dublin Core

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https://infosci.um.ac.ir/index.php/RRP/article_27183.html?lang=en
https://doi.org/10.1080/13614579709516904
https://archive.ifla.org/documents/libraries/cataloging/metadata/drusch.pdf
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/10/dublin/
https://www.sid.ir/paper/102563/en
https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/18374/20723
https://mn.gov/bridges/user2study.pdf
http://eprints.rclis.org/7319/
http://eprints.rclis.org/7319/1/Search_Engines_and_Resource_Discovery.pdf

What Happened to Dublin Core as an SEO Factor?


https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551504045851
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-on-using-dublin-core-schema-29002.html

https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_7837/final.html
https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:7837 <-- What is it with repositories and asking for human verification? Isn't the point of these to be machine crawlable...? Same thing with SIL

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-on-using-dublin-core-schema-29002.html

Subjects around DC: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/520975/pdf

Subjects for images

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Somebody told me once that pictures don't have subjects because of the is-ness about-ness separation:

I disagree. Here are some things from the literature.

https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/15063/Describing_Visual_Materials_in_the_Digital_Age_Hamburger.pdf

http://duspeccoll.github.io/local_authority

https://journals.ala.org/index.php/lrts/article/viewFile/7564/10462

https://listserv.loc.gov/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0501&L=MARC&P=4254

https://inevermetadataididntlike.wordpress.com/category/library-of-congress-genreform-terms/

http://netanelganin.com/projects/lcgft/lcgftType.html

https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=olac-publications

https://www.isko.org/cyclo/subject

MODS and element order

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Is element order a thing in XML? That is is the order of appearance of sibling elements within an XML document critical?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28268696/is-the-order-of-two-siblings-implementation-dependent

Node Relationships

Here is the response from the XSD author:

I haven’t read the entire thread, but I take it the question is whether elements in a mods record need to be in a particular order (i.e. in the order that they are listed in the schema). They don’t.

In the MODS schema, look for:

*********************************************************************** ** Definition of a single MODS record ** **********************************************************************

And following that:

<xs:element name="mods" type="modsDefinition"/>
<!-- -->
<xs:complexType name="modsDefinition">
<xs:group ref="modsGroup" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>

……….

This says: a MODS record consists of one or more elements from the “modsGroup (at least one, because that is the default if there is no minOccurs, and as many as you want because maxOccurs=“unbounded”) enclosed within a element.

Next, look for:

*********************************************************************** ** These are the "top level" MODS elements ** ********************************************************************** —>

prior to that:

<xs:group name="modsGroup”>
<xs:choice>

…. and following it is the list of elements:


<xs:element ref="abstract"/>
<xs:element ref="accessCondition"/>
<xs:element ref="classification"/>
<xs:element ref="extension"/>
<xs:element ref="genre"/>
<xs:element ref="identifier"/>
<xs:element ref="language"/>
<xs:element ref="location"/>

……………. and so on.

“Choice: says “choose any one of these elements."

So all together, it says choose an elements from the list. Any element. And then repeat as desired.

So you could choose “genre”, and then choose “classification”, and so on. Chosen in no particular order.

And then enclose your list within a 

<mods>

record, in the order in which you chose the elements.

Ray