Tag Archives: metadata

From iPhoto to Lightroom

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iPhoto is Apple's default photo management solution. I have used it since early 2004 when I purchased my first Mac. I currently run OS X 10.6.8. and iPhoto '09 (iPhoto version 8.1.2 Build 424). In late 2013, this is considered an old version of the OS and an old version of iPhoto. I have seen more recent versions of iPhoto as my wife runs 10.7 and a newer version of iPhoto.

In the spring of 2012 I purchased a Cannon t3i and started to shoot RAW. (Read large photo size and editable images.) So, I need a photo editing solution with more power than iPhoto. My iPhoto collection was also starting to wax big approaching 28,000 images at the time (and why not after 9 years of collecting photos).
iPhoto to Lightroom
iPhoto is a brilliant way to browse photos and gives great access to simple tools to crop, rotate, and apply redeye reduction. However, iPhoto has a weakness when it comes to embedded metadata. If you want to export your photo, with geo-tagged location, and with keywords applied then one needed to export the photo as a .jpg. And one could not apply these metadata "enrichments" to the original photo file type. iPhoto's "Export Original" is just that, the original file, not the original plus added metadata.

Enter Lightroom. Continue reading →

Dating Photos and passing on Knowlege

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I have been reading this blog, and its links. About scanning family photos. I think one relevant point that it brings out for professional contexts like is: "Additionally, it [the way of naming the files] will now be documented for whomever inherits all of your work, that you didn’t know this information." Especially with photos, which have a high metadata field to file-count ratio, representing a high curation workload. A metadata schema needs to help archivists administratively determine known unknowns rather than just empty elements. It is one thing to choose not to describe something, it is another to not have access to the information and be unable to describe something. Continue reading →

Busy in the Literature

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This summer (June-August) I added 629 new citation to EndNote - mostly by hand. Of those citation 392 of them had PDFs attached to the citation. I am ready to learn how to more effectively use Endnote. I estimate that I still have 450 PDFs in various folders from courses and research trips to the library over the last few years that I need to add to EndNote.

I usually try and download .ris files when I find a resource I want to cite or use. The problem is that EndNote X6 does not allow for importing more than one .ris file at a time.

To speed up the process I have learned to use the OS X Concatenate command in terminal: cat.

I open up terminal. type cd type drag my folder containing the .ris files I want to add to EndNote over the blinking cursor and hit enter. I then type cat and drag all the .ris files I want to concatenate to one .ris file. type a > symbol and the new .ris file's name. The result is a concatenation of all the data from the many .ris files into one .ris file. This allows me to go back to EndNote and import all the one massive .ris file and save clicks.

Leave Typology to the Typologists: I am a Linguist

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A User Experience look at Linguistic Archiving

In a recent paper Jeremy Nordmoe, a friend and colleague, states that:

Because most linguists archive documents infrequently, they will never be experts at doing so, nor will they be experts in the intricacies of metadata schemas. [1] Jeremy Nordmoe. 2011. Introducing RAMP: an application for packaging metadata and resources offline for submission to an institutional repository. In Proceedings of Workshop on Language … Continue reading

My initial reply is:

You are d@#n right! and it is because archives are not sexy enough!

Continue reading →

References

↑1 Jeremy Nordmoe. 2011. Introducing RAMP: an application for packaging metadata and resources offline for submission to an institutional repository. In Proceedings of Workshop on Language Documentation & Archiving 18 November 2011 at SOAS, London. Edited by: David Nathan. p. 27-32. [Preprint PDF]

Grants being aggregated in OLAC Search results

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I have been doing some thinking about what would make OLAC search more valuable to its current users and to its targeted users. One of the things which would make it more useful would be if the NSF, a partial funder for OLAC and OLAC search, would aggregate its language related grants, scholarships, fellowships and awards through OLAC.

Some of these Grant proposals are really well written, and well cited documents which explain a certain snapshot of the language situation. Even the announcements that a grants like From Endangered Language Documentation to Phonetic Documentation has been awarded would allow other researchers to know that someone has applied or been awarded a block of funding to work on a particular language situation.

Notice of NSF Grant award

Notice of NSF Grant award

I was particularly happy to find that NSF does have a grant offering and grant awarded search section. But aggregating this knowledge with prior research would really give interested parties in particular languages the integrated perspective.

DOIs and URLs same or different?

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A document’s DOI (http://www.doi.org/ or on Wikipedia under Digital Object Identifier) is an important part of the citation of a document [1] Chelsea Lee. 21 September 2009. A DOI Primer. APA Style Blog. http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/09/a-doi-primer.html [Accessed: 10 April 2011] [Link] . Many style sheets allow for just the DOI of a paper as the citation. Because DOIs are unique they can act as URIs which are resolvable and look like URLs [2] Dion Almaer. 23 November 2007. URI vs. URL: What’s the difference?. Ajaxian. http://ajaxian.com/archives/uri-vs-url-whats-the-difference. [Accessed: 10 April 2012] [Link] . However, a DOI is different than a URL for where a digital object might be located. It might be well argued that a DOI should be tracked in the metadata schemes of archives which collect language and linguistic data.
Continue reading →

References

↑1 Chelsea Lee. 21 September 2009. A DOI Primer. APA Style Blog. http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/09/a-doi-primer.html [Accessed: 10 April 2011] [Link]
↑2 Dion Almaer. 23 November 2007. URI vs. URL: What’s the difference?. Ajaxian. http://ajaxian.com/archives/uri-vs-url-whats-the-difference. [Accessed: 10 April 2012] [Link]

Metadata and the Target Audience

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I have been reviewing applications for library, research and citation metadata. Things like RDF, METS, Dublin Core, .ris and BibTeX. In some ways these things are related – they are metadata. But in other ways they are different animals.

In my search I have found two very different classes of metadata schemes based on two different kinds of end users.

  1. End users who are machines (Metadata for interoperability or resource discovery).
  2. End users who are human.

End Users who are machines are usually concerned with the interoperability of metadata for search, storage, and advertisement. These kinds of systems usually are engineered to use metadata schemes like Dublin Core, MODS and METS. Often these systems are able to communicate high level metadata in generic categories.

However, End Users who are human are usually concerned with purposing the metadata in creative processes. And in general, desire to use and appropriate more specific elements of metadata. This is especially true with citation metadata. Students and researchers want to be able to build bibliographies with the data. Additionally, Many of the more detaied metadata elements, that is, overly detailed from a Dublin Core perspective (i.e. can include geo-location name, or a Latitude value or an Altitude value), could be classified as technical metadata according to the first listing below. However, technical metadata is especially relevant for users of audio objects and graphic objects (photos and moving picture objects).

Of those users looking to use metadata to construct bibliographies and citations, they are often looking for that metadata in the interchange formats of either BibTeX, Endnote XML or .ris. Of those users interested in finding things based on technical metadata, such as audio technicians, linguists, ethnographers, and ethnomusicologists, they are looking to use the metadata and the object it describes in a workflow. And in order to purpose that media object as they need to, those users need to make sure that the digital object fits their workflow criteria.

This discrepancy between Metadata for System to System transmission and Metadata for End Users creates a bit of a complext situation, in that delivery systems need to consider both sets of users.

Which information to record?

http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/audio/advice/metadata-and-audio-resources [1] JISC Digital Media. 07 January 2010. Metadata and Audio Resources. http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/audio/advice/metadata-and-audio-resources [Link] [Accessed: 19 March 2012]

Structured metadata is divided into four main categories that contain information which is defined by the schemas or extension schemas being used:

  1. Structural metadata. This is information about the structural relationship with other parent or family files and how the metadata relates to the file.
  2. Descriptive metadata. This is information about the content of the digital file. The information recorded here is more curatorial than technical, and is the primary portal for users to access your resource. Data including File name, creator, associated dates, description, summary, locations etc should be standardised using a interoperable schema such as Simple DC or MODS.
  3. Administrative metadata. This contains information about the analogue source material, the rights of the content and any preservation information. Information here provides support to the managerial team of the collection and researchers in organising and providing access to the resource. Information about rights, ownership and usage restrictions is also kept within the administrative metadata.
  4. Technical metadata. To make good use of the digital object data is required which describes the technical qualities of the physical and/or digital object. This includes information such as channel number, bit-depth, sampling rate, and the unique file identifier. AudioMD, is an XML based schema that has been designed primarily for this purpose. It is soon to be superseded by AES-X098, developed by the Audio Engineering Society, upon its formal release.

Though it is possible to separate out some finer grained metadata categories. Consider the differences from above and those below which were part of my post about Metadata for Socio-linguistic Corpora:

  • Descriptive meta-data: supports discovery, attribution and identification of resources created.
  • Administrative meta-data: supports management, preservation, and appropriate usage of resources created.
    • Technical: About the machinery used to create the resource and the technical aspects of the resource.
    • Use (meaning how one may use the objects) and Rights: Copyright, license and moral ownership of the items.
  • Structural meta-data: maintains relationships between the parts of complex, multi-part resources (Spanne 2008). [2] Spanne, Joan. 2008. Metadata: Why, What and How (the “Who” is You). Presentation for Audio and Video Techniques. Dallas: GIAL. 29 July 2008.
  • Situational: this is metadata which describes the events around the creation of the work. Asking questions about the social setting, or the precursory events. It follows ideas put forward by Bergqvist (2007). [3] Bergqvist, Henrik. 2007. The role of metadata for translation and pragmatics in language documentation. In Peter K. Austin (ed.), Language Documentation and Description, vol. 4, 163-73. London: … Continue reading
  • Use metadata: metadata collected from or about the users themselves (e.g. user annotations, number of people accessing a particular resource) [4] JISC Digital Media. 07 January 2010. An Introduction to Metadata. http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/crossmedia/advice/an-introduction-to-metadata/ [Link] [Accessed: 19 March 2012]

In that post I also said:

I think it is only fair to point out to archivist and to librarians that linguists and language documenters do not see a difference between descriptive and non-descriptive metadata in their workflows. That is sometimes we want to search all the corpora by licenses or by a technical attribute. This elevates the these attributes to the function of discovery metadata. It does not remove the function of descriptive metadata from its role in finding things but it does functionally mean that the other metadata is also viable as discovery metadata.

Compare and match three

My goal here is to compare Doublin Core [http://www.feedforall.com/dublin-core.htm] with BibTeXThere is a nice cross-walk technology for bibTex resources in source-forge: http://bibtexml.sourceforge.net/details.html and with .ris.
“RIS” Format Documentation Adding a “Direct Export” Button to Your Web Page or Web Application

List of Mappings [5] Michael Day. August 1996, Last updated: 22-May-2002. Metadata: Mapping between metadata formats. UKOLN: The UK Office for Library and Information Networking, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, … Continue reading not .ris or Bibtex to DC but many other cross walks.

References

↑1 JISC Digital Media. 07 January 2010. Metadata and Audio Resources. http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/audio/advice/metadata-and-audio-resources [Link] [Accessed: 19 March 2012]
↑2 Spanne, Joan. 2008. Metadata: Why, What and How (the “Who” is You). Presentation for Audio and Video Techniques. Dallas: GIAL. 29 July 2008.
↑3 Bergqvist, Henrik. 2007. The role of metadata for translation and pragmatics in language documentation. In Peter K. Austin (ed.), Language Documentation and Description, vol. 4, 163-73. London: SOAS.
↑4 JISC Digital Media. 07 January 2010. An Introduction to Metadata. http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/crossmedia/advice/an-introduction-to-metadata/ [Link] [Accessed: 19 March 2012]
↑5 Michael Day. August 1996, Last updated: 22-May-2002. Metadata: Mapping between metadata formats. UKOLN: The UK Office for Library and Information Networking, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, United Kingdom. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/interoperability/
[Link] [Accessed: 19 March 2012]