Pull quote: “What is trendy about the ‘idea’ of metadata? Perhaps it’s the ability to say that … well metadata is good for discovery and access. It’s like eating your favorite dessert without the hassle of having to make it by hand every time you want it. The only thing is that the devil is in the details. The more I work with metadata the more this phrase rings true. The big picture is important. But it’s really the details where the action happens. The trendy focus on the big picture runs the risk of minimizing these details and the day to day work of catalog/metadata librarians. I guess the question becomes then how to promote the details as cool.”
Pull quote: “Many people have asked what we expect people to do with the data. Personally, I have no idea, and that’s the point. I’ve seen over and over that when data is made openly available with the fewest impediments — legal and technical — people are incredibly creative about finding innovative uses for the data that we never could have predicted.”
Pull quote: “John Palfrey, Chair of the DPLA, said he hoped that this would encourage other institutions to make their own collection metadata publicly available. According to Harvard’s FAQ, other libraries that have already done so include 3 million records from the British Library, 5.4 million from Cologne libraries, 3.6 million from the University of Cambridge, and 8 million from OCLC’s OhioLINK–OCLC Collection and Circulation Analysis Project.”
Pull quote: “Worst-case, an EBSCO with a lot of article metadata sewn up can let search-UI development slide, knowing libraries will buy because they need its exclusive metadata. That’s not good for libraries or for patrons. Or this could turn into another Big Deal situation, where EBSCO can charge the moon and stars because there’s no other way to get the information.”
Pull quote: “There’s no question that the data format known as RDF is darned difficult. Let’s suppose that we in the library world decide not to hitch our wagon to RDF, but would still like to create a new bibliographic framework. After all, if MARC simply won’t work for the creation of RDA records, we still need something besides MARC that we can use to create data. And even if (although this is unlikely) we should decide not to move to RDA, our records still need some upgrading to fit better into current data processing models.”
