Karen Smith-Yoshimura

Program Officer

Karen Smith-Yoshimura has been working with research institutions affiliated with the trans-national OCLC Research Library Partnership for over twenty years. She focuses on issues related to the metadata needed to describe and provide access to the resources managed by libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage organizations. Karen reports to Vice President James Michalko and contributes to the hangingtogether.org blog.

Karen worked with the Library of Congress and the Chinese Character Code for Information Interchange's Chinese Character Analysis Group to develop the East Asian Character Code Set for Bibliographic Use, an American standard (Z39.64) that preceded Unicode. She participated in the founding of the Unicode Consortium and served on the US Technical Advisory Committee that contributed to Unicode becoming an international character set standard now used globally.

Before working with the RLG Partnership, Karen spent nine years in East Asia, primarily in Japan and Taiwan. She holds a degree in Chinese Studies from Yale University.

Projects

• Books as Expressions of Global Cultural Diversity
• Gather Evidence to Inform Changes Needed in Metadata Practices
• Identify Requirements for a Cooperative "Identities Hub"
• Sharing and Aggregating Social Metadata