OCLC Research Library Partnership Metadata Managers Focus Group
The OCLC Research Library Partnership Metadata Managers Focus Group is comprised of representatives from 62 Partners in eleven countries who are very interested in engaging with other OCLC Research Library Partners on issues of common concern. This focus group offers an opportunity to engage with peers in OCLC Research Library Partner institutions who are responsible for creating and managing metadata.
The focus group shares information about topics of common concern, identifies metadata management issues OCLC Research could pursue in support of the OCLC Research Library Partnership, provides feedback on OCLC Research’s various metadata management projects and initiates working groups as warranted.
A planning group determines three timely topics and develops question sets around these topics with context statements indicating why these questions are being asked. This information is distributed to focus group members a couple of months before each ALA conference. The compilation of the responses then serve as background for face-to-face meetings held in conjunction with ALA as well as WebEx sessions held afterwards for those who couldn’t attend the meetings. Summaries of all focus group discussions are posted on the HangingTogether blog.
Publications
Transitioning to the Next Generation of Metadata
By Karen Smith-Yoshimura
Transitioning to the Next Generation of Metadata synthesizes six years (2015-2020) of OCLC Research Library Partners Metadata Managers Focus Group discussions and what they may foretell for the “next generation of metadata.”
Discussion summaries:
2021
2020
- Experimentations with Wikidata/Wikibase
- Metadata management in times of uncertainty
- Presenting metadata from different sources in discovery layers
- Knowledge Management and Metadata
- New ways of using and enhancing cataloging and authority records
2019
- Strategies for alternate subject headings and maintaining subject headings
- Stewardship of professional FTEs in metadata work and turnover
- “Future Proofing” of Cataloging
- Knowledge Organization Systems
- Alternatives to Statistics for Measuring Success and Value of Cataloging
- Systematic Reviews of Our Metadata
2018
- Creating metadata for equity, diversity, and inclusion
- Metadata for audio and videos
- Coverage of Identity Management work
- MarcEdit and other tools for batch processing and metadata reconciliation
- Are distributed models for vocabulary maintenance viable?
- What metadata managers expect from and value about the Research Library Partnership
2017
- How much metadata is practical?
- Beyond the Authorized Access Point?
- Metadata advocacy
- Vocabulary control data in discovery environments
- Use cases for local identifiers
- New skill sets for metadata management
- Metadata for archival collections
2016
- Sharing digital collections workflows
- Faceted vocabularies
- Metadata reconciliation
- Metadata for research data management
- Impact of identifiers on authority workflows
- Metadata for archived websites
2015
- Services built on usage metrics
- Persistent identifiers for local collections
- Getting identifiers created for legacy names
- Shift to linked data for production
- Managing metadata for image collections
- Working in shared files
Working groups launched recently
- Representing Organizations in ISNI Task Group (2014-2016)
Report: Addressing the Challenges with Organizational Identifiers and ISNI - Registering Researchers in Authority Files Task Group (2012-2014)
Report: Registering Researchers in Authority Files - Social Metadata Working Group (2009-2012)
Reports: Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums