Saturday, February 04, 2017

Metadata for All: Article Summary #2, A LS 566 Post

From the Article
Mary W. Elings and Günter Waibel in their article Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing Across Libraries, Archives, and Museums discuss integrating digital content in libraries, archives, and museums, and the challenges there in. There are different standards used in regards to handling digital content. They go over the key concepts for the different standards, like data field and structure, and data forma. With each concept they give an example of how it works within the standard method. There is a helpful table (see image) explaining which standards are used in each field. They point out that the success of this endeavor hands on the development of a "homogenous practice in describing like-materials in different institutions."

I am all about across the board standards. It makes sharing and preserving data effective and efficient. Plus the risk of something getting lost in the shuffle is reduced. I would also like to point out that there an awful lot of acronyms in this article (the field in general -we're all speaking in tongues at this point). Despite the article being ten years old, the section on current trends was informative and still relevant. There is a constant need to stay current, especially with the new technology that is always coming out. Library Science is always updating itself so that need of standards is vital.

1 comment:

Steven said...

Nice summary! In my mind, it's tempting for some writers to think about combining the work of librarians, archivists, and museum professionals (the "LAMs") into a single profession in the not so distant future. I'm not sure I'm convinced of that, though we should definitely be working to share our metadata! :)

Dr. MacCall