OLAC Newsletter
Vol. 29 | No. 1| March 2009
The OLAC Newsletter (ISSN: 0739-1153) is a quarterly publication of the Online Audiovisual Catalogers, Inc. appearing in March, June, September and December. Permission is granted to copy and disseminate information contained herein, provided the source is acknowledged.
OLAC Meeting Minutes:
Conference Reports:
Reports from the 2008 OLAC/MOUG
Conference, Part II:
Workshops:
- Elect. Resources
- Form/Genre Headings
- Integrating Resources
- Metadata for Audiovisual Materials
- Worldcat Local
- RDA Program
- Poster Sessions
Book Reviews:
OLAC Cataloger's Judgment:
- Sounds & Silence
- Edition or contents
- Order of names in 505
- PowerPoint on CD-ROM
- Mysteries of the 007
- Which came 1st 508 or 511
- True colors
- Computer file vs. video
- Auteur theory questioned
Book Reviews
Douglas King, Column Editor
Metadata
by Marcia Lei Zeng and Jian Qin
Metadata has been written to serve as a “textbook that systematically introduces metadata concepts and principles through the incorporation of practical examples and learning assessment materials” and “an instructional guide for practitioners”. A further goal of the book is to provide theoretical and practical instruction in metadata “concepts, principles, and applications” and “trends, innovative ideas, and advanced technologies in metadata research and practice that that will have significance implications in the years to come” (p. xv). The authors, Marcia Lei Zeng and Jian Qin, are exceptionally well-qualified: both are library and information science professors, Zeng at Kent State University and Qin at Syracuse University; both have received numerous grants for research on knowledge organization systems, metadata, and digital library projects and served as trainers for professionals, consultants for digital library projects. Zeng has also served on standards committees and working groups for IFLA, ASIS, SLA, and US NISO, among others. Accordingly, Zeng and Qin take a broad view of metadata, putting it in the context of managing digital information, not just in libraries, but across the digital information spectrum.
The main part of the book consists of four parts: “Fundamentals of Metadata,” “Metadata Building Blocks,” “Metadata Services,” and “Metadata Outlook in Research”. The first part, “Fundamentals of Metadata,” outlines the history, definitions, types and functions, principles, and anatomy of a metadata standard. The structure and semantics of representative metadata standards created by various metadata communities for general purposes or for special types of digital objects or purposes are discussed, including Dublin Core, MODS and MARC; metadata for cultural objects and digital resources; educational resources; archival and preservation metadata; rights management metadata; scientific metadata; and metadata for multimedia objects; a new (to this reviewer) variety of metadata, metadata describing agents (people, groups, and organizations) to support social computing, is also discussed. The second part of the book, “Metadata Building Blocks,” moves further into issues of sound digital project design, with chapters on the structure and semantics of a schema (elements and element sets, controlling the values in value spaces, application profiles, crosswalks, and best practices) and schema encoding design. A very long chapter on metadata record creation, including issues related to levels of description, methods of record creation (by catalogers, machines, or harvesting techniques), encoding and expression, linkage, wrapper, display, and parallel metadata, reinforces the view of metadata as part of a larger bibliographic or information universe and the necessity of adherence to standards for metadata creation to enable interoperability for data sharing.
The third part of the book includes chapters on metadata services such as metadata registries and repositories, including the metadata harvesting protocol initiated by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI-PMH), issues and methods of metadata quality measurement and enhancement, and achieving interoperability at the record, schema, and repository levels. The last section and chapter of the book examines current research and trends in metadata architecture, modeling, and semantics. Each chapter is followed by suggested readings and exercises that apply the concepts introduced in it and balance group and individual application and analysis. Fifty pages of appendices contain sections listing, first, metadata standards (schemas, application profiles and registries) mentioned in the book and, second, value encoding schemes and content standards (all with links given for documentation), as well as a glossary, and a bibliography. A companion Website (http://www.metadataetc.org/book-website/index.html) contains the chapter bibliographies, metadata standards and content standards and vocabularies lists, and links to the Websites and works cited where freely available online.
Metadata is a systematic and comprehensive treatment of the theory and practice of digital information organization and project design. Throughout the chapters, the authors stress the importance of following best practices in project design and adherence to standards and consistency in record creation so that records and aggregations of records are shareable. The writing style is clear, the book is replete with illustrations, and the supplementary resources are a gold mine for the student or practitioner. The table of contents is detailed down to the subsection level, which makes the text itself very easy to dip into for reference. The book is ideally suited as an instructional tool, in circumstances where the chapters are spaced across a quarter or semester, with lectures or classes to explicate the concepts presented, and fellow students with whom to study and work on the group projects. The level of presentation presupposes some grounding in systems concepts and terminology. There are a number of typographical errors, which I hope will be corrected in subsequent printings. Excellent overview and reference resource for the subject.
Published in 2008 by: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc., New York (xvii, 365 p.) ISBN 978-1-55570-635-7 (pbk.-$65.00)
Reviewed by:
Anna DeVore
Cataloging & Metadata Services
University Library
University of California, Santa Barbara
Kidzcat: a How-To-Do-It Manual for Cataloging Children’s Materials and Instructional Resources
by Deborah J. Karpuk
Cataloging “children’s materials and instructional resources” is an activity that is, most decidedly, not for the faint of heart. For catalogers who spend much of their careers cataloging library materials of all kinds—but chiefly those aimed at the adult crowd—being confronted with the necessity of dealing with stuff for kids can be daunting. Applying LC AC headings can be mystifying to someone who is otherwise quite capable of slogging around in the magisterial 4-volume LCSH; everything, it seems, is part of some kind of series (real or implied) or otherwise related to something else (and the kids know these relationships!); curriculum materials seem to be published with reckless disregard for even rudimentary publishing conventions; classification choices can be puzzling; the stuff that children’s materials selectors want to keep—and have cataloged—in their collections can leave us simply bemused. Deborah Karpuk’s Kidzcat promised help with finding answers to all kinds of questions and problems that are encountered frequently when cataloging kids’ stuff. Alas, such was not to be the case.
The book starts off well enough. Chapter 1, “Getting Started in Cataloging”, proceeds through a basic, but useful, outline of the components of the MARC record (the inclusion of fields 653 and 658 in a chart of “curriculum-enhanced MARC” tags does raise questions, particularly when chapter 8, “Subject headings” says nary a word about the use of these tags). On through chapter 2, “Description and Cataloging of Books” until the reader notices, on p. 23, the apparent typo that gives the form subdivision “Fiction” in a $x. (This practice was discontinued in 1999, in favor of the $v). The contents of this chapter are, in fact, pretty slight but perhaps this is due to comparatively widespread knowledge of book cataloging. The reader may pause to wonder about the example, on p. 17, that gives the quoted note, “Book four in the Underland Chronicles” immediately after “(The Underland Chronicles ; Book 4)”. This seems oddly redundant.
Chapter 3, “Authority Control,” provides a pleasant, if uncomplicated, explication of its topic until the book presents this peculiar example on p. 27: “RowF, Jo See Rowling, J. K.” Inasmuch as the basic authority record provided on p. 25-26 does not include a reference from “RowF”, a suspicion of carelessness arises. A brief mention of RLIN as a source for name authority checking seems a bit dated, since OCLC absorbed RLIN in late 2007.
The next chapter, “Non-book Materials,” is one that should be the largest, covering as it does, sound and video recordings, electronic resources, and three-dimensional artifacts. Here, Karpuk barely skims the surface, presenting her material in a scant 20 pages, while barely touching on any of the manifold challenges that cataloging these materials really do present. And, oh yes, the chapter includes another rather entertaining typo: “MARC uses the 246 field for Computer File Characteristics.” This is followed by examples of 256 fields which, according to OCLC’s Bibliographic Formats and Standards, are no longer used.
So, the reader turns (with as yet undaunted optimism) to chapter 5, “Series and Related Titles”. Dr. Karpuk’s presentation of this critically important aspect of cataloging for children is so garbled, confused, and foreshortened that the chapter succeeds in creating more confusion than already exists. Except for a brief mention of Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series, Karpuk seems determined to ignore or avoid the concept of series titles entered under personal author heading. Unfortunately for Dr. Karpuk, children’s series are all too often created by, or associated with, single creators (e.g., Gertrude Chandler Warner’s Boxcar Children, R.L. Stine’s Fear Street, or Lisi Harrisons’ Clique series) and, as such, are entered under the heading for the associated author. If Karpuk objects to the way catalogers handle personal-author series (and her examples certainly seem to indicate that she does), she should come right out and state the fact and then explain how to amend series authority records to suit her purposes instead of instructing, by example, her reader to tag such series as 440s.
The chapter on “Serials” (chapter 6) is slight, but probably sufficient to its audience; “Web Site Cataloging” (chapter 7) is certainly a good deal shorter than one might have expected for such mutable resources; and “Subject Headings” (chapter 8, 8 pages) and “Classification” (chapter 9, 12 pages) barely cause a ripple. Dr. Karpuk’s closing chapters—“Automation Systems and Retrieval,” “Local Policy Issues,” and “Outsourcing”—are geared primarily toward school libraries rather than children’s departments of public libraries, and may provide some valuable food for thought for school library media specialists. At the same time, this may also exhibit a kind of naïveté. Most decisions concerning these matters usually are made at the district or regional level with precious little input from personnel at the building level. Still, it would not hurt for media specialists to be prepared for the (unlikely) possibility that their participation will be welcomed.
Finally, the book offers its “Appendix: Practical Exercises” (27 pages, with running title “Appendix: Practice Exercises”). The best use for these exercises would be as fodder for a rousing game of “find-the-mistake” (although Dr. Karpuk does not present them as such). Almost every example is marred by outdated practices (e.g., page 171, 650 _0 $aScience museums$zSan Francisco (Calif.) instead of going indirectly through California), mistakes (e.g., page 169, 650 _0 CD-ROM instead of CD-ROMs), or typos (a personal favorite, page 163, gives a subject string with the form subdivision “Fiction” in $z immediately adjacent to another subject string that ends with “Juvenile fiction” in $x).
This may sound like just a lot of carping and nitpicking, but cataloging is all about detail and accuracy, and Dr. Karpuk’s book displays an almost wanton disregard for these qualities. An astute reader may well wonder why Karpuk produced this book while the unsuspecting children’s materials cataloger or school library media specialist, following this text, easily could create bibliographic records that mislead catalog users, fail to work well in many ILSs, and even add “biblio-trash” to shared library databases by (at the very least) eluding duplicate detection algorithms. At the steep price of $60, this inconsequential text, rife with errors and omissions, fails to live up to the promise of its subtitle.
Published in 2008 by: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc., New York (xiii, 183 p.) ISBN 978-1-55570-590-9 (pbk.-$59.95)
Reviewed by:
Michael W. Rechel
Head, Technical Services
Abington Township Public Library
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