MWDL's Best Practices for Geospatial Metadata Creation now available

If you're interested in having your digital collections materials show up on the map interface provided on the Digital Public Library of America portal, start planning to add geospatial metadata to your records! The Mountain West Digital Library Geospatial Discovery Task Force spent many months reviewing different options, and now Best Practices for Geospatial Metadata Creation for MWDL Cultural Heritage Digital Repositories and the companion document, Instructions for Assigning Geospatial Metadata Using GeoNames.org, have been approved by the MWDL Digitization Committee and are available for MWDL partners to use.

GeoNames data for Idaho State Capitol.

The new MWDL documents are on the “Policies and Guidelines” page on the MWDL website.  Please feel free to point people to the page or to the particular links above and on the page in any of your websites or documents. We want to continue to get the word out about these valuable standards.

We were delighted to see the recent Geographic and Temporal Guidelines that the Digital Public Library of America released about geospatial metadata in DPLA.  It looks like the MWDL Task Force's documents are well in line with DPLA’s Guidelines -- not too surprising, given the high level of coordination MWDL’s task force had with DPLA staff throughout our work!

Congratulations again to all task force members on fine work. An especial big thanks goes to the co-facilitators of the Task Force: Liz Woolcott from Utah State University Merrill-Cazier Library and Kristen Jensen from the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts.  The strength of what we have produced together is the best example of why we all collaborate. 

Ingestion Update and Metadata Office Hours

We are continuing to add more new collections to the Mountain West Digital Library!

You can see the list of partners under Montana grow larger as we add more collections from the Montana Memory Project. We have even more collections to add, so that list will be getting even longer.

We've recently added additional collections from the Idaho State Historical Society, the Roland Onffroy Collection and the Idaho Statehouse Images.

Coming soon are more collections from Brigham Young University, Utah State University, the Arizona Memory Project.

One new thing that we are also starting in response to feedback about MWDL partners wanting more metadata training is some informal metadata office hours, to be held on the first and third Thursday each month. Join me for Tuesdays with Metadata if you want to check in about any metadata related issue!

Roland Onffroy Collection

DPLA Metadata Model Introduction now available

The folks at DPLA just published this handy guide to the DPLA Metadata Model. This blog post has more information. This is interesting reading if you would like to get an overview of some of the metadata aggregation issues DPLA deals with on a national level. MWDL deals with similar issues at a regional level, by using our Application Profile to articulate best practices and standardization before we send our metadata up to DPLA.

A Day In the Life of Your Metadata Librarian

I've noticed that sometimes my work comes in different types of waves. When I first started my position my major project was adding the great collections from the Arizona Memory Project. Since then I've been adding new collections here and there as they come in, as well as working on a reharvesting project with our collections from Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library.

I've recently been doing a great deal of metadata auditing, which means shortly after that's done we will be adding even more new collections to MWDL! Today we have new collections from Utah Valley University, and we'll soon be adding new collections from Brigham Young University, Montana Memory Project, University of Idaho, Northern Arizona University, Weber State University, Arizona Memory Project, and more!

When we add new collections to Primo, we also need to update our master tracking spreadsheet, update the php includes that make mwdl.org run so smoothly, and create new web pages for partners and collections. 

I'm about to take a class on XSLT and XQuery, which I'm hoping will help me become an even more efficient and useful metadata librarian! I'm hoping to come up with some procedures that will help me audit metadata against the MWDL application profile in a more comprehensive manner. Stay tuned for my adventures with XSLT and XQuery!

Metadata issues - we want your feedback!

I've recently set up a google site designed to track metadata issues. The issues could be items we want to address in a new version of our MWDL Application Profile, issues we would want clarified on our general guidelines page, or even ideas for additional training. I've loaded in a few issues and questions, but would really like your feedback! You can add comments to the issues list or simply e-mail me if you have items to add.

Also, with the start of a new year, the ingestion queue has been revised. Let me know if you have any questions about the MWDL ingestion process.

Fresh Metadata from Brigham Young University Library

We've had some harvesting issues with Brigham Young University, so one of my major projects in December was working with our Primo team to get fresh metadata in for all of BYU's collections. This project is now complete, and the metadata is all fresh and new! It makes me feel like MWDL has done a bit of cleaning and redecorating for 2014!

You can browse these great collections from the partner page for the Harold B. Lee Library and also the partner pages from Brigham Young University - Hawaii and Brigham Young University - Idaho. 

Coming up next: more new collections from a variety of partners that we'll be announcing soon. BYU also has many new collections that I'll be reviewing and adding in the coming weeks. It is great to start out 2014 with many new collections to add to the Mountain West Digital Library!

OpenRefine and Metadata

One of the many great things I took away from the recent MWDL workshop on Linked Data was an introduction to OpenRefine. Aside from the great activities in using OpenRefine and Mulgara to clean up data, create URIs, and generate RDF files, OpenRefine looks like a great (and free) resource for most digital metadata librarians to use when faced with general metadata clean up issues.

Open Refine used to be known as Google Refine, so there you can find different information available under both names if you are searching for documentation.

Here are some resources I've been looking at recently:

Using OpenRefine to create clean-up scripts

Here's an entertaining screencast from Free Your Metadata.

Resources listed on a Google Refine Blog 

There's also an OpenRefine Google Group

The GitHub page for OpenRefine has a variety of resources, use cases, and tutorials listed.

You can easily export a CONTENTdm collection into an excel or .csv file and open it in Open Refine, but I've been curious about taking advantage of some of the harvested MWDL metadata that DPLA offers for download.

When will all our data look like this?

Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/