originally: http://www.oclc.org/programs/ourwork/renovating/changingmetadata/aggregating.htm
Sharing and Aggregating Social MetadataRLG Partners participating in discussions about renovating descriptive practices have identified network-level integrating and sharing of metadata contributions as an area that would benefit from collective action. These contributions could come from curators, subject librarians, experts, users, etc., both locally and globally, that can enrich the descriptive metadata created by libraries, archives and museums. To be truly effective, we need to share and aggregate contributions added by users in many diverse environments. Potential user contributions could include annotations of text, commentaries, reviews, links to related sources, images, etc. These contributions might originate in systems not designed by libraries, museums or archives. Ideally, these contributions would be open, available for searching, linking, contributing and extracting targeted information according to context. We are thinking of these contributions as a means to enrich descriptive metadata that could be presented, as desired, through "mashups," where contributions could be integrated within, separated out or excluded from a montage of information that includes descriptive metadata created by libraries, archives and museums. We recognize that these kinds of contributions are not necessarily tied to a specific title or work. For example, subject guides, course introductions, finding aids or exhibit commentaries often have good overviews of a particular field; they may have relevance beyond their immediate environment and provide valuable context for a variety of individual works in that field. A Social Metadata Working Group has been assembled to analyze issues that will need to be resolved to take full advantage of the array of potential user contributions by communicating and sharing them on the network level. The group will issue a report of our recommendations in the latter half of 2009. Among the questions the working group is addressing:
Social Metadata Working Group Roster
This working group is staffed by John MacColl and Karen Smith-Yoshimura. |
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