“Under the Hood” is a collaboration between VALA and members of our loyal vendor community to provide GLAM IT practitioners with a real look at the structure and mechanics of technology solutions, products and works in progress. This is not a sales pitch, but an opportunity to test drive, analyse and contribute to the development of real solutions for our industry.
This paper presents the current state of development of GlamMap, a visualisation tool that displays library metadata on an interactive, computer-generated geographic map. The focus in the paper is on the most crucial improvement achieved in the development of the tool: GlamMapping Trove. The visualisation of Trove’s sixty-million book records is possible thanks to an improved database structure, more efficient data retrieval, and more scalable visualisation algorithms. The paper analyses problems encountered in visualising massive datasets, describes remaining challenges for the tool, and presents a use case demonstrating GlamMap’s ability to serve researchers in the history of ideas.
Australian school libraries have an expressed need to organise resources according to Australian Curriculum (AC) outcomes. Education Services Australia (ESA) has aligned digital resources to the AC since 2011, publishing it on platforms including Scootle. The Schools Catalogue Information Service (SCIS) at ESA creates and distributes MARC records to 93% of Australian school libraries, but has not traditionally provided curriculum-alignment data. This paper describes a trial in which headings from a linked data subject vocabulary (the Schools Online Thesaurus) in MARC records are supplemented with URIs for the purpose of consuming AC alignment data. A widget is presented to demonstrate possible downstream applications.
Collaborative development of a multi-disciplinary research infrastructure for vocabulary creation, management, publication, discovery, access and re-use
The use of controlled vocabularies increases the value of data resources by improving discovery, interoperability, and re-usability. The Australian National Data Service (ANDS), in partnership with members of Australian research organisations, is developing a user-driven vocabulary service to support Australian research groups, universities, and research libraries to find and use published vocabularies, as well as to create, manage, and publish new vocabularies. This paper follows the evolution of the development of the service. It provides a technical overview of the systems involved as well as a proposed model for support, outreach and responding to community need.
New web-based technologies are providing information professionals with tools to collect and preserve historical resources as never before. Many institutions are engaging the public in assisting them with metadata creation to improve description, increase access, and expand the body of knowledge surrounding their resources. These activities not only provide organisations with critical human resources, but build a more informed and engaged community of users. This paper reviews examples of several types of these innovative projects and what the evolution of “crowd-sourced metadata” may mean for the professional role of future librarians, archivists and curators.
Despite growing volume and popularity, institutional video content is the least curated and least discoverable of all content types. Although users expect ubiquitous access to all content, regardless of format, video is under-catalogued/indexed and therefore not easily accessible. Video, especially institutional video, is not available to discovery services, and rights management concerns inhibit availability. Therefore, libraries are missing an opportunity to showcase their relevance. This paper presents research on the hypothesis that utilizing automated transcription to programmatically create rich metadata promotes discoverability and usability of institutionally created video.
The University Digitisation Centre (UDC) at the University of Melbourne has been working towards implementing the Embedded Metadata Manifesto since its inception in 2009. This paper follows the evolution of the in-house information systems developed by UDC to incorporate the embedding of descriptive metadata as part of a standard digitisation process. Central to this has been the development of novel ways of accessing metadata from the various library catalogues via their public interfaces. Challenges arising from the re-use of catalogue metadata in non-library systems may provide additional insights as libraries attempt to re-invent the catalogue.