A Training Program for Shareable Metadata Metadata for You & Me is a collaboration between the University of Illinois Library and Indiana University. This project is made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. Metadata for You & Me Section 2: A Look at Sharing: The Current Sharing Environment

2 Questions to Consider How do you currently share? Who do you share with? What do you find hard about sharing/not sharing? What technical standards do you use for sharing?

3 A History of Library Sharing (Abridged) Standardization of size of catalog cards 1901 – Library of Congress card distribution program MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC) 1971 – OCLC Union Catalog 1987 – Z – Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)

4 Why Share? Sharing benefits users –Ability to create customized searches of specific domains –Brings together distributed collections Sharing benefits your institution –Increases exposure of collections –Broadens user base –Potentially adds collaboration opportunities

5 Why Share? Because we have to. –User expectations are changing –We can no longer assume that users will come through our front door –Sharing metadata gets us “in the flow”

6 Library/archive/museum data is useful –Even when objects aren’t digitized It’s our mission to distribute information We should be leaders in the networked information environment We have good ideas, but others do too We should therefore make it easier for our data to be used by others Why we should care

7 Sharing metadata: Federated search The distributed databases are searched directly. Mill? My resource 04 For Example: Z39.50, SRU

8 Sharing metadata: Data aggregation The user searches a pre-aggregated database of metadata from diverse sources. Mill? My resource 04 For Example: Search engines, union catalogs, OAI PMH, RSS

9 Sample OAI RequestSample OAI Request:

10 Some Other Ways

11 Safe Assumptions - For Now Users often discover material through shared records, not through your front door Users don’t know about your collection or won’t remember it Because users enter through “deep” links, they may bypass introductory information that provides the larger context for a collection Shared records lead users to local environment where full context is available

12 Collection Registries ????? Photograph courtesy of Charles W. Cushman Collection: Indiana University Archives

13 Metadata for You & Me Online What’s available: –Workshop slides in Powerpoint format –Brief textual versions of workshop materials –Supplemental materials such as references, links, and activities Up next: Section 3: A Look at Sharing: Aggregations

14 Credits The development of the Metadata for You & Me curriculum was funded through a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarianship grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services The content for this course grew out of work sponsored by the Digital Library Federation and National Science Digital Library to develop best practices for use of OAI- PMH and shareable metadata We would also like to thank: –Richard Urban, MYM Project Manager –Institutions hosting on-site workshops –…and all participants in the online and on-site workshops for your valuable contributions towards the evolution of this training program This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.