Some observations:

• The bulk of the bill strengthens sentencing for and protections against all sorts of disturbing predatory behavior. The benefits of doing so should not be overlooked or belittled.
  
• The "deception" described above can land you in prison for 20 years, if a minor is found to have mistakenly navigated to your site.
  
• Defining what might be considered obscene is a difficult task, depending as it does upon "community standards." Defending yourself against such charges is fraught with difficulty and risk.


• Passage of the bill was helped by the work of a study done by a company called Envisional in 2000. The company

  ... searched against the names of that year's 26 most popular children's characters, including Pokémon, My Little Pony, Toy Story and Furby. Its study found several thousand links to pornographic sites.



• The above list of characters contains some double entendres; the number of links found may have been inflated by these multiple meanings.


• The law applies to all "source code" on a website; if one embeds scripts or other functional programming jargon, one must also beware of future development practice for those vocabularies. Quoting from the law:

  The term `source code' means the combination of text and other characters comprising the content, both viewable and nonviewable, of a web page, including any website publishing language, programming language, protocol or functional content, as well as any successor languages or protocols. [emphasis mine]

Perhaps worrying about this is making a mountain out of a molehill. Meta tags as a class have been less and less popular as their utility was abused by search engine rank ploys and advertising parasites. However, it seems to have special dangers for organizations that have wide appeal to all ages, and have large collections of pages (many of which may be automatically populated with meta tags) that contain some material that might be considered objectionable by the stodgiest amongst our populace. Hmmm, sound like anybody you know?

http://www.rlg.org/en/pdfs/rlgnews/news63/news63_3.pdf

The part of my quote that explains how what we do relates to Google et al was chopped off, so i am afraid it makes me sound like I am blathering on in ignorance of those larger initiatives. The sentence that got left out was, " We see the interest in the above-mentioned initiatives as validating, informing and adding momentum to our efforts." So there you go. Thanks to my supervisor, Barb Stelmasik, for crediting me with this line, which I had contributed to her report to RLG.

An example record is here, click on the "card catalog image" link to see what I am talking about; a post explaining the genesis and use levels is here.

Your thoughts? I can think of a few enhancements and critiques, but is this an approach that deserves more exploration? Is it more or less suitable for a public library, vs. other types of libraries?

This term is generally designed to describe a new wave of library services that focus on creating community, incorporating user input and customizing views and perspectives. Some of these ideas and approaches are not that new, but the momentum of the discussion is growing rapidly.

Michael Stephens, who has recently been hired as a professor for the MLIS program at Dominican University, has published a bibliography on the topic, which can be found at http://www.tametheweb.com/presentations/CIL2006Bibliography.pdf. I recommend it for anyone who wants to explore this area, which is important not only to those involved in designing user services, but also to those selecting and describing materials.

Eric and cohorts at UND and elsewhere have collaborated on a manual to describe the effort. I'm excited to dig into it and would love to hear your comments. It can be found at:
http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/manual/

Plenty more info and applications at http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/

Main presentation:
Reflections on the Water

Links and cites:

Minnesota Digital Library:
www.mndigital.org/
DLF Aquifer:
www.diglib.org/aquifer/
Open Archives Initiative:
www.openarchives.org
NSDL Metadata Primer:
metamanagement.comm.nsdlib.org/outline.html
Best Practices for Shareable Metadata:
oai-best.comm.nsdl.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?PublicTOC

Hillmann, Diane I. and Elaine Westbrooks, eds. Metadata in Practice. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2004. (Link to University of Minnesota Libraries record)

See here: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/browse.html.

Categories are generally pretty clear: Your contact information will go under the category of "Personal Information," your work history will be under the category "Career", etc. But even here there are some grey areas: the element "Mentors" is under the category "Personal Information," while advisors are listed under "Education" and Informational Interview-ees under "Career"! Clearly, there is some conceptual overlap.

It gets even messier when looking at subcategories. How to fit elements under subcategories, let alone categories, that will satisfy the broad user base, extending from graduate schools to primary (Kindergarten - 6th grade) institutions?

I argued for adding a modifier to each element to allow it to be assigned multiple categories, with one set as default. These values could be edited by a system administrator but be invisible to the normal user. This relieved considerable pressure to define a universal hierarchy of element classification, a hierarchy that would need to be so universal in application as to make itself useless. The hierarchy will be used primarily for discovery - that is, for display but not for actually structuring or storing content.

Another issue was user pressure to bring in "tagging" of content. This concept is hot right now, with services like Flickr allowing users to enter free-text words describing items. We discussed using this only in a narrow sense, for users to find files that they had uploaded by using keywording. This approach of making it private, while eliminating some of the emergent properties of serendipity and conversation that the Flickr model allows, is well-suited for such a private application, and does not force the system to rely on user behavior for ensuring meaningful display to viewers.

Along with Eric Celeste, I am pushing for a strong role for the Libraries, involving Technical Services at least in part, to advise, manage and/or consult on the creation of these two tools. More to come as discussion continue!

Well, maybe we feel a little too comfortable, because, as the recent testing of the LUMINA website showed, even graduate stiudents are not always clear on the concepts surrounding selection of these classes of tools. Constantly in our testing, we were faced with the realization that, as much as possible, we need to look toward using functional labels for our tools. "article-finder," to use a silly example, will get a lot more people to articles than "index."

LUMINA is designed to get faculty and graduate students to MNCAT and the article indexes, databases and associated tools quickly. Its focus is on providing access to the deepest, most informative, most esoteric information we have to offer. What we also came to understand was that these resources must be placed in a fair amount of context, and made as easily accessible to the once-a-month user as they are to the daily user. For while a person may be experienced in their subject of study, we should not assume that their study has extended into the realms of library science.

What else did we learn? The information seeking behaviors of the academic library patron have changed, as much as is commonly advertised - if not more. A major change from the old LUMINA design is a MNCAT search box placed prominently on the front page. In the age of the single search box, we felt this a necessity. For all the talk you have heard about Google-ization and people not wantingn to go past the first page of search results, the testers showed a surprising willingness to go through pages and pages of hits.

Another glaring problem is the near invisibility of the Archives and Special COllections units, and the Andersen Library as a whole, in the new design. It is expected that the faculty and graduate stiudents are among the most important users of these resources, and there was no real way for people to distinguish these collections from others in a long list.

The upshot of the testing was a return to some of the old nomenclature of "Articles and More" and "Books and More" that had appeared on the old LUMINA design. I look forward toi the new, edited design and hearing everyone's comments.

Congratulations to Shane and Jen for a tremendous effort on a short, short timeframe.

Presenters:
Dr. William Moen (University of North Texas);
Rebecca Guenther ( Library of Congress);
Ann Caldwell (Brown University);
Marty Kurth (Cornell University);
Terry Reese (Oregon State University)

Moen gave an introduction to the particulars of metadata, and laid out some of the intellectual concepts that underlay the difficulties in crosswalking data between schemas. He stated that until recently, metadata had been thought of as largely a systems problem. Moen argued for developing a view of metadata from a user perspective, making sure that data standards meeting search and retrieval requirements. He also said that he believes no one library metadata scheme will emerge, but that XML will become entrenched as the common syntax. Overall, libraries must think of themselves as “one node on the information network” – previously used to the highest position in a hierarchy, libraries must accept that in the new networked world of information, they are in a large pool and must distinguish themselves within that pool.

Moen’s presentation: http://www.unt.edu/wmoen/presentations.htm
[Metadata Interaction, Integration, and Interoperability]

Marty Kurth manages metadata for the Cornell libraries, and he shared his observations on managing large metadata projects, specifically reusing MARC data for digital projects that focused on pulling items from the monograph collections. This was especially interesting in light of the Cornell digital projects model, which operates as a consulting service somewhat separate from the library itself.

Kurth stated that the storehouse of MARC records was the research library’s main asset. A huge amount of work has been put into populating and maintaining this database. So it should be reused whenever possible. However, maintaining “separate-but-equal” data stores in different formats (i.e. MARC & XML) is a headache.

Kurth’s staff previously used a model in which IT staff at the library would use scripting to pull specific fields from the MARC records and output them into a database. These scripts would be re-run at specific intervals to refresh the database. Recently, they have moved to a model with metadata staff themselves using XSLT to do transformations. However, with the more efficient XSLT model, which allows the metadata staff to quickly see results and then tweak the stylesheets to improve them, comes documentation issues that did not exist with the more centralized scripting model. Kurth stressed the need to document and archive tools, templates, scripts, etc. that are used to convert data. Along with the metadata itself, these can provide an important record of decisions and strategies that have been built upon.

Kurth’s presentation: http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/1457
[Using MARC repurposing to Initiate a Metadata Management Design]

Guenther’s presentation was an introduction to the structure and use of MODS, paying particular attention to its ability to maintain hierarchical levels of description within a single record. As always, this capacity does not mean that an institution will have the resources to take full advantage of it.

Guenther’s presentation: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/presentations/ala2005-mods.htm
[Rich Descriptive Metadata in XML: MODS as a Metadata Scheme]

Caldwell runs a small metadata “shop” at Brown University that creates metadata for digital projects. They do so entirely in MODS records, most of them fairly minimal in detail, using homegrown templates in an application called NoteTab Pro. This program is a text editor that allows custom templates and error checking routines. Currently their image database runs on a custom platform, but they are looking at various proprietary solutions currently.

Caldwell’s presentation: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/staff/caldwell/MODSatBrown.ppt
[MODS at Brown University: Our First Three Years]

Reese concluded the presentation by demonstrating a new version of his MARCedit software. This program has been enhanced extensively by Reese over the past several months, and he demonstrated its new features while discussing some of the reasons for his design decisions. Most important in the new program are the enhanced conversion tools. These tools convert records into MARCXML and then into the desired format. Reese discussed his strategy of using MARCXML as the matrix for conversion, based largely on the fact that it is as rich as MARC, providing lossless conversion back and forth, while being in a XML format allows for easier conversion into other, XML-based formats. Reese also demonstrated a tool that displays a MODS record as if it were a MARC record, allowing catalogers who are used to the latter an easy entry into the MODS world.
Reese’s presentation: http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/presentations/ala/summer2005/ala_2005_mods.ppt
[MODS for Everyone - XML Tools for Everyone]