Seminar Speakers

Tom Baker   Tom Baker is the Chief Information Officer of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and co-chair of the DCMI Architecture Forum. He has previously worked as a digital library researcher at the German National Research Center for Informatics, GMD (later Fraunhofer Society) in Bonn and and the State and University Library in Göttingen. He holds an M.S. in library science from Rutgers University, a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University, and taught for two years at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok. He has worked as an activity lead in German and European research projects and consulted for organizations such as the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN. From 2006 to 2009 he co-chaired the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group of the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which standardized SKOS, and more recently co-chaired the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group.

 
Edmund Chamberlain   Edmund Chamberlain serves as Systems Development Librarian for Cambridge University Library. He has a BA in Politics from the University of East Anglia and an MA in Library and Information management at Loughborough University. His library career started as a Systems Assistant at the London Library This was followed by a role as Digital Projects Librarian at the Natural History Museum. He took up the position of Systems Librarian at Cambridge University Library in 2007 and has taken a lead in the redevelopment of online services and systems supporting both electronic and print library resources, including the LibrarySearch discovery service and library system API publishing. His professional interests include all aspects of online library and information services, especially web design trends and underlying software architecture. He is also interested in new standards of metadata, including emerging semantic web based services and open publishing models for both data and content.

Abstract: Ed's presentation will focus on the JISC funded 2011 Cambridge Open Metadata Project (COMET) project—run in parallel to the British Library's BNB RDF work. As well as a technical overview of the Marc to RDF conversion and tools used, the section will focus on institutional reasons for working with RDF and for exploring the licensing issues around bibliographic data reuse. He also touches upon current projects, including the current phase of the Open Bibliography project and the development of BibJSON.
Robina Clayphan   Robina Clayphan has spent the last sixteen years working in the area of the development and application of metadata. During her twelve years at the British Library she became the Bibliographic and Metadata Standards Coordinator and focused on metadata for digital objects and the internet. Robina chaired the Library Community of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative for several years and retains a position on its Advisory Board. She has been a member of several committees of national and international standards organisations related to developments in the area of metadata and identifiers, covering both the book information supply chain and domain–based application profiles. For the past four years she has been an independent consultant working for the Europeana Foundation and The European Library.

Abstract: Europeana is a service, largely funded by the European Commission, that aggregates and gives access to the on-line cultural heritage of Europe. Metadata relating to cultural heritage objects is harvested from libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual collections—many of whom are aggregators themselves. This has necessitated the development of the Europeana Data Model, a cross-domain data model that will accommodate the specific requirements of these different domains. It has been developed with the principles of the semantic web as a fundamental requirement to allow enrichment of the data by extensive linking. This presentation explains the model that has been developed and the looks briefly at the work undertaken in the Europeana Libraries project to apply library data to the model.
Alan Danskin   Alan Danskin is Metadata Standards Manager at the British Library. Alan is the British Library's representative to the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA . Alan has also represented the British Library on the MARC Advisory Committee. Recent activities include the project to release the British National Bibliography as Linked Open Data.

Abstract: Much has been written about linked and open data's potential. The BL aimed to advance debate from theory to practice via release of a 'critical mass' of core data offering the greatest possibilities for wider community experimentation and innovative application. The British National Bibliography (BNB) was chosen over specialist datasets since its scope and scale matched the requirement while underlining the BL's commitment to serious exploration of the issues.

The BL was interested in the organisational development possibilities of utilising: internal staff, existing tools and legacy MARC data to create its own linked open data offering. One key objective was to rethink old service approaches; blending the best with ideas from new communities using the metadata.

The British Library and Talis collaborated to develop a model and develop the technical infrastructure The BNB was released as Linked Open Data in July 2011. Since being launched the 'Linked Open BNB' has grown to cover nearly 3 million publications issued since 1950. The fact the system was soon processing over 2 million transactions per month suggests that authoritative sites offering useful data will be used. Similarly, effort put in to remodeling traditional library data was well received by the wider community and has helped advance discussions as hoped. Lessons learned included the value of exploiting external expertise to guide library specialists together with the benefits of offering sample data for wider community feedback and continual improvement.
Gordon Dunsire   Gordon Dunsire is an independent consultant, and was formerly Head of the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde. He co-chairs the DCMI Bibliographic Metadata Task Group and is a member of the DCMI Advisory Board. He was a member of the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group. He is a member of IFLA's Classification and Indexing Section and FRBR Review Group. He chairs the IFLA Namespaces Technical Group, and is a consultant to the ISBD/XML Study Group. He is also a member of the CILIP-BL Committee on RDA and the CILIP Committee on DDC. His career includes cataloguing (from 3x5 card to WorldCat) and systems librarianship as well as research. His current interests are the Semantic Web, open linked data, and resource discovery.

Abstract: (Dunsire & Hillmann) Diane Hillmann and Gordon Dunsire met in the Panizzi Room at the British Library on the first day of the famous "London Meeting" of April/May 2007. For reasons lost in the mists of time, they were designated co-chairs of the DCMI/RDA Task Group, and charged with (among other things) with developing the RDA Vocabularies as the JSC continued to work on the guidance text. With that beginning, the Task Group proceeded to build those vocabularies in the Open Metadata Registry (OMR)—learning a great deal in the process. Gordon went on to help build the IFLA standard vocabularies in a similar manner (which has informed the ongoing review and maintenance of those standards), and to work with the OMR team to add an RDF version of MARC 21 to the OMR. What will they do next?
Diane Hillmann   Diane Hillmann is currently a partner in the consulting firm Metadata Management Associates, Vocabulary Maintenance Officer for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, and Director of Metadata Initiatives at the Information Institute of Syracuse. From 1977 to 2008 she was associated with Cornell University Library, as a law cataloger, technical services manager, and manager of authorities and maintenance processes for the Cornell Library's MARC database. She also participated in the Cornell portion of the National Science Digital Library Core Infrastructure as Director of Library Services and Operations between 2000-2005. (http://nsdl.org) Diane was a liaison to and member of MARBI from the late 1980's to 2000, specializing in the Holdings and Authorities formats, which led to her early participation in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. She is currently a member of the DCMI Advisory Board, and was co-Program Chair for the DC-2010 and DC-2011 conferences in Pittsburgh and The Hague. Diane edited (with Elaine Westbrooks) Metadata in Practice, published by ALA Editions (2004) and she publishes frequently on digital library and metadata issues, particularly in the Metadata Matters blog (http://managemetadata.com/blog/).

Abstract: See Dunsire
Mikael Nilsson   Mikael Nilsson Mikael Nilsson published his PhD thesis on metadata harmonization at the Royal institute of Technology in Stockholm in 2011, summarizing his experience over the last decade as an active participant in numerous metadata standardization activities, nurturing the vision of making standards work together in a common metadata ecosystem. A former co-moderator of the DCMI Architecture forum and chair of the DCMI/IEEE LTSC joint task force, co-editor of a number of DCMI specifications, such as the DCMI Abstract Model and the DCMI RDF expression and a driving force behind the formulation of the DCMI Singapore Framework for application profiles, Mikael brought his harmonization vision to the 2007 Data Model Meeting at the British Library. Mikael is currently working as a software engineer at Google.

 
Pat Riva   Pat Riva is Coordinator of the Monographs Section in the Cataloguing Directorate for Heritage Collections (Direction du traitement documentaire des collections patrimoniales) at Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) in Montreal, Canada since 2007. Previously she held academic librarian positions at McGill University Libraries, first in the Library Systems Office, then as Romance Languages Cataloguer/Bibliographic Database Specialist and unit coordinator in Library Technical Services. Pat completed her MLIS at McGill University in 1986, having undergraduate degrees in mathematics and linguistics. Pat is chair of the Canadian Committee on MARC since 1996, and a member of the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing since 2009. Pat was a member of the Format Variation Working Group (2001-2004) appointed by the JSC and of the Examples Group I for RDA (2005-2008). In addition, BAnQ is one of four partners in the French translation of RDA currently underway. Since 2005, Pat has been an elected member of the IFLA Cataloguing Section Standing Committee and chair of the FRBR Review Group, she is an active member of the FRBR/CIDOC CRM Harmonisation Working Group since 2006. Pat currently writes and speaks primarily about FRBR and RDA

Abstract: (Riva & Willer) The presentation will first give a brief introduction to IFLA's bibliographic standards—ISBD and the FRBR family of conceptual models, their goals and management, specifically the procedures and processes for review and development within the IFLA Cataloguing Section's ISBD Review Group and FRBR Review Group. Background information will also be given on the declaration of the ISBD and FRBR element sets and vocabularies in RDF with reference to the problems encountered in the process, such as identifying elements, defining classes and properties, determining domains and ranges, separating semantics from syntax in the definitions of the elements, and designing application profiles.

The namespaces for the element sets and value vocabularies for ISBD and the FRBR models have been published, and are available in usable form due to the newly designed de-referencing services. Uses of these namespaces to publish linked data will be mentioned.

The final part of the presentation will discuss current activities and developments such as the harmonization of the FRBR family of conceptual models, ongoing work to extend FRBRoo to include entities, attributes and relationships defined in FRAD and FRSAD, alignments with other namespaces—ISBD/RDA and FRBR/RDA, and issues arising from such collaboration. Some thoughts about the need for defining strategy for future standards development, and their impact on the development of cataloguing rules will be mentioned.
Owen Stephens   Owen Stephens has been working in Library and IT services within the Higher Education sector for over 15 years. As well as a strong technical background, he has been on the management team of the library services of two leading UK Universities (Royal Holloway, University of London and Imperial College London). Owen's work to exploit IT to provide excellent library services includes implementation of a wide variety of library systems and work on national projects such as the current JISC Discovery initiative and KBPlus project. Owen organised the first 'Mashed Library' event in the UK to enable librarians and developers to work together to do interesting things with technology and libraries.

Abstract: The JISC-funded Discovery programme was launched in May 2011 to create 'a metadata ecology' to support better access to vital collections data in libraries, archives and museums and facilitate new services for UK education and research. In this presentation Owen Stephens will outline the background to the Discovery programme, review the outputs to date, including the Discovery open metadata principles and high level technical principles. Owen will also look ahead to what the programme will deliver up to the end of 2012.
Barbara Tillett   Dr. Barbara Tillett is Chief of the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) at the Library of Congress. That division of 29 people is responsible for creating and distributing various authoritative cataloging tools, including LC Rule Interpretations/LC Policy Statements, LC Classification schedules, LC Subject Headings, and other cataloging and acquisitions documentation, as well as the Web products, Cataloger's Desktop and Class Web. She currently serves as the Library of Congress representative and Chair of the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (the new cataloguing code) and represents LC on the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) Project, which she help found. She led the IFLA work that produced the Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (ICP). Along with Elaine Svenonius and Tom Delsey, she served as one of the consultants that developed the conceptual model for IFLA's Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.

She has been at the Library of Congress for the past 18 years. Prior to working at the Library of Congress, she worked at the University of Hawaii and the University of California, San Diego, with a short time teaching at UCLA following her doctorate. Barbara has been active in the American Library Association, including founding the Authority Control Interest Group in 1984 and chairing the ALCTS Cataloging and Classification Section. She is also the 2004 recipient of the distinguished Margaret Mann Citation in recognition for her many contributions in the areas of cataloging and classification.

She has served on the editorial committees of ACRL Publications in Librarianship, Advances in Librarianship, and continues for Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, and was a reviewer for Library Resources & Technical Services and College & Research Libraries. Her many publications have focused on cataloging theory and practice, authority control, bibliographic relationships, conceptual modeling, and library automation. Her dissertation on bibliographic relationships has been a source for conceptual designs of computer-based systems for bibliographic control.

Abstract: The collaborative work of the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA included important coordination with representatives from all over the information community. A key meeting in that process was the April 2007 London meeting at the British Library with the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), IEEE/LOM, and Semantic Web representatives that launched development of the RDA Vocabularies in the Open Metadata Registry and plans for a schema and application profile for RDA. Barbara provides the background and an overview of that process.
Mirna Willer   Dr. Mirna Willer is Professor at the Department of Information Sciences, University of Zadar, Croatia since 2007. Her teaching and research interests include the theory and practice of information organization, metadata and identifiers, digital web archives, interoperability, IFLA standards and models in the semantic web. She worked from 1980 to 2007 as systems librarian, standards officer and senior researcher at the National and University Library in Zagreb, Croatia. Among other international body memberships, she was a standing member of the IFLA Permanent UNIMARC Committee from its establishment in 1991 until 2005 (chair of Committee from 1997 to 2005), since then she has been its consultant and honorary member. She was also a member of the IFLA Working Group on FRANAR, the Working Group responsible for the development of the conceptual model FRAD, ISBD Review Group's ISBD Future Directions Working Group, chair of the ISBD/XML Study Group, and since 2011 chair of the ISBD Review Group. She wrote a book on UNIMARC in Theory and Practice, a chapter on authority control, about 100 articles (professional and research papers, reviews, etc.), translated in the field of UBC such as UNIMARC Manual: Bibliographic Format and E. Svenonius's The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, and edited the 3rd edition of UNIMARC Manual: Authorities Format.

Abstract: See Riva