If you’re at the conference at the Westin San Diego, my showcase presentations take place Thursday, May 28 at 9.30am and 10.00am. Please do stop by and say hello!

I attended an all-day version of this workshop at Stanford University and found it to be an excellent presentation in terms of covering the issues of looking at metadata standards for digitization projects with an eye toward being able to share that metadata to other environments (i.e. being harvested, whether into the Encore discovery services platform and/or the greater world of metadata aggregation). It also covered why harvesting (really, sharing metadata) is important and had some very practical tips and real-world examples for looking at how the whole world of harvesting works.

Look for more posts from me about harvesting in the months to come, as we are building this functionality into Encore. You can also check out an article on University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s harvesting project on pages two and three of our recent INN-Touch newsletter.

We are definitely keeping an eye on RDA, but so far there has been nothing that is, as we say, machine-actionable, so being ready has mostly involved monitoring the progress of the Joint Steering Committee.

At the moment, the timeline for RDA’s emergence as an accepted standard seems somewhat in doubt, given the Library of Congress’s recent call to suspend all work on RDA until the business requirements for proceeding can be articulated and large-scale testing of FRBR can be carried out with real data.

Diane Hillmann (from Cornell University) met with AVIAC (Automation Vendors Information Advisory Committee) at ALA in June to talk with vendors about what RDA might involve for us.  We had an interesting discussion about the ways in which vendors have used the MARC format to transmit information beyond bibliographic description embedding invoice and order information, item record and holdings information, and other local uses that leverage 9xx fields and other parts of the MARC record.  Diane assured us that RDA would have extensible sections for vendor use, and I am now working with Diane and some other vendors to try to capture some of the ways in which we have used MARC that might need to make it into RDA.

Diane also indicated that a preliminary data sample might be ready as early as August 2008 (that’s this month!) so I am looking forward to seeing what there is to see.

For more information about RDA:

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/jsc/rda.html

Then, in early July, Jerry Kline and I made a visit to Scottsdale, Arizona, (see picture below) where Aimee Fifarek had been kind enough to arrange for the temperature to be under 110 degrees especially for me!  (July is often one of the colder months of the year in San Francisco, so you can imagine the shock to one’s metabolism when it’s suddenly 50 degrees warmer!)  Our visit was to launch a development partnership with the Scottsdale Public Library, one of seven development-partner libraries helping Innovative build a new digital library solution called Content Pro.

L to r: Aimee Fifarek, Technologies & Content Manager; Richard Howley, Lead Cataloging Librarian; Rice Majors, Content Pro Product Manager; Kathy Schoepe, Technology Coordinator; Rita Hamilton, Library Director; Jerry Kline, Innovative’s Chairman and CEO; and Leigh Conrad, Lead Librarian in the Scottsdale Room.

We had an enthusiastic response to the demonstration we gave of the Content Pro system and it sparked a lively brainstorming session among the library managers and their Content Pro team as to the possibilities that this could open for them to engage their community in capturing and describing their local history.

June brought me to my very first ALA conference, which came as something of a surprise even to me! I had a terrific conference experience in all, from getting a chance to see so many of the library staff members that I speak to by phone and email so often to getting to show a brand-new product (Content Pro) in the Innovative booth. I even got my photograph taken with Thomas Leonhardt from St. Edward’s University in Texas (left) when he was signing on to become a development partner for Content Pro!

In other ALA news, I attended the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) FRBR Interest Group, where Rich Greene from OCLC announced that due to shifting job responsibilities it would be appropriate for him to step down as Chair. I found my hand raising itself when a volunteer was sought to be the Chair for the remainder of Rich’s term, and thus I’m now the Chair until ALA 2009, when the new Chair-Elect will take my place!