News from 2014

DCMI is pleased to announce the appointment of Paul Walk to DCMI's Governing Board for a three year term. In 2013, Paul joined EDINA, University of Edinburgh, as Head of Technology Strategy and Planning, an exciting role which has placed him back into a service development and delivery environment -- albeit one operating at a national as well as an institutional scale. Paul has been an active participant in DCMI work for a number of years. While at UKOLN at the University of Bath where, for seven years, he served the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and then its successor, Jisc, as a strategic technical advisor, with a focus in the areas of information standards development, resource discovery and digital infrastructure. Paul brings a strong set of management and process skills that will be essential as we move forward with our new organization structure, and will be a welcome asset to the Board.

DCMI, the Texas Digital Library and the Harry Ransom Center are pleased to announce this DC-2014 special pre-conference event that will bring together experts and practitioners to explore archival description in the cultural heritage descriptive landscape and the emergence of authority files/identity description as an opportunity for cultural heritage cross-community collaboration. In addition, this day-long workshop to be held at the Harry Ransom Center on the University of Texas at Austin campus will provide attendees with the latest information on key metadata editing and management tools used by the working archivist. You will not want to miss "Fonds Bonds: Archival Metadata, Tools, and Identity Management." Space for this special event is limited, so register now for DC-2014 at _blank">http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2014/register

DCMI and the Texas Digital Library invite you to register for this day-long, hands-on "Training the Trainers of Linked Data" post-conference workshop to be held on Saturday, October 11, 2014. Linked Data has gained momentum, and practitioners are eager to use its principles to derive more value from metadata. Available handbooks and training materials focus on an audience with a computer science background. However, people with a non-technical education find it hard to understand what Linked Data can mean for them. This full-day, hands-on workshop will provide an overview of methods and case studies from the handbook "Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums" (2014, ALA/Neal-Schuman). Using freely available tools and data, this workshop will teach you how to clean, reconcile, enrich, and publish your metadata. Participants will learn about concepts, methods, and tools that they can use on their own, or to teach others within their own institutions, to get more value from metadata. Space for this special event is limited, so register now for DC-2014 at _blank">http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2014/register

Online registration for DC-2014 is now open at http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2014/register. The conference and DCMI Annual Meeting is scheduled for 8-11 October in Austin, Texas. This year's theme is "Metadata Intersections: Bridging the Archipelago of Cultural Memory". Metadata is fundamental in enabling ubiquitous access to cultural and scientific resources through galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM). While fundamental, GLAM traditions in documentation and organization lead to significant differences in both their languages of description and domain practices. DC-2014 will explore the role of metadata in spanning the archipelago of siloed cultural memory in an emerging context of linked access to data repositories as well as repositories of cultural artifacts. More information about the conference can be found at http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2014.

"Fonds Bonds: Archival Metadata, Tools and Identity Management" is a full-day pre-conference workshop at DC-2014 on archival metadata, tools, and standards. The workshop is being hosted by and at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin and will feature top experts in the archives field. The program includes presentations on archival data in leading discovery services (e.g., Europeana), an update on revisions in process to EAD, the latest on tools popular with working archivists including ArchivesSpace, RAMP, and xEAC, and leading developments addressing archives-related identities (Find Connect, ISNI, SNAC). More information on the workshop can be found at http://dcevents.dublincore.org/IntConf/index/pages/view/2014-archives.

Two DCMI Regional Meetings are happening very soon. On June 20th, the Shanghai Library hosts a seminar titled "Digital Humanities and Semantic Technologies". This meeting is the first DCMI Regional Meeting in China. The meeting is a partnership of DCMI, the Shanghai Library, and the Shanghai Society for Library Science. Full information and a link to the official website can be found at http://dcevents.dublincore.org/BibData/APShanghai. On June 23rd, the partnership of DCMI, ISKO-UK and IRSG hold a DCMI Regional Meeting in London titled "Making Metadata Work". Full information and a link to the official website can be found at http://dcevents.dublincore.org/BibData/mmw.

At DC-2014, DCMI will convene a group of graduate students, particularly master's in professional programs, and early career professionals as part of DCMI's efforts to support the next generation of metadata specialists in developing their knowledge, skills, and mastery of best practices. In addition to engaging in 1-on-1 and group interactions with leading researchers, consultants, and practitioners shaping the metadata ecosystem, there will be a Special Session designed specifically for them where they will gain an understanding of how the discourse and practice of metadata is evolving and how today's innovations are changing for better metadata modeling, design, and implementation. The students' schools and employing institutions sponsor attendance, establish their own criteria for selection, and determine the level of support to be provided. For more information, go to the DC-2014 conference page for the Next General Metadata Specialists Program at http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/index/pages/view/nextGen.

The new DCMI Technical Board has created a one year Task Group to address development of definitions and best practices for RDF application profiles and to closely liaise with other organizations engaged in addressing similar issues including W3C. The Group will report to the Community Specifications Committee and be co-chaired by Antoine Isaac and Karen Coyle with editorial assistance from Evelyn Dröge and Thomas Bosch. The Task Group charter, statement of work and a listing of current participants can be found on the Group's wiki at http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/RDF_Application_Profiles. Others interested in participating should contact the Task Group chairs.

The Governing Board of DCMI is pleased to announce the appointment of Valentine Charles and Stuart Sutton as co-chairs of the new Community Specifications Committee (CSC). Valentine currently serves as a Research and Development Coordinator with Europeana. Stuart is an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Information School of the University of Washington and Managing Director of DCMI. The CSC is a new committee that functions under DCMI's Technical Board and is charged with supporting the stakeholder community, working with DCMI Communities and Task Groups as well as appropriate DCMI members and stakeholder organizations in the development of new specifications and vocabularies and their publication as DCMI Community Specifications. In addition, the Committee is responsible for managing the criteria and process for designation of third-party resources as a DCMI Community Resources. More information about Valentine and Stuart can be found on the Technical Board's page at http://dublincore.org/about/technicalBoard/

DCMI and ASIST will present a joint webinar titled "How to pick the low hanging fruits of Linked Data" on Wednesday, 21 May 2014, 10:00am EDT (World Clock: 14:00 UTC http://bit.ly/1qLSeq1). The presenters are Seth Van Hooland and Ruben Verborgh. Online registration is open at http://bit.ly/1kwVMai and free for DCMI Individual Members and US$20 for non-members. The concept of Linked Data has gained momentum over the past few years, but the understanding and the application of its principles often remain problematic. This webinar offers a short critical introduction to Linked Data by positioning this approach within the global evolution of data modeling, allowing an understanding of the advantages but also of the limits of RDF. After this conceptual introduction, the fundamental importance of data quality in the context of Linked Data is underlined by applying data profiling techniques with the help of OpenRefine. Methods and tools for metadata reconciliation and enrichment, such as Named-Entity Recognition (NER), are illustrated with the help of the same software. This webinar will refer to case-studies with real-life data which can be re-used by participants to continue to explore OpenRefine at their own pace after the webinar. The case-studies have been developed in the context of the handbook "Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums", which will be published by Facet Publishing in June 2014.