Week 3 Reading Notes

Introduction to Metadata (Gilliland, Anne J.)

• I’ve heard about the content vs. the container, but this three-pronged feature of information (content, context, and structure) is new to me. With the example of a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the content would be the story, the structure would be the physical copy of the book (or digital e-book), and the context would be any events, experiences, or items that could be associated with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (such as the renewed zombie phenomenon and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice). Perhaps this is different when referring to metadata?
• This article points out the argument that “there is no single metadata standard that is adequate for describing all types of collections and materials.” Is this then a major flaw rather than benefit to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative—it’s too encompassing? Should different fields and disciplines have different metadata standards?
• Information science professionals need to achieve two main goals when describing and organizing information: a) describing and organizing the information that does that item justice and b) describe and organize the information in a way that most users understand. With the Internet allowing users to generate their own metadata, this allows information professionals to learn how the public wants to organize information.

An Overview of the Dublin Core Data Model (Miller, Eric J.)

• Questions: How prevalent is Dublin Core in the information science field? Is it generally used or generally not used? Since it’s supposed to “support cross-discipline resource discovery,” are professionals in a variety of disciplines queried when creating/revising Dublin Core?
• I feel that because Dublin Core allows for broader concepts that many fields can use (the articles points out that it uses the term “contributor” rather than “painter”), it will allow/does allow for it to be used across many disciplines.
• DCMI encompasses the “work smart, not hard” belief by drawing on vocabularies that have already been created (such as the Australian Government Locater Service vocabulary).

Working with Endnote

• EndNote claims that it saves the hyperlinks that lead you to the references you’ve downloaded into your EndNote library, but how well would this work with Pitt’s remote access to ULS and other resources that require a log-in (such as many of CLP’s resources)?
• Does EndNote truly succeed in correct formatting? I’ve used RefWorks and had to re-format the citations page manually.
• While the EndNote tab that can be added to Microsoft Word does appear to be very handy, and granted I’ve never worked with EndNote, I don’t see how this is any more useful and/or time-saving than my current method (creating a document of notes that includes paraphrases and direct quotes from each source I’ve researched and the bibliographic information for each of the sources). I might be more open to using EndNote with a bibliographic style of which I am less knowledgeable, but then I wouldn’t be able to tell if any edits needed to be made manually (as was my issue with RefWorks).