Extending the role of library technical services to metadata outreach: an interview with Martin Kurth

Citation

Stewart-Marshall, E. (2002), "Extending the role of library technical services to metadata outreach: an interview with Martin Kurth", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 9. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919iaf.005

Extending the role of library technical services to metadata outreach: an interview with Martin Kurth

Elizabeth Stewart-Marshall

Martin Kurth was interviewed on June 3, 2002 at Olin Library in Ithaca, New York. Links are provided to Cornell resources, which provide additional context to some of the subjects Martin covers. Martin has worked in academic library technical services since 1988. He has worked in Central Technical Services (CTS) at the Cornell University Library since 1999. In January 2002 he began serving as the Head of Metadata Services in CTS.

Q: Central Technical Services (CTS) has recently reorganized in order to be able to create a Metadata Services Unit. Can you define what the charge of this Unit will be?

A: First, the reorganization occurred for more reasons than just the creation of the Metadata Services Unit (Cornell University, 2002a). There was a need to address how to handle the increasing number of electronic resources more effectively. Metadata Services was just part of that. Also, the Future Search planning process we used (Cornell University, 2002b) had identified a need to bring the activities of CTS more in line with the goals and objectives of the Cornell University Library (CUL) as a whole. Because CUL has chosen to place an emphasis on digital resources, CTS needs to have similar goals and objectives or it will no longer be providing services that the library needs (Cornell University, 2002c).

The Metadata Services Unit has been conceived as one part of a larger suite of services being offered by CUL to other campus units interested in developing digital collections. The idea is to offer the knowledge management skills of the Library to the wider campus community. One example of how this is being done is the Multi-Media Implementation Team (Cornell University, 2002d), which uses team participation to support development of digital multimedia collections.

The suite of services offered by CUL includes: metadata, digitization (e.g. scanning), information technology consulting, copyright management, preservation, project management, and support for distributed learning. It is based on a decentralized model, utilizing existing resources and units within the library working together to provide services as needed. CTS is concentrating on the metadata and project management portions. CUL is also seeking increasingly closer cooperation with Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) in providing digital collection support to other campus units (see Complementarity in Distributed Learning: The Roles of Cornell Information Technologies and the Cornell University Library for an example of this type of collaboration) (Cornell University, 2001a).

Q: Why was this Unit created as part of CTS rather than elsewhere in the organization, such as in the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections or within the Digital Library and Information Technologies Department?

A: It is important to remember that the suite of services is based on a distributed model. There are already many, if not most, of the pieces for this suite of services in place at various unit libraries in CUL. However, work up to this point had been done mostly with a project orientation. The suite of services is seen as a way to move creation and maintenance of digital resources at Cornell from a project to a production orientation. This reflects a maturing of the digital resource creation process.

The creation of the Unit was driven from within CTS as a response to the Library's Digital Futures Plan (Cornell University, 2002e) and emerging Masterplan. The administrative team in CTS felt that the knowledge that CTS brings to the table, through our long experience with traditional metadata (AACR/MARC) and our experience with production workflows, was invaluable and was irreproducible in other units.

Q: What other units, outside CTS, are you working with at Cornell and how do you see your Unit interacting with them?

A: The other departments and units involved with offering the suite of services for digital resources include: the CUL Office of Distributed Learning (Cornell University, 2002f), Cornell Institute for Digital Collections, (Cornell University, n.d.), Digital Library and Information Technologies (D-LIT) (Cornell University, 2001b), Department for Preservation and Conservation (Cornell University, 2002g), and Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) (Cornell University, 2002h). Additionally, staff in technical services at Cornell's Mann Library have been very active in metadata creation and will continue to be so, primarily working with the state funded units on campus. We have already collaborated on metadata consultancy with them.

Q: One of the goals of your Unit is outreach to Cornell faculty and staff outside the Library. How do you plan to initiate, structure and maintain this interaction?

A: As we are getting started we are joining some library initiatives that are already in progress such as: the library component of the Faculty Innovation in Teaching Grant Program (Cornell University, 2002i) and the Multi-Media Implementation Team. At this point we are making ourselves available and simply relying on other members of the suite of services to function as primary contacts with clients. There is already more than enough business.

The Library sees that it has a role in helping creators maintain their collections over time. One of the goals in the Masterplan incorporates a commitment to establishing a common depository system for the long-term preservation of Cornell's digital resources (Cornell University, 2002j). For CUL to maintain access for future generations we want to work with collection builders, from the design phase, in building a structure that the Library can incorporate into the repository more easily. Collection builders will be introduced to standards and best practices for retrieval that they may not have been aware existed. Also, the planning process will take into consideration components for periodic evaluation and modification as circumstances, such as changing technology and metadata upgrades, dictate.

Related to maintenance, one aspect that will be looked at closely, as part of the evaluation process, will be cost. Does a collection justify the investment in time and money to upgrade, maintain and preserve it? Because of the cost involved for long-term maintenance of a collection, consideration will be given to whether the value of a given digital collection goes beyond the idiosyncratic – beyond the people who created it.

Q: Many Technical Service Units have created Metadata positions that more narrowly focus on the creation of non-MARC metadata within a traditional library context. What led you to take a different approach?

A: As technical service managers have learned through long experience, elaborate systems of description are expensive to maintain. The overhead and cost involved in doing traditional library description and enhanced access would impede rather than facilitate getting digital collection builders to "buy in" to providing standardized forms of enhanced access – metadata. The process of the Library applying metadata after the collection is built, the traditional approach, applies a substantial additional cost for which there are limited resources both in time and in funding.

The goal is to collaborate with faculty to provide expertise without scaring them off, raising the bar too high, or requiring too much infrastructure that would exceed limited resources. We are looking at bringing to bear our skills acquired from existing project work in order to apply an automated approach to metadata and reduce record-by-record handling. We want to apply this infrastructure at the point of creation rather than retrospectively. Our feeling is that this works well when the source is digital. We are looking for a balance between access, efficiency and existing skills.

Our approach intends to enable the creator to perform ongoing creation of metadata by providing systems that can be utilized at various skill levels. The goal is to provide needed access as opposed to ideal access. We want to contribute our skills and experience with workflows, documentation and consultation to make the process of creating the metadata as painless as possible for the collection builder.

Q: How do you see your Unit interacting with the more traditional activities of Technical Services, including Bibliographic Control?

A: There will definitely be ongoing collaboration between Metadata Services and Bibliographic Control in the area of e-journals and e-resources as CTS moves towards utilizing more non-MARC metadata in order to provide appropriate access. (CTS has done studies already of the use of CORC records (Calhoun et al., 1999). CTS has been charged with providing access to e-resources, similar to what they have traditionally provided for physical materials.

Metadata Services would be applying some of the same project management skills that will be used with digital collection builders within CTS to implement workflows that create the appropriate metadata for the Library's resources. Metadata Services will have the skills to develop scripts and automated workflows that can be applied within CTS. This will build on a foundation that CTS has already established by placing an Information Technology Librarian organizationally within CTS.

Q: How would you characterize Cornell University Library's vision of the future for digital collections? What role does ENCompass play in making that vision happen?

A: Cornell is at a point where it is time to move from discrete digital projects to implementing a production environment. There is a recognized need for seamless searching across the existing and emerging digital collections, so users do not have to continue to search each collection separately. The intent is to provide integrated access to digital content to users wherever they happen to be. Also, Cornell has done a lot of work with distributed learning and continues to garner grants to work in this area. We hope to more fully integrate library resources with course content.

ENCompass is one solution for providing integrated access. It provides cross-collection access through metadata mapping to a common scheme, Dublin Core. ENCompass is being developed to provide deep searching of digital objects within collections while maintaining context, to help the user visualize the relationships among digital objects (Calhoun et al., 2001). The Library is working to provide an infrastructure for the way we see people want to work, that is, by interacting with one another in a networked environment.

Q: What do you envision the Metadata Services Unit doing in five years? Where do you want to be by then?

A: The Metadata Services Unit may not need to exist in five years. This may be a migratory or temporary solution to give CTS the "space" to bring more people, with special skills, to bear on digital collections. Longer-term, we hope to see greater integration within CTS to provide access to digital and non-digital collections. This will most probably happen at the expense of non-digital materials, but it will happen by choice to keep CTS central to the Library's priorities.

It has been the experience of technical services over the years to distrust solutions that are format-specific, that break certain materials out into separate workflows. It is possible that what is now separated out, digital collections, will be re-integrated into one workflow, even if the objects (digital and physical) require using different standards. As in the past, applying general principles with special considerations yields efficiencies that separate workflows may not. We will continue to make pragmatic adjustments over time. A unit of four people will not, by itself, be able to handle the volume we anticipate with the increasing number of digital collections and e-resources.

ReferencesCalhoun, K. et al. (1999), "CORC at Cornell project: final report", [Internet], available at: http://campusgw. library.cornell.edu/corc/ (accessed July 22).Calhoun, K., Turner, T., Brodsky, M., Kozak, G., Kurth, M., Muraton, F., Ruddy, D. and Young, S. (2001), "Mixing and mapping metadata to provide integrated access to digital library collections: an activity report" [Internet], in Oyama, K. and Gotoda, H. (Eds), Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2001, National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, available at: www.nii.ac.jp/dc2001/proceedings/product/paper-23.pdf (accessed July 22).Cornell University (2001a), Complementarity in Distributed Learning: The Roles of Cornell Information Technologies and the Cornell University Library [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/staffweb/CUL-CITfinal.pdf (accessed July 19).Cornell University (2001b), Digital Library and Information Technologies (D-LIT), [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/dlit/(accessed July 19).Cornell University (2002a), Central Technical Services Organizational Chart, [Internet] available at: www.library.cornell.edu/cts/chart.htm (accessed July 22).Cornell University (2002b), CTS Future Search Process [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/cts/futuresearch/ (accessed July 19).Cornell University (2002c), CTS Priorities, 2001-2003 [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/cts/futuresearch/futpriorreport.html (accessed July 22).Cornell University (2002d), CUL Multi-Media Implementation Team Web site, [Internet], available at: www.library. cornell.edu/mmit/mmit.htm (accessed July 19).Cornell University (2002e), CUL Digital Futures Plan [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/staffweb/CULDigitalFuturesPlan2.html (accessed July 15).Cornell University (2002f), CUL Office of Distributed Learning, [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/DL/ (accessed July 19).Cornell University (2002g), CUL Dept. for Preservation and Conservation [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/ (accessed July 19).Cornell University (2002h), Cornell Information Technologies (CIT), [Internet], available at: www.cit.cornell.edu (accessed July 19).Cornell University (2002i), Faculty Innovation in Teaching Grant Program 2002-2003: Technologies That Support Teaching and Learning [Internet], available at: www.cit.cornell.edu/atc/innovation/res_appb.html (accessed July 19).Cornell University (2002j), CUL Common Depository System [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/iris/dpo/cds.html (accessed July 19).Cornell University (n.d.), Cornell Institute for Digital Collections [Internet], available at: http://CIDC.library.cornell.edu/content.htm (accessed: July 19).

Further readingBesser, H. (2002), "The next stage: moving from isolated digital collections to interoperable digital libraries" [Internet], First Monday, Vol. 7 No. 6, available at: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_6/besser/index.html (accessed July 3).Calhoun, K. (2002), Redesign of Library Workflows: Experimental Models for Electronic Resource Description, prepared for Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium, Library of Congress, November 15-17, 2000 [Internet], available at: http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/calhoun_paper.html (accessed July 1).Cole, T.W. (2002), "Creating a framework of guidance for building good digital collections" [Internet], First Monday, Vol. 7 No. 5, available at: www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_5/cole/index.html (accessed July 3).Cornell University (2002a), Cornell Digital Library Research Group, [Internet], available at: www.cs.cornell.edu/cdlrg/ (accessed July 19).Cornell University (2002b), CUL Digital Preservation Officer Website, [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/iris/dpo/index.html (accessed July 19).Cornell University (2002c), CUL Report to the Digital Library Federation [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/staffweb/Diglibfedrpt02.html (accessed June 29).Eden, B.L. (1999), "Technical services: a vision for the future", Library Computing, Vol. 18 No. 4, pp. 289-94.Hudgins, J. and Macklin, L.A. (2000), "New materials, new processes: implementing digital imaging projects into existing workflow", Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services, Vol. 24, pp. 189-204. Kenney, A.R. et al. (2001), Preserving Cornell's Digital Image Collections: Implementing an Archival Strategy [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/imls/IMLS-CULfinalreport2.pdf (accessed July 1).Lagoze, C. (2002), "Business unusual: how 'event-awareness' may breathe life into the catalog?", prepared for Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium, Library of Congress, November 15-17, 2000 [Internet], final version, available at: http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/lagoze_paper.html (accessed July 1).Lane, L. and Stewart, B. (1998), "The evolution of technical services to serve the digital academic library", in LaGuardia, C. (Ed.), Recreating the Academic Library: Breaking Virtual Ground, Neal-Schuman Publishers, New York, NY, pp. 151-66.McGovern, N.Y. (2002), Cornell University Central Depository and Project Harvest, [Internet], available at: www.library.cornell.edu/iris/dpo/cul-oais2.pdf (accessed July 19).Moving Theory into Practice: Digital Imaging Tutorial [online tutorial] (2001), available at: www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial/ (accessed July 19).Rieger, O.Y. (2000), Current Thinking on Digital Preservation: Role of Metadata, [Powerpoint], available at: www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs502/2001SP/slides/guest_rieger.ppt (accessed July 19).Stanford University Libraries, Cataloging Services Department, Metadata Unit (2002), [Internet], May 24, available at: www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/catdept/units/metadata (accessed July 19).Thomas, S. (2000), "The catalog as portal to the Internet", prepared for Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium, Library of Congress, November 15-17, 2000 [Internet], final version, December 2000, available at: http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/thomas_paper.html (accessed July 1).Vellucci, S.L. (1997), "Options for organizing electronic resources: the coexistence of metadata" [Internet], Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, October/November, available at: http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-97/vellucci.htm (accessed July 1).Vernon, R.D. and Rieger, O.Y. (2002), Digital Asset Management: An Introduction to Key Issues [Internet] REV 2, available at: www.cit.cornell.edu/oit/Arch-Init/DigAssetMgmt.pdf (accessed July 19).

Elizabeth Stewart-Marshall (es254@cornell.edu) is Assistant Database Quality & Authorities Librarian, Database Quality & Enrichment Unit, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY.

Martin Kurth(mk168@cornell.edu) is Head of Metadata Services, Central Technical Services, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY.