Colleagues

Please note this forthcoming event, of interest to cataloguers and metadata
practitioners working with digital resources and institutional repositories.

Title: Metadata issues for Scottish institutional repositories
Date: Monday 4 Dec 2006
Time: 14.00-16.30
Venue: Conference Room, National Library of Scotland, Causewayside Building,
Edinburgh.
Organisers: CIGS, CDLR, NLS.
Registration: Email [log in to unmask] with your name and institution.
More information about the event and venue:
http://www.slainte.org.uk/events/EvntShow.cfm?uEventID=474 

Programme:
1. Presentation of results of harvesting metadata from Scottish
institutional repositories during the HaIRST and IRIScotland projects / Alan
Dawson.
This will include a demo of the pilot search/browse service for IRIScotland.
2. Presentation on the DC ePrints application profile initiative and its
potential use in Scotland / Gordon Dunsire.
3. General discussion and plenary.

Aim:
1. To inform the IRIScotland Work Package 5 deliverable of a metadata
agreement.
2. To inform the IRIS Work Package 4 deliverable of a pilot integrated
hosted repository service.
3. To inform the IRIS Work Package 5 deliverable of a pilot search/browse
service.
4. To inform the Scottish and wider cataloguing/metadata community of issues
arising from the development of institutional repositories in general, and
progress on related issues in IRIS.
5. To inform the National Library of Scotland of issues in relation to the
Trusted Digital Repository initiative and the mixed metadata schema
environment of the John Murray Archive and other developments.

Background:
The Cataloguing and Indexing Group in Scotland (CIGS) has collaborated with
the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) on similar exercises in the
past.

CIGS co-ordinated and chaired a series of meetings of SCURL cataloguers to
discuss local practice and its potential effect on Z39.50-mediated
distributed union catalogues, as part of the CAIRNS project. The discussions
at the meetings were used to draw up a checklist of short- and long-term
changes to local practice which would improve interoperability in the CAIRNS
service. The checklist was approved by the Scottish Confederation of
University and Research Libraries (SCURL), and was effectively a metadata
agreement. This subsequently formed the basis of a work package in the
cc-interop project which investigated the development of a similar agreement
on a UK-wide basis. CIGS hosted a seminar for Scottish cataloguers, and
liaised with a parallel seminar for England and Wales. The outcome was a
report saying that the original CAIRNS agreement, although a suitable
starting-point, could not be extended without the support of a high-level UK
agency to co-ordinate metadata schema, formats and content guidelines.

The current CDLR approach to delivering a metadata agreement for Scottish
institutional repositories is similar: identify issues directly from
examination of the content of aggregated metadata; expose those issues to a
wide professional audience for feedback and identification of additional
background issues; develop an initial proposal for discussion by SCURL
cataloguers; develop a draft final proposal for consideration by SCURL
itself. The deliverable is scheduled for March 2007.

Audience:
1. Cataloguing/metadata practitioners in Scottish universities and colleges.
2. Cataloguing/metadata practitioners and managers in the NLS (including
those working on the John Murray Archive and the Trusted Digital
Repository).
2. CIGS members.
3. Anyone else who is interested in metadata standards and workflows applied
to institutional repositories and self-archiving services. You do not have
to be a member of CILIP/CILIPS or CIG/CIGS to attend.

Preparation in advance of the meeting:
There are several public documents on the IRIS project wiki at:
http://iriscotland.nls.uk/wiki/index.php/  
These give the background to the metadata issues, and attendees may find it
useful to read them in advance.

Registration fee: Free. Please register in advance to avoid any problems
with security and refreshments.

Light refreshments will be provided at 13.45.
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George Macgregor,
Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR),
Department of Computer & Information Sciences,
University of Strathclyde, Livingstone Tower,
26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, UK, G1 1XH
tel: +44 (0)141 548 4752
fax: +44 (0)141 548 4523
web: http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/
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