Summary of IMLS NLG Collections

The creation of a collection registry for digital collections developed with funding from the IMLS National Leadership Grant (NLG) program from inception to date has provided an opportunity to observe commonalities and differences among and between these collections. Initial analyses of collection characteristics and the different approaches taken by NLG projects to collection definition inform us regarding current practice and have suggested avenues for fruitful research.IMLS National Leadership Grant LG-02-02-0281unpublishednot peer reviewe

Organising music for movies

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine and discuss the classification of commercial popular music when large digital collections are organised for use in films. Design/methodology/approach - A range of systems are investigated and their organization is discussed, focusing on an analysis of the metadata used by the systems and choices given to the end-user to construct a query. The indexing of the music is compared to a checklist of music facets which has been derived from recent musicological literature on semiotic analysis of popular music. These facets include aspects of communication, cultural and musical expression, codes and competences. Findings -In addition to bibliographic detail, descriptive metadata is used to organise music in these systems. Genre, subject and mood are used widely; some musical facets also appear. The extent to which attempts are being made to reflect these facets in the organization of these systems is discussed. A number of recommendations are made which may help to improve this process. Originality/value - This paper discusses an area of creative music search which has not previously been investigated in any depth and makes recommendations based on findings and the literature which may be used in the development of commercial systems as well as making a contribution to the literature

Discovery Tools and Local Metadata Requirements in Academic Libraries

As the second decade of the twenty-first century commences, academic librarians who work to promote collection access must not only contend with a vast array of content available in a wide range of formats, but they must also ensure that new technologies developed to accommodate user search behaviors yield satisfactory outcomes. Next generation discovery tools are designed to streamline the search process and facilitate better search results by incorporating metadata from proprietary and local collections, then by providing relevancy-ranked results. This paper investigates the implications of discovery tool use for accessing materials housed in institutional repositories and special collections, in particular, how the discovery of these materials depends on local metadata creation practices. This paper surveys current research pertaining to metadata quality issues that may put unique local collections at risk for being overlooked in meta-search relevancy rankings, and considers ways in which academic libraries can address this issue as well as areas for future research

Characterizing the Landscape of Musical Data on the Web: State of the Art and Challenges

Musical data can be analysed, combined, transformed and exploited for diverse purposes. However, despite the proliferation of digital libraries and repositories for music, infrastructures and tools, such uses of musical data remain scarce. As an initial step to help fill this gap, we present a survey of the landscape of musical data on the Web, available as a Linked Open Dataset: the musoW dataset of catalogued musical resources. We present the dataset and the methodology and criteria for its creation and assessment. We map the identified dimensions and parameters to existing Linked Data vocabularies, present insights gained from SPARQL queries, and identify significant relations between resource features. We present a thematic analysis of the original research questions associated with surveyed resources and identify the extent to which the collected resources are Linked Data-ready

Towards the disintermediation of creative music search: Analysing queries to determine important facets

Purpose: Creative professionals search for music to accompany moving images in films, advertising, television. Some larger music rights holders (record companies and music publishers) organise their catalogues to allow online searching. These digital libraries are organised by various subjective musical facets as well as by artist and title metadata. The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of written queries relating to creative music search, contextualised and discussed within the findings of text analyses of a larger research project whose aim is to investigate meaning making in this search process. Method: A facet analysis of a collection of written music queries is discussed in relation to the organisation of the music in a selection of bespoke search engines. Results: Subjective facets, in particular Mood, are found to be highly important in query formation. Unusually, detailed Music Structural aspects are also key. Conclusions: These findings are discussed in relation to disintermediation of this process. It is suggested that there are barriers to this, both in terms of classification and also commercial / legal factors

Multimedia Vocabularies on the Semantic Web

This document gives an overview on the state-of-the-art of multimedia metadata formats. Initially, practical relevant vocabularies for developers of Semantic Web applications are listed according to their modality scope. In the second part of this document, the focus is set on the integration of the multimedia vocabularies into the Semantic Web, that is to say, formal representations of the vocabularies are discussed

Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants

Describing Scholarly Works with Dublin Core: A Functional Approach

This article describes the development of the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP)—a Dublin Core application profile for describing scholarly texts. This work provides an active illustration of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) “Singapore Framework” for Application Profiles, presented at the DCMI Conference in 2007, by incorporating the various elements of Application Profile building as defined by this framework—functional requirements, domain model, description set profile, usage guidelines, and data format. These elements build on the foundations laid down by the Dublin Core Abstract Model and utilize a preexisting domain model (FR-BR—Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) in order to support the representation of complex data describing multiple entities and their relationships. The challenges of engaging community acceptance and implementation will be covered, along with other related initiatives to support the growing corpus of scholarly resource types, such as data objects, geographic data, multimedia, and images whose structure and metadata requirements introduce the need for new application profiles. Finally, looking to other initiatives, the article will comment on how Dublin Core relates to the broader scholarly information world, where projects like Object Re-use and Exchange are attempting to better equip repositories to exchange resources

Linked Data - the story so far

The term “Linked Data” refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. These best practices have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the last three years, leading to the creation of a global data space containing billions of assertions— the Web of Data. In this article, the authors present the concept and technical principles of Linked Data, and situate these within the broader context of related technological developments. They describe progress to date in publishing Linked Data on the Web, review applications that have been developed to exploit the Web of Data, and map out a research agenda for the Linked Data community as it moves forward

Crowdsourcing Linked Data on listening experiences through reuse and enhancement of library data

Research has approached the practice of musical reception in a multitude of ways, such as the analysis of professional critique, sales figures and psychological processes activated by the act of listening. Studies in the Humanities, on the other hand, have been hindered by the lack of structured evidence of actual experiences of listening as reported by the listeners themselves, a concern that was voiced since the early Web era. It was however assumed that such evidence existed, albeit in pure textual form, but could not be leveraged until it was digitised and aggregated. The Listening Experience Database (LED) responds to this research need by providing a centralised hub for evidence of listening in the literature. Not only does LED support search and reuse across nearly 10,000 records, but it also provides machine-readable structured data of the knowledge around the contexts of listening. To take advantage of the mass of formal knowledge that already exists on the Web concerning these contexts, the entire framework adopts Linked Data principles and technologies. This also allows LED to directly reuse open data from the British Library for the source documentation that is already published. Reused data are re-published as open data with enhancements obtained by expanding over the model of the original data, such as the partitioning of published books and collections into individual stand-alone documents. The database was populated through crowdsourcing and seamlessly incorporates data reuse from the very early data entry phases. As the sources of the evidence often contain vague, fragmentary of uncertain information, facilities were put in place to generate structured data out of such fuzziness. Alongside elaborating on these functionalities, this article provides insights into the most recent features of the latest instalment of the dataset and portal, such as the interlinking with the MusicBrainz database, the relaxation of geographical input constraints through text mining, and the plotting of key locations in an interactive geographical browser