Dear MCN and Standards & Controlled Vocabulary SIG members,
The 32st annual meeting of the Museum Computer Network in Minneapolis (now less than 3 weeks away!!) is shaping up to be quite an interesting program for those of us interested in standards and controlled vocabulary.
In addition to attending some of the great sessions listed below (some Standards & Controlled Vocabulary SIG sponsored), we hope you will join us for the annual meeting of the Standards & Controlled Vocabulary SIG. The meeting has been (re)scheduled to Friday November 12th at 5:00 pm. We'll be meeting at the registration desk at 5:00 pm and will then depart for a local restaurant for a meeting over refreshments (tba).
The meeting is open to current SIG members and anyone interested in joining the SIG. We will discuss projects and activities of interest to the group, hear reports on emerging standards, talk about new developments in the field, and brainstorm ideas for workshops and sessions for next year's conference.
So, please meet us at the Registration Desk on Friday, Nov. 12 at 5:00 pm!
Mary W. Elings, Co-Chair, MCN Standards & Controlled Vocabulary SIG
Erin Coburn, Co-Chair, MCN Standards & Controlled Vocabulary SIG
Please check out these interesting sessions:
Sessions
Thursday Nov. 11, 2004 8:30-10:00 - Room 2
Libraries, Archives, and Museums: Reports from Research and Projects
This session highlights the best research and projects from Howard Besser's graduate school course comparing libraries, archives, and museums. These projects and research will make audience members more aware of the commonalities and differences between different types of cultural repositories. They will show how the goals and cultures of different memory institutions differ, and how these differences lead to varied implementations of selection policies and practices, of collection management and metadata schemes, of exhibition design, education, and preservation.
Thursday Nov. 11, 2004 1:30-3:00 - Room 2
Achieving Digital Preservation Through Collaboration
Cultural heritage institutions of all varieties are facing the challenge of sustaining digital resources. This roundtable session will bring together representatives from the archival, library, historical society, art museum and history museum communities to discuss developing collaborative digital preservation policies and programs. Each speaker will be knowledgeable about digital preservation and will have participated in multi-organizational collaborative projects and programs.
Each representative will be asked to address the question "What would a collaborative digital preservation program among archives, libraries, historical societies, and museums look like? Please include some reference to policies, procedures, access and preservation requirements, and incentives for collaboration."
Thursday Nov. 11, 2004 3:30-5:00 - Room 4
CCO Practicum: Implementing Vocabularies, Authorities into Cataloging Practice
Sponsored by the MCN Standards & Controlled Vocabulary SIG
VRA Presents Cataloguing Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and their Images (CCO). In addition to describing how to use the guide to select, describe, and format cultural heritage data, this session will focus primarily on Authority Files and Controlled Vocabularies. How authorities are constructed and how they interact with each other and with work and image records are critical issues that must be decided by the cataloguing institution. What do you want your controlled vocabulary to do? Is it for cataloguing or retrieval, or will the same vocabulary be used for both? This session will elaborate on how CCO helps with issues regarding creating and maintaining local thesauri, using existing vocabularies, and constructing authority records to fit your collections and institutional needs.
Friday, Nov. 12, 2004 8:30-10:00 - Room 4
Museums and the OAI Protocol
The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting(OAI-PMH) claims promise as a means of sharing information about cultural repository holdings. This panel will feature presentations detailing how OAI-PMH is being implemented by museums in real-world settings to make holdings better known to interested communities of researchers. Projects featured will include the Music of Social Change Project (Emory University), MOAC (Univ. of California), and the University of Illinois IMLS Digital Collections and Content Project. Presentations will address the promise and the pitfalls of museums sharing their content via standards like OAI-PMH and will emphasize practical lessons learned about OAI-PMH implementations in museum context. Perspectives of both metadata providers and harvesters will be explored.
Friday, Nov. 12, 2004 10:30-12:00 - Room 4
Integrated Access and Meta-search (Digital Library)
This session will give an overview of the issues associated with cross-repository or distributed searching in order to provide integrated access to diverse information resources. Some practical implementations of cross-collection searching currently in progress will be discussed, and a report on the Search-Retrieve Task Group of the NISO Metasearch Initiative will be presented.
Friday, Nov. 12, 2004 1:30-3:00 - Room 1
Implementing Metadata: Practical Issues
Sponsored by the MCN Standards & Controlled Vocabulary SIG
It has been established (some may say beaten into us) that metadata standards are good for maintaining, sharing and preserving our collections information. We know why we should use metadata standards and now need to know how to implement them. This panel will come down from the theoretical soapbox and discuss some practical issues involved in implementing metadata in your institution. Specifically, the panel will focus on descriptive, technical and preservation metadata, and how systems, tools and initiatives currently in the works can make doing the right thing easier.
Topics to be covered include a webtool for gathering descriptive metadata for digital objects, an initiative promoting the automatic capture of technical metadata for digital images ("Automatic Exposure"), and preservation metadata structuring and entry software tools that will assist in archiving digital files.
Friday, Nov. 12, 2004 3:30-5:00 - Room 4
Data Management: A Strategic Concern with Practical Solutions
For many institutions, work with collection databases is not yet a part of museums' core mission. Management of digital information does not just happen by redeployment of existing staff and redirection of existing budgets. It requires the development of new skills, operating budgets and new resources. This session is cross-disciplinary in its approach to registration as it covers data standards, strategic planning for decision makers, and how to implement good data management to promote communication and effective workflow within the museum.
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