This was the first meeting of the committee. The Chair, Joan Swanekamp, opened the meeting with brief, housekeeping announcements. Monthly meetings are expected, but 2 meetings in December may be needed. We can expect to have in-depth project work to do between meetings, working in sub-groupings of the committee members. We may have some reading to do as well. The committee has a Web page. The address is http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/metadata/IACmetadata.html. For now, Matthew Beacom will maintain the page. Send any comments to him.

The Chair briefly talked about the charge. The committee is charged as part of the Integrated Access Council.

She noted that at our next meeting we need to begin to develop action items within our charge's broadly stated terms.

As this was the first meeting, the members introduced themselves to one another briefly, giving name, unit, and interests in metadata.

Rebekah Irwin reported on the work of the Eli metadata group. Rebekah distributed a printed metadata guide developed by the Eli group for use by persons using Luna Personal Insight to make their own collections. The guide is an element set of 8 optional and repeatable fields that was partially derived from the Rutgers Core (a sub-set of Dublin Core used at Rutgers.) The guide is available online in the background papers on the Metadata Committee Web page. The guide has been made for use by faculty and students for their personal collections. The guide is not suitable for institutional collections.

There was substantive discussion, mainly concerning how we might build on our experience with the metadata guide. For example, we may be able to use it as a basis for further work on a base record or core record for resources in Yale collections.

Matthew Beacom reported on the work of the Medical Digital Library project. Matthew distributed an element summary for the Yale Medical Library DL and draft instructions for use by staff creating Medical DL records.

The Medical DL is online at http://www.med.yale.edu/library/subjects/digital.html. The Medical DL uses Greenstone and DC.dot as its database software and metadata tool, respectively.

Beacom also reported on the revision of RLG's Cultural Materials metadata guide. The RLG cultural materials program and its metadata guide may be useful as a model. The RLG guide recommends three levels of acceptable metadata for cultural materials. These are, more or less, good enough, better and best. RLG calls them base-line, value-added, and bonus. They are distinguished by how many fields or elements each record has and each improved level builds on the level it. Each level is linked explicitly to the user functions the record can support. There was some interest in having such a three-level arrangement for a Yale core record.

The Metadata Committee meets on Dec. 9th at 2 P.M. in room 409 in SML and on Dec. 16th at 9 A.M. Each meeting is scheduled for one hour.