Minutes for December 1, 2005
Present: Tom Bolze, Daniel Lovins (chair and recorder), Youn Noh, and Britta Santamauro, Becky Slitt
Note: Action items are in boldface green. Meeting began at 2pm in the Law School cafeteria.
Report from NELINET and NEASIS&T programs
We discussed Daniel's Program Report (along with D. Chudnov's blog posting: End of the Library Bubble).
Tom pointed out that, while the program content was interesting, its relavence to our task force was not entirely clear. Daniel responded that he thought the content was relevant because it speaks to major changes taking place in our department and in the profession. [The presentation on Marty Kurth is probably the most relevant, since he describes the process and rationale by which a metadata unit was set up at Cornell. We're developing something similar at Yale, though our plan is for it to remain a part of the Catalog Department.] Daniel suggested that catalogers will increasingly collaborate with systems librarians and programmers to implement new features, and that some of us will be using the models and technologies discussed in the report.
Regarding the section on "Weaving the Library into the Web", it was pointed out that the "attention economy" (where search engine rank determines value of a resource), the importance of which was emphasized by several program participants, is vulnerable to "google bombing" (where members of an online community link to a site en masse in order to raise its ranking).
Pilot Projects
The Wikipedia/NAF experiment with Dan Chudnov temporarily on hold (while Dan finishes another project), but still of interest to all parties.
The digital scanning and metadata project with Rebekah Irwin is moving forward. Daniel reported that the Yiddish pamphlets (with rare illustrations by Chagall, et al.) are being scanned by the the Digital Production Unit at Beinecke, after which TIFs will be sent to Luna for processing, and then returned to us in the from of CD-ROMs. The plan, then, would be to do a small test of MARC to MODS conversion (and other experiments), using the catalog records already created for the print versions. Youn suggested that Daniel consult with Audrey Novak about some MODS documentation she may have already worked on.
Change in Frequency of Meeting
Daniel suggested that Task Force meetings be held once every two weeks, rather than every week as is currently the case. The rationale for this is that the one week interval doesn't provide enough time to acomplish our action items. Other members seemed to agree, and Daniel said he would make the changes to our Web site and MeetingMaker schedule.
Meeting adjourned at 3pm.