Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology最新文献

EDITOR'S SUMMARY

Standardization is fundamental for bringing a vast variety of electronic records under control. It enables capturing and preserving original records as well as evidence of any access or change to the records. Creating standards within and across organizations is an extreme challenge that must be met. The 2011 Presidential Memorandum on Managing Government Records and subsequent 2012 Directive established values and strategic direction for managing federal electronic records without creating strict standards. The Battelle Record Management Office relies on a Defense Department standard for enterprise content management systems to be secure, searchable and capable of preserving contextual relationships and on the Code of Federal Regulations regarding equivalence of electronic records and signatures to paper. The result demonstrates a record's integrity and authenticity and enables it to be discovered and accessed. Defined access permissions and an audit trail add further assurances. Interoperability through application program interface layers is another requirement, being addressed through advanced platform development, which may provide the solution for authenticity and contextual preservation.

EDITOR'S SUMMARY

Yolande Nanayakkara has been selected as the first communications officer by ASIS&T, a role prompted by the Board's view that the organization needs to be more visible and to engage more effectively with international members. In an interview with ASIS&T Bulletin editor Irene Travis, Nanayakkara noted that ASIS&T seeks to break down geographical barriers and enhance the free exchange of ideas and networking. She intends to focus on consistent branding throughout communications and marketing, emphasizing the connection between information science and other fields of study and industries, and expanding use of technology to promote interaction. Nanayakkara looks forward to applying her personal creativity, academic background in organizational psychology and broad career experience in the management of nonprofits to help strengthen and build ASIS&T through innovative marketing and communications.

EDITOR'S SUMMARY

Formal standards and professional practices characterize modern archival administration, increasing consistent archival description and interoperable metadata as well as the authenticity and reliability of the archives themselves. The International Council of Archives' General International Standard Archival Description identifies 26 data elements to describe archives, being extended for the semantic web. Archives in the United States follow three sets of archival description standards. Describing Archives: A Content Standard, 2nd Edition (DACS), used together with the other standards and with MARC, describes archival materials and authority records about material creators. It stresses principles for arrangement, order and hierarchical organization. The Encoded Archival Description (EAD) contains elements to describe archival materials and interrelationships. Like DACS, it stresses respect de fonds, keeping records together in original order. Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) describes information about people and organizations reflected in an archive. It was adopted by the Society of American Archivists in 2011 and has been used to derive 6.6 million EAC-CPF records from EAD finding aids and authority records. Archival descriptions are complex and unique. Using standardized and required descriptive elements and special search interfaces would maximize the advantage of EAD encoding and extend opportunities for data sharing between institutions.

EDITOR'S SUMMARY

A basic requirement for linked data is that records include structured and clear data about topics of interest or searched Things, formatted in ways that allow linking to other data. While linked data presents great potential for the library community, libraries' existing digital knowledge is largely inaccessible, stuck in the increasingly obsolete MARC format, readable only by humans and certain library systems. To maximize the value of linked data using library content, important entities and relationships must be defined and made available, codings that are machine understandable must be adapted for linked data purposes, and persistent identifiers must be substituted for text. The Virtual International Authority File aggregates identifiers published by numerous sources in a variety of domains and languages to help produce a linked data collection of information on given topics, making possible rich linked data that is machine readable and presented in the user's language. Since 1994 the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) has worked toward cost effective uniformity of library standards. The PCC's ultimate goal is to transition from MARC to linked data through widespread adoption of standards and best practices by the library community.

EDITOR'S SUMMARY

Multiple groups at Mayo Clinic organize knowledge with the aid of metadata for a variety of purposes. The ontology group focuses on consumer-oriented health information using several controlled vocabularies to support and coordinate care providers, consumers, clinical knowledge and, as part of its research management, information on clinical trials. Poor findability, inconsistent indexing and specialized language undermined the goal of increasing trial participation. The ontology group designed a metadata framework addressing disorders and procedures, investigational drugs and clinical departments, adopted and translated the clinical terminology of SNOMED CT and RxNorm vocabularies to consumer language and coordinated terminology with Mayo's Consumer Health Vocabulary. The result enables retrieval of clinical trial information from multiple access points including conditions, procedures, drug names, organizations involved and trial phase. The jump in inquiries since the search site was revised and vocabularies were modified show evidence of success.

EDITOR'S SUMMARY

Large organizations relying heavily on knowledge work require effective capture and reuse of information, enabled through consistent use of standardized enterprise content metadata. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has undertaken a standardization effort, building an internal content schema based on established metadata field standards that are content- and application-agnostic but locally customizable for application to a broad variety of repositories. The JPL adopted the Dublin Core standard, with its Simple and Qualified properties as well as further refined Custom sub-properties. The JPL Resource Schema serves as an enterprise-wide metadata standard, while specific application profiles state the available fields and field labels for each repository or content management system. The schema's terms are drawn from two distinct but semantically related vocabularies and linked by an intermediary registry tying granular listings for specific applications to enterprise-level terms. The registry mappings permit the use of both local metadata and higher level or external systems. The effort has demonstrated the importance of consistent application of both granular and general metadata for information capture and revealed important lessons about adopting the Dublin Core standard in a large enterprise setting.

EDITOR'S SUMMARY

The University of Colorado-Boulder expanded its digital services through the 2016 opening of its Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship (CRDDS), a collaboration between the libraries and research computing. The aim is to provide a full range of data services, from analytics and visualization through curation, storage and preservation, in addition to education and consultation for both university and community members. Increased data discovery, reuse, access and publication are expected to be among the several advantages to this collaborative effort. The CRDDS will focus on promoting research data management mandated by federal funding agencies and journal publishers, cyberinfrastructure to gain full benefit from big data, education and training through courses and online modules, and digital scholarship to explore tools and methods used throughout the life cycle of a digital project. CRDDS plans to create a seminar and consulting space within the library in addition to digital outreach.

EDITOR'S SUMMARY

Standards and interoperable systems are crucial in the work of information professionals, applying to bibliographic descriptions, taxonomies, data exchange formats and markup and more recently for linking data. They enable access to archival information and associations to data in other contexts. The ASIS&T Standards Committee represents the Association with the International Standards Organization, the American National Standards Institute and related organizations and serves as an informative liaison with the membership. This special section explores standards as they relate to metadata for linking library data, recognizing MARC as an early and evolving standard and reviewing standards specifically for archival description. Discussions of records management at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Battelle Memorial Institute and the Mayo Clinic illustrate the necessity for standards-driven metadata and systems within large, complex organizations. The Program for Cooperative Cataloging and OCLC's Virtual International Authority File exemplify projects working toward best practices for linking data.