2017-02-16 Metadata Management Meeting Notes

• Racine from Duke will fill in for Naun as liaison from the Product Council.
• Naun will continue to serve on this SIG while at Harvard.
• Metadata Management SIG roles have been filled: Alexandra will be our reporter to OLE. Doreen will back her up. Lisa will take minutes. Joseph Olivarez agreed to be the representative for the Metadata SIG on the Folio Forums Facilitator's Group.

The questions below came from Anne Highsmith. They are used here as a launching point for discussion.

Relative to the stated initial goal of “Establish the groundwork for support of data formats beyond MARC … ,“ information that I have read or heard about FOLIO seems to state that any external record, such as MARC21 or DC or Bibframe, would be translated into a FOLIO-specific data storage format. Is that correct?

Additional comment/question: Initial reaction is: why create yet another metadata format? It seems that it would make more sense to facilitate conversion between existing metadata formats rather than producing another one... So is that because there is no desire to build FOLIO on Marc, but there is nothing else as yet that can be used?

Marc Johnson comments:

• The document serves three purposes 1) capture a high level summary of discussions around metadata and 2 ) encourage conversations in this area 3) get into a rough initial plan
• We need to support MARC in FOLIO.
• We want FOLIO to be able to support eventually resources that are not well expressed in MARC21, such scientific data sets
• Balance between describing resources without trying to cover all of MARC21 or Bibframe, for example. We don't want every part of FOLIO to have to understand all languages when and where it doesn't need to. We want the parts of the system that need to understand the formats to do so, but then to relieve the systems

Doreen asked for a citation or resource to give the group information to help the group understand this.

Anne - Is the intent to translate the records coming in to a single format?

Paul - Some of the metadata that is going into FOLIO will need to be edited, some will not. Several possibilities of how FOLIO will work, depending on how data will be edited.

Marc

• Yes, we would like to translate aspects of the data coming in into something." Not sure how that will work, or how much will need to be translated.
• The intention is to keep the original records.
• Scenario: The "correct" representation will be the original, but editable.
• Trying to consider all scenarios so we are not "backed into a corner"

Peter - We could have apps that do not need to understand the underlying data format. For example, with circulation, that app does not need to understand MARC in its entirety. It only needs to understand basic descriptive info. Idea is to have circ apps that can be somewhat interchangeable, while allowing for description to

Christy - What is the relationship between the source records and stored record?

Peter - Distinct metadata formats would have distinct editors. Example: something in BibFrame would have a BibFrame editor, etc. What is "agreed upon between apps" is a high level of metadata. Sometimes this is expressed in Dublin Core. There would be translators in FOLIO that would help apps that understand different metadata formats do what they need to do. Some work was done on this over the summer. Google docs with heavy comments. He would like to take these documents clean them up, and provide a further reference point for this SIG.

Perhaps I’m being premature, but I look at the stated goals, outcomes, and deliverables in the context of existing record conversion, especially bibliographic/holdings/item records. In that context, I find the “physical item” depending from the “entitlement” to be problematic. It implies to me that at the point of conversion we’d need to provide data on how we’re entitled to a given physical item; we don’t have such data for hundreds of thousands of our physical items because they were bought while we were using a previous system and the purchase data didn’t come with them into the current environment. Also, I would see Location connected to Physical Item rather than Entitlement.

Regarding teh conceptual domain model, I would like to have clarification on what is meant my Instance - is this in a Bibframe sense or something else? If external/internal instances are sets of metadata either external to the institution or internal, I find the use of the word Instance in this context confusing: surely those sets of metadata would be more than relating to Instances only, but again it all depends what is meant here. If we also have Works, which would presumably be created as part of the FOLIO metadata format, then the external/internal metadata sets encompass more than Instances?