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• Webinar slides
  • Download Merrilee Proffitt's slides (pptx: 221KB/4 slides)
  • Download Ethan Gruber's slides (ppt: 441KB/8 slides)
  • Download Allison Jai O'Dell andTim Thompson's slides (pptx: 373KB/14 slides)
  • Download chat transcript (pdf: 70KB/6 pp.)

Speakers

Ethan Gruber
Web and Database Developer for the American Numismatic Society

Tim Thompson
Metadata Librarian at the University of Miami Libraries

Allison Jai O'Dell
Special Collections Cataloging & Metadata Librarian at the University of Miami Libraries

Description

The webinar features demonstrations of two tools, xEAC and RAMP, that will help archivists and librarians explore new possibilities for name authority work, moving beyond the boundaries of traditional archival metadata. This 90-minute session includes presentations and demonstrations, plus speakers answer questions from attendees.

xEAC

Ethan Gruber discusses the development of xEAC, an open source framework for creating, maintaining, and publishing collections of EAC-CPF records using XForms, a W3C standard for editing XML in next-generation web forms.  While generalizable across the library, archival, and museum fields, this presentation will demonstrate xEAC's potential for creating scholarly prosopographies, focusing on Greco-Roman entities and their integration in the larger linked open data universe.

RAMP

Over the years, the archives community has produced a body of detailed biographical descriptions that support access to the broader social and historical context surrounding archival collections. To help disseminate this information in new ways, a team of librarians, curators, and programmers at the University of Miami Libraries developed the Remixing Archival Metadata Project (RAMP), recently profiled in the Code4Lib Journal article "From Finding Aids to Wiki Pages: Remixing Archival Metadata with RAMP." The RAMP editor leverages EAC-CPF as a data exchange format, letting users take existing metadata, enhance it, and then republish it to Wikipedia through its API. You can view a demo of RAMP online.

For information about changes institutions can make to their Encoded Archival Description (EAD) practices to improve the discoverability of their materials, see our earlier webinar, "Achieving Thresholds for Discovery: Addressing Issues with EAD to Increase Discovery and Access."

This was the 15th webinar in the OCLC Research Technical Advances for Innovation in Cultural Heritage Institutions (TAI CHI) Webinar Series, the goal of which is to highlight specific innovative applications, often locally developed, that libraries, museums and archives may find effective in their own environments, as well as to teach technical staff new technologies and skills.

Related links

Prosopography?  It's a study, often using statistics, that identifies and draws relationships between various characters or people within a specific historical, social, or literary context.

More about XForms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XForms

"MVC" stands for Model-View-Controller, the three parts of this commonly used design pattern for software applications with user interfaces.  More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller

XPath is a query language for selecting nodes in an XML document.  E.g., to get the Title Proper (filing) from an EAD document, use the XPath expression ead/eadheader/filedesc/titlestmt/titleproper[@type='filing'].  More details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpath

REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer, and is a system architecture style that is commonly applied to systems that support APIs or Web services.  Follow this RESTful URL to learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer

Orbeon: an application for handling XForms. http://www.orbeon.com/

Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project.  http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

eXist is an open source native XML database system. http://exist-db.org/exist/apps/homepage/index.html

KML (Keyhole Markup Language) is an XML notation for geographic data.  It was initially developed for use with Google Earth and has since become an international standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole_Markup_Language

VIAF is the Virtual International Authority File, which combines multiple name authority files into a single authority service, hosted by OCLC. http://viaf.org/

DBPedia is a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and make this information available on the web.  http://dbpedia.org/About

Geonames is a geographical database with access available through web services.  http://www.geonames.org/

Pleiades is an open source historical gazetteer supporting the creation and sharing of historical geographic information about the ancient world. http://pleiades.stoa.org/

RDF (Resource Description Framework) describes a method for conceptual description and modeling of information.  RDF is similar to other modeling approaches such as entity-relationship or class diagrams, as it is based upon the idea of making statements about resources in the form of subject-predicate-object expressions.  These expressions are known as triples, in RDF terminology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

SPARQL is an RDF Query language, and a SPARQL Endpoint is a service that receives and responds to SPARQL queries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL  

XEAC Demo site: http://admin.numismatics.org/xeac/