Eric R. Childress
Community Manager
Eric R. Childress is a Community Manager for the OCLC metadata services communities (WorldShare® Collection Manager, WorldShare® Record Manager) and for the OCLC CONTENTdm community.
A specialist in metadata standards and systems, Eric has been active professionally in the Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures (formerly Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), serving as chair and member of the DCMI Governing Board and on various professional association committees and working groups. He has authored or co-authored [orcid] articles and columns for a variety of professional journals including Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Code4Lib Journal, D-Lib Magazine, Journal of Information Science, Journal of Internet Cataloging, Library Resources & Technical Services, VRA Bulletin, published papers in the Proceedings Of The International Conference On Dublin Core And Metadata Applications, and contributed to the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences. Eric has organized various professional meetings such as the "Fonds & Bonds: Archival Metadata, Tools, and Identity Management" workshop at the Dublin Core 2014 conference, and the “Dublin Core at 21” IFLA Satellite Meeting (2016). His wide-ranging expertise on metadata-related topics is often tapped for keynotes or other presentations at professional conferences and workshops.
Prior to OCLC Childress worked in the cataloging departments of the libraries at Elon University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). He holds a B.A. (Geography) and M.L.S. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Activities
At OCLC Eric Childress has been part of the product teams that developed the OCLC CatExpress service and Connexion. He is a longstanding member for the FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) and VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) teams. Eric has also been a contributor to other OCLC Research projects including:
- CORC (Cooperative Online Resource Catalog)
- Metadata Schema Transformation Services
- Metadata Switch
- Missing Materials Beta Procedure
- Publisher Name Server
Publications
Linking FAST and Wikipedia
12 August 2016
Rick Bennett, Eric Childress, Kerre Kammerer, Diane Vizine-Goetz
This paper describes a research project to develop automated techniques for linking FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) to Wikipedia articles. The research is motivated by libraries’ interest in connecting library resources such as authority files to non-library linked data resources such as GeoNames and DBpedia (a dataset containing structured data extracted from Wikipedia). Of the approximately 183,000 non-subdivided topical headings in the FAST vocabulary, 76,000 terms were matched to Wikipedia article titles with 95% accuracy. Wikipedia links in the FAST authority file and FAST linked data enable people and software applications to take advantage of information in both of these resources.
The Evolving Scholarly Record
5 June 2014
Brian Lavoie, Eric Childress, Ricky Erway, Ixchel Faniel, Constance Malpas, Jennifer Schaffner, +
FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) Users: Summary and Case Studies
26 August 2013