Next Generation Metadata as a Transformative Change

For many years now, OCLC has been involved in experiments, pilots, workshops, and research projects to better understand the challenges and opportunities that Next-Generation Metadata could bring to libraries. Recently, in a 2-year project with financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, OCLC has been able to start building a shared entity management infrastructure, that will include easily accessible authoritative descriptions of works and persons, enhanced, and managed by OCLC and the library community. Building this infrastructure was yet another learning opportunity for OCLC staff and the advisory group members involved.

Conversations about Next-Generation Metadata often center around changes in resource-description workflows and, more broadly, metadata creation and knowledge work, including the opportunity for more inclusive descriptions, as well as the infrastructure required for collecting and sharing entity based data. However, it is equally important to look at “the people side of things.” Moving from records to entity description is no less than a paradigm shift that fundamentally changes the work formerly known as “cataloguing,” and with it creates new or updated skills, roles and staffing requirements, which in turn is likely to change any measurements of impact and effectiveness of descriptive work undertaken in libraries.

Libraries should be thinking strategically about the changes to staff and workflows that any implementation of Next-Generation Metadata workflows can bring, and as with any transformative change, social interoperability can help finding the partners necessary for making this effort a success.

In this session, we will share lessons learned in our work and research to date, but will also enumerate a number of remaining challenges that require library engagement to address.

Dr. Annette Dortmund for more than two decades has worked for and with European libraries of all sizes, with a focus on inventorising and analysing library needs from multiple perspectives in a changing environment characterized by broader interoperability between systems and increasing group scaling of activities. Annette joined OCLC in 2001 and has since worked in several roles across Europe. Her current focus as a Senior Product Manager lies in helping libraries navigate the challenges around the implementation of next-generation metadata workflows. Annette graduated from Mainz University with a Magister Artium in Book Sciences, Latin Philology and Comparative Literature, and was awarded a doctorate in 1998.