Metadata and its relation to the OPAC

Sistrunk, Wendy. “Metadata.” In Pre-Conference Workshop on The Assessment, Preservation, and Access of Audio Collections in the Digital Age. March 30, 2005. Austin, Texas: Association of Recorded Sound Collections, 2005.

Wendy Sistrunk was a presenter at the Association of Recorded Sound Collections’ 2005 pre-conference workshop on assessing, preserving, and giving access to audio collections. She is the music catalog librarian for the University of Missouri—Kansas City, and creates and edits bibliographic and authority records, as well as handling aspects of metadata for the music collections. She talked about the importance of including metadata when undertaking a digitization project, and its relationship to individual libraries’ online public access catalogs. Most of the pre-conference workshop was focused around the University of Missouri’s World War II collection of radio broadcast transcription discs and its online exhibit, Voices of World War II: Experiences from the Front and at Home. Ms. Sistrunk talked about how metadata and traditional cataloging provide access to digital projects and exhibitions.

Sistrunk gave a brief description of what metadata is, its various functions, and some of the common schemas in usage today. She talked about her role in providing records not only to the digital image, but also to the original recording in the Marr Sound Archive. She makes two MARC records—one for the sound recording, and the other for the digital file. Because these materials are unpublished and qualify for archival treatment, many MARC fields are used that are not typically needed in ordinary library situations. Some of these include provenance, creating subject headings for the collections, detailed information related to the original recording process and subsequent digitization process, as well as information related to grant funding for the project. By creating two individual records, instead of just one with an 856 tag for electronic access, they are able to more fully separate the original item in the archive, from the derivative copy created for online access. She also talked about how it is possible to create Dublin Core records in OCLC Connexion, and the poor mapping that occurs when that record is exported into the MARC format.