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Günter Waibel
Program Officer
RLG-Programs,
OCLC, USA
Abstract:
The cultural
heritage field has developed parallel systems for describing and sharing
collections in each of its constituent communities. Libraries, archives and
museums use different standards to provide access to cultural objects.
Integrating these heterogeneous collections
presents a challenge for data aggregators such as RLG or OCLC, who aim to
bring together materials from many different sources to provide a
comprehensive search and retrieval environment for academic research and
teaching. While harmonizing different descriptions represents a key
challenge for aggregators, the cultural heritage community is debating how
to describe and digitize collections more efficiently - mass digitization
efforts of bibliographic materials by Google and the Open Content Alliance
(OCA) hold the promise of less dependence on human-generated metadata, yet
how the same efficiencies may be achieved across the board for non-textual
materials remains less clear. The museum community has proposed a new XML
Schema (in combination with Open Archives Initiative (OAI) harvesting) for
sharing collections more efficiently, while the archival community is
coming together around a proposal to streamline processing and accessioning
of collections. In summary, this talk will trace the changing US
landscape of standards and practices in the realm of sharing digital
collections across libraries, archives and museums, and hopes to provide a
view of the opportunities in this changing information ecology.
Biography:
Günter Waibel is a Program Officer in the RLG Programs division of OCLC.
He specializes in standards for describing and representing cultural
materials in a networked environment, as well as the intersection of
museums, libraries and archives in providing access to primary materials.
Further areas of interests are digital asset management and digital
preservation. Mr. Waibel serves as the RLG Programs liaison to the museum
and art library community.
Mr. Waibel joined RLG at the beginning of 2003, coming from the position
of Digital Media Developer at the University of California Berkeley Art
Museum & Pacific Film Archive. At UC Berkeley he worked closely with the
California Digital Library (CDL) and the project Museums and the Online
Archive of California (MOAC). In July 2006, he transitioned to OCLC Programs
and Research following the combination of OCLC and RLG.
Waibel is a board member of the Museum Computer Network (MCN) and the
Association of American Museum’s (AAM) Media & Technology Committee.
He edited a best-selling special issue of MCN’s quarterly publication
Spectra on Digital Imaging, and currently blogs at http://www.hangingtogether.org/.
Since 2004, he teaches as adjunct faculty in the School of Information
Studies at Syracuse University, New York.
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