Congratulations to Karen Coyle for winning the Association of Library Collection and Technical Services Outstanding Publication Award for her Library Technology Report Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata (Vol. 46: No. 1).
I spent a couple years managing the content development of RDA, as intellectually-challenging a responsibility as any I’ve had in ALA Publishing. Certainly I wasn’t shaping content, though I did have to navigate through a variety of interests and understand associated positions that were often stated in lengthy, dense email messages on conceptual topics. I had come to the conclusion that discussion around RDA was overly focused on the admittedly significant disruption and change to current system. I had learned enough to appreciate the constraints of strings and the potential offered by structured data even if my understanding of the details therein was a bit thin. From this vantage point, reading Karen Coyle’s Report and clicking through her slides, I gained an appreciation for her distinctive ability to explain--of course, a map of Boston’s “T” is metadata!
Karen’s award-winning report is accessibe on our Metapress site, and also available for purchase as a package with its follow up issue RDA Vocabularies for a 21st Century Data Environment.
If you're interested in learning more about RDA, we invite you to register for the upcoming, three-partALA TechSource Workshop Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future, where Karen will be joined by a couple of other good explainers, Chris Oliver and Diane Hillmann. Learn more at the ALA Store.