habitually probing generalist

<relief>

Now which attributes does that element take?

I got up today and went in and talked to my metadata prof, Jerry McDonough.  I have been working myself into a lather confusing the long-term goal, and even portions of it, with what is doable in one semester [Longer version of immediate issues and long-term goal].

I was grousing about going in to see him at 10 AM when I don’t have to be at work until 2, but then work or have class till 9+.  But I am so glad that I did.  Relieved is not the word!  I actually believe that I was grinning for a bit there.  Well, after that whole body sigh anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still have a challenging semester.  It might just be doable in this iteration, though.  Good thing, as I’m supposed to graduate and I have an application in for another degree.  [So I can complete my project, of course.  ]

Jerry wisely (is he younger than me?) helped me see what was doable this semester, which was not all of what I was contemplating, and how to link what is doable to the longer-term goal.

I was really starting to freak at what all it looked like I was going to have to learn.  Last night and this AM particularly I pretty much realized I had to back off.  Jerry helped me find that point.

For Metadata in Theory and Practice assignment 1 I’ll be encoding four bibliographic citations (annotated) in three separate schemas.  I’ll be using MODS, TEI and DC Core. 

• I’m going to the TEI workshop this Friday afternoon and all-day Saturday and Sunday.  That should help me a lot!  I’ll use the XML editor a lot more, I’ll learn a fair amount about and practice with TEI.  I should be prepared to decide between TEI and TEI Lite at that point.
• Jerry suggested MODS because the citation formatting portion of XBib is designed around MODS; long-term thinking.
• Why DC Core?  Really, why?  Honestly, I dismissed it almost out-of-hand.  But two important considerations.  DC Core is the assumption in our OAI harvesting (2nd assignment).  Secondly, as a point of education, instead of assuming it sucks, honestly explicate what exactly "sucks," and even more importantly, what didn’t suck for my functions?  And why?  Some portion of the citation must come through in DC Core; what is that, and is it useful?

When I write my paper, I will focus on the longer-term goal, that is, a format that makes conversions easy.  Which other schemas can I map from one to the other? …

After we learn about OAI in a few weeks, I will make a static repository page from which they will be harvested.

For the last assignment, maybe I’ll have learned enough to put my own together, and thus suffer through the intellectual rigor of learning something,  and then defending it in writing.  I may also then be ready to try and understand much of what’s going on in XBib.

Indexing and Abstracting.  Fair amount of reading.  Articles to index and a vocabulary to arrange.  Been loosely working on a vocabulary (possible thesaurus) for the blog since I will quite probably index it for my project.

Advanced Cataloging is humming along.  I spoke with Kathryn yesterday and layed out a flexible plan of assignments that easily adds up to 25 points.  And my final project is, in a sense, very easy.  I need a fair amount of bibliographic citations prettily formatted and annotated.  Hell, that’s doable with the content of "my Haworth problem."  And as for that problem, at the moment it is to do what everyone esle does.  Ignore it.  No, probably drop a note in the annotations field, possibly a separate note field (unlikely).  So that means data entry, select a format, print.  But since this is the start of my "goal," I’d like to seriously start thinking about the process of finding all of this literature.  I need to formulate search strategies for indexes, OPACS, ….  [Boy, I sure wish I had taken Online Searching at this point.  Maybe this summer if I get to stay.]  I do have a dozen or two other articles and a couple of very short print or web bibliographies on my topic, though, that I can begin entering.

Oh, yesterday I signed up for a free RefWorks class (2 March) through the library.  I’ll have to compare its ease-of-use and its export formats to EndNote.  RefWorks has the benefit of using it online; I do most of my work on my Mac laptop.

Anyway, the world is feeling a bit lighter at the moment.