More Information
How would you describe your role at UCLA Library?
As the assistant head for metadata services in Resource Acquisition & Metadata Services (RAMS), I help manage the unit that acquires and makes discoverable more than 90,000 new resources annually, in a number of formats (including both print and online) and over 400 languages.
What do you wish people knew about the work you do to support discovery and access?
Metadata (information about the resources in our collections) is what allows our users to discover and make sense of our collections, especially at the scale of UCLA Library. It is a rich source of information about both individual items in our collections, and about our collections as a whole.
Why do you care about the work you do?
Connecting people to the resource(s) they need, including resources they didn’t even know they needed until they stumbled across them serendipitously, is tremendously rewarding. Structured metadata supports serendipity by helping you to find everything available on a particular topic or format or in a particular language.
How does your work benefit students, faculty and other researchers? Can you give an example from a recent project?
When we describe the items in our collections, both what they are and what they are about, we make sure our users can find specific known works, other related works and also find everything available on a particular topic.
We recently digitized a number of music scores that were quite rare and had entered the public domain, but were not available online. This project allowed us to experiment with transforming metadata from the schema used by academic libraries into a format that could be ingested by UCLA Library Digital Collections(opens in a new tab).
Is there anything you want students, faculty and researchers to know about the resources you steward? Which resources are your favorite? Which ones have you discovered working at the Library?
This is a bit like asking a parent to describe their favorite child! But I am particularly passionate about the work we do describing photographs and other visual resources that touch on the history of Southern California. We know these visual resources are being used because we regularly get feedback from our users supplying us with additional information about the events and people depicted in them — a reminder that our users are often themselves experts on these same events and people.
While interviewing a donor (Walter Gordon) about his photograph collection, I first heard about Miriam Matthews, the first African American librarian in the Los Angeles Public Library. This led me to her archival papers in UCLA Library Special Collections. This led me to write my Master's thesis(opens in a new tab) on her life and career, which led to her induction into the California Library Hall of Fame, an article about her in Southern California Quarterly and other overdue recognition of her accomplishments. Mr. Gordon’s collection of historical photographs, as well as Matthews’ own photograph collection, are all now available online in UCLA Library Digital Collections and discoverable thanks to the rich metadata we created to describe them.
Any additional information or thoughts about your work that you’d like to share?
Someone once described metadata as a “love note to the future.” We invest our time and effort into describing our collections so that users now and well into the future can discover, access, use, interpret and share the information they contain.
