I went to DLF and all I got was…

Posted by laura on November 4, 2011 under Metadata | Be the First to Comment

I’m now home from the DLF 2011 Forum.  This was my 2nd year and it has become my favorite conference.  I met people I wanted to meet both times I have attended.   I liked being able to express my impressed-ness  and talk shop. This year, I made connections from which some collaborations may emerge.   Exciting!

I’m back with some very useful information, stuff I can apply to my day-to-day.  The Linked Data hands-on session was awesome and merits its own blog post.  Best thing: it helped me make a bit of headway with the CIT faculty names linked data work.

CURATEcamp also gets its own blog post. The conversation between catalogers and coders made a great leap.  There are concrete next steps.  See details at the CURATEcamp wiki.  See also the pretty pretty picture of the distribution between catalogers and coders attending.  Catalogers represent!

I laughed so much.  This is truly the conference’o'mirth.  Dan Chudnov proposed a weekly call-in show where a cataloger and a coder take questions from the field.  The names proposed in the twitter back-stream made it difficult to hold back laughter for fear of disturbing the front-stream speaker.  Chuckles aside, this seems to have strong possibility of actually happening.   I’m getting over my instinct that back-chat is rude at conferences.  It seems to have a group bonding effect.  I can see the value of nurturing professional relationships through shared discussion and commentary.  See part above about concrete next steps from CURATEcamp.

I got caught up on Data Management Plans and the eXtensible Catalog project.  I asked for & received advice about migrating our archival information system.  I asked people about their use of descriptive metadata and best practices for image management.  I have new software to evaluate and test.   I also got to see a preview of an RDA training workshop which focuses on as data elements (not RDA as records!!!).

My brain hurts because it’s so full.  I’ll need to collect my thoughts.  I absorbed so much that it wouldn’t be fair to blog one big brain dump.  I’ll be able to synthesize it better if I break it down in chunks.  Stay tuned.