Blitz participants and organizers, front row from left to right, from SILS, Jane Greenberg, Jacki Sherman, Elisabeth Cribbs, Sojourna Cunningham, and Jewel Ward; back row from left to right, Michele Hayslett, UNC Libraries; Libby Dechman, Ed Summers and Barbara Tillet (all from the Library of Congress); Renee McBride and Margaretta J. Yarborough, UNC Libraries. (Blitzers not in the photo include: Jill Sexton, UNC Libraries; Xi Niu and Rahul Deshmukh, SILS)
Library of Congress guests, School of Information and Library Science (SILS) students and faculty, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries staff and visitors from the Research Triangle Park and surrounding libraries came together April 19, 2010 in the Davis Library on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus for a celebration that featured a blitz on cataloging research.
This was the first "blitz" of three (3), to be sponsored by the SILS Metadata Research Center and the UNC Libraries, to celebrate 2010 as the year of cataloging research. Among the topics covered were the Semantic Web, FRBR, faceted searching, censorship and cataloging and authority control.
The event also featured a social, meet and greet activity, where participants and guests discussed cataloging research and interacted with presenters and guests.
Dr. Jane Greenberg, SILS professor and director of the Metadata Research Center, and Margaretta J. Yarborough, head of Resource Description and Management, UNC Libraries, welcomed the group and provided an overview of the afternoon celebration (see the presentation, "A Cataloging Research Blitz!!!"). SILS students and UNC library staff “blitzed” through their cataloging/metadata research, providing highlights with four minute presentations. A list of the blitzers and their topics of research can be found here. Distinguished guests from the Library of Congress (LOC) attending the event, included:
- Barbara B. Tillett, chief, Policy and Standards Division
- Libby Dechman, senior policy specialist
- Ed Summers, software developer/librarian
Earlier in the afternoon, LOC guests participated in a "Seminar on Knowledge Organization" that Greenberg teaches annually. Tillett gave a presentation entitled, “Building Blocks for the Future: Making Controlled Vocabularies Available for the Semantic Web,” Summers spoke about linked data and Dechman followed Summer’s presentation demonstrating the LOC Authorities and Vocabularies service moving towards linked data. Greenberg opened her class to members of the UNC library community.
As members of the Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering (HIVE) Advisory Board, Library of Congress guests also spent the morning with members of the SILS Metadata Research Center and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center discussing progress on the HIVE project.
The next "blitz" will take place in late August, 2010 with the final blitz scheduled for December.
