Building a Digital Teaching Commons to Enhance Teaching, Learning and Research: The MERIC

Experience and Challenges

Ingrid Hsieh-Yee (Organizer and moderator)School of Library and Information Science, Catholic University of Americahsiehyee@cua.edu

Sherry VellucciSchool of Communication, Information and Library Studies, Rutgers Universityvellucci@scils.rutgers.edu

William E. MoenSchool of Library and Information Sciences, University of North Texaswemoen@unt.edu

Francis MiksaSchool of Information, University of Texas at Austinmiksa@ischool.utexas.edu

Diane I. HillmannCornell University Library dih1@cornell.edu

This panel is designed 1) to share with the ASIST community the development of aninnovative project, MERIC, the Metadata Education and Research InformationCenter, 2) to discuss MERIC’s potential for improving and enhancing cataloging andmetadata education for LIS students, cataloging practitioners and others involved inmetadata projects, and 3) to explore with the audience various issues andchallenges related to educating a diverse community of metadata creators andturning MERIC into a virtual teaching commons and research center.

MERIC originated from an action plan of the Library of Congress to prepare futureinformation professionals to control digital resources in the 21st century. Initiallyconceived as a digital information clearinghouse (Hsieh-Yee, 2003), the MERIC

Advisory Board recognized the value of a “teaching commons” as recommended bythe Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Huber and Hutchings,2005), the need to provide users with the knowledge, skills and tools to processdigital resources (Soergel, 2002), and the benefits of collaborative research in thisemergent field. The vision and scope of MERIC have evolved beyond a repositoryfor teaching and learning objects to embrace the concept of a collaborativeresearch center and to expand the target audience beyond informationprofessionals to include anyone interested in increasing their metadata knowledge.The project is a joint initiative of the Association for Library Collections andTechnical Services and the Association for Library and Information ScienceEducation.

As a portal-based information center, the initial objectives of MERIC were to promote understanding of metadata within the LIS community, integrate metadata into LIS education, and encourage metadata research. The next foci of the MERIC project are building a diverse community of users and collaborators and providing fora and tools for collaboration in metadata teaching and research among these communities.

As the co-chair of the MERIC Advisory Board, Ingrid Hsieh-Yee will facilitate thediscussions. Sherry Vellucci, co-chair of the MERIC Board and a highly respectedmetadata expert and educator, will present the background and development ofMERIC. William E. Moen, a well-known researcher who specializes in metadata,interoperability, and system design, will present the beta version of MERIC and thelessons learned from working with students to develop the prototype. FrancisMiksa, a historian of library cataloging and a cataloging educator for more than 30years, will discuss the challenges of teaching cataloging and metadata and MERIC’spotential in enhancing such education. Diane Hillmann, another expert in metadataimplementation and an experienced educator in building curriculum and materialsfor metadata education, will discuss the needs of students and practitioners andsuggest ways for MERIC to make its resources more readily accessible to users. Wewill reserve 20 minutes to discuss issues and questions raised by the panel.

Keeping Up with the Changing Landscape of Metadata EducationSherry Vellucci

Metadata is an evolving area of information organization that is constantly in flux and the technologies used to support its teaching and implementation are changing just as rapidly.In their efforts to stay current with the content, technology and pedagogical aspects of teaching information organization, cataloging and metadata educators will benefit from

sharing their ideas and teaching methods. In addition, the MERIC Advisory Board believesthat collaborative research in the many aspects of metadata development and implementation will enhance the teaching and training processes.

Initially conceived as a clearinghouse to provide resources for LIS educators, trainers, andstudents, the project has expanded to address the needs of practicing catalogers, metadata creators, and other people tagging digital objects. This broader vision will create challenges for deciding on the appropriate level of training for different audiences.

This presentation will introduce the Metadata Education and Research Information Center and discuss the background, development and evolving scope and goals of this portal-based center for teaching, learning and research.

Questions for the audience and the panel:

What should be the scope of MERIC? Should it include indexing materials? Document representation? Ontologies? Taxonomies? Automatic classification? Internet indexing? Information architecture?

1.

How do we use MERIC to build a community of collaborators? 2.The MERIC Advisory Board is committed to engaging the library and information science community in the development of MERIC. What business models are appropriate for MERIC? How do we address the sustainability issues?

3.

What process should be used to evaluate content?4.Should ASIST become involved in some way?5.The Advisory Board wants MERIC to evolve into a collaborative research tool. What technologies should be incorporated into the Web site to facilitate the collaborative research aspect of MERIC?

6.

The MERIC Prototype: A Collaborative Development ProjectWilliam E. Moen

The Texas Center for Digital Knowledge at the University of North Texas (UNT) is working with the Metadata Education and Research Information Center (MERIC) to implement a prototype application in the form of a portal-based clearinghouse for teaching and learning materials. These resources are intended to support a range of users involved in metadata and cataloging education. Under the direction of Dr. William E. Moen, graduate students inhis Spring 2006 course, Metadata and Networked Information Organization and Retrieval, have taken on this development project as a semester-long class activity. The MERIC Advisory Board prescribed a metadata-driven web application, and as such, the project fitswell into the goals and objectives of the course. Students will design and implement a prototype application by Summer 2006.

The course is implemented in a blended delivery mode, with the majority of courseinteraction occurring through the WebCT learning management system. The course alsoincludes a three-day onsite meeting at UNT. Approximately 30 students enrolled in thecourse, and all have a variety of roles and responsibilities in the project. In addition, Dr.Shawne Miksa, a faculty member in UNT’s School of Library and Information Sciences,serves on the MERIC Board and is working with Dr. Moen and the students. Thedistributed learning nature of the course presents challenges for managing the project, yetit also brings opportunities for students to work in virtual teams, a situation increasinglycommon in our field.

The MERIC Advisory Board comprises the “customers” for this project. Board membershave prepared a number of documents that express explicit and implicit requirements anddesign features for the application. Throughout the development work, communicationbetween the MERIC Board and the project team (Dr. Moen and students) is essential. Aweb-based discussion forum enables communication among the students and with theMERIC Board. Understanding a customer’s needs and requirements and being responsiveto those through iterations of requirements and specifications give students a real-worldexperience in application development.

The project is guided by a project plan that describes a number of Work Areas, associatedwork packages, tasks, deliverables, and timelines. Work Areas include: Functional Requirements Analysis, Clarification, and Prioritization; Technology Review, Assessment, and Recommendation; Application Design; Graphic Design; Prototype Implementation; Functional and Usability Testing Evaluation Design and Implementation. Each of the workareas have one or more working groups of students that carry out specific tasks. For example, the Work Area covering functional requirements has working groups that include:Metadata Requirements Working Group; Search and Navigation Requirements Working Group; User Interface Requirements Working Group; and Work Flow Requirements Working Group. Deliverables include technical reports. A systematic methodology for

project planning and implementation will help students understand how to plan and manage multi-faceted projects. Students will also build evaluation components into the development and implementation to assess usability and overall system performance.

This presentation will report on the workings of the virtual teams, the details of requirements setting, the technical specifications for the application, and the resulting prototype. It will address lessons learned from this collaborative development and implementation project carried out in a distributed learning environment. Questions for the panel and audience include:

What suggestions do they have for the MERIC prototype?What types of space and tools should MERIC provide to facilitate online collaboration in metadata teaching and research?What features do educators and researchers want to see in the MERIC TeachingCommons?

MERIC from a Cataloging Educator’s PerspectiveFrancis Miksa

MERIC show great promise as a resource for cataloging education. Even so, its creatorswill have to keep in mind several of the pedagogical and practical issues that cataloging educators have faced over the years. The basis of remarks here-close familiarity with thehistory of American cataloging and American cataloging education, and 42 years of experience both as a cataloger and as a cataloging instructor-lead to comments and insights on the following basic questions and to suggestions on how MERIC might make an important contribution to their answers.

What important issues arise in the relationship between pedagogical goals and instructional materials? (Pedagogical goals include such conflicts as cataloging as exploration vs. cataloging as recitation; cataloging as considering principles vs. cataloging as practicing techniques; cataloging as learning to input into a given system vs. cataloging as creating new systems; cataloging as learning system parameters and features vs. cataloging as using a system.)

1.

How serious are temporal issues in the use of practice objects? (Temporal issuesinclude out-of-date cataloging objects, cataloging objects that have bibliographicalrecords easily obtainable, the temporal reach of “works” and “superworks,” andmaterials with brief half-lives)

2.

Can the costs of access to systems and to other support materials be lowered?3.What intellectual property issues are the most difficult for cataloging education?(Some of these issues include permissions to copy and/or to distribute practice materials; the problems in sharing intellectual property created by instructors and

4.

possibly claimed as university property.)How can the absurdity of making non-digital cataloging practice materials available digitally for the purpose of creating cataloging records be moderated?

5.

Metadata Education Beyond the ClassroomDiane I. Hillmann

As a practitioner with over 35 years working in libraries, I have been a cataloger (startingon typewriters with card platens), trained and managed professional and support staffcatalogers, written documentation for catalogers and metadata creators, and participatedin metadata standards creation and maintenance. I have also, every five years or so,taught graduate students in more or less traditional settings, as well as presented dozensof workshops and presentations for working professionals. Recently I’ve been involved inbuilding curriculum and materials to help catalogers make a transition to digital librarymetadata work, and have trained catalogers and trainers using the materials. I recentlywrote a grant with some colleagues to develop more materials and refactor/reuse existingmaterials within a broader digital library curriculum.

I see a number of questions arising in the broad space between LIS education and continuing education of professionals that need to be addressed.

Are there inherent differences in training needs for new librarians and experienced professionals? What are the assumptions we carry about what typical members of each of these groups already know as well as their level of comfort and experience with technology, which might affect how their training needs might be met?Each of these groups will need materials at different levels, but will those levels be analogous?What is the balance needed for new librarians and established professionals between classroom-based approaches and those designed for independentlearners?How can we encourage the appropriate use of ‘new media’ in the context ofdistribution of materials for independent learning (and to better supportclassroom-based materials)?How can we ensure that repository approaches to gathering and making available materials available for re-use (like MERIC) are developed using standard digital library best practices as a base?Is the intended audience for these MERIC materials other classroom teachers, professionals doing workshops, or self-directed learners? How do we define those audiences for the purposes of providing good descriptive metadata for these

materials?Should there be some attention early on to providing appropriate vocabulary to describe important aspects of these materials? If so, how might that beaccomplished?

References

Hsieh-Yee, I. (2003) Cataloging and Metadata Education: A Proposal for Preparing Cataloging Professionals of the 21st Century URL: http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/CatalogingandMetadataEducation.pdf

Huber, M.T. & Hutchings, P. (2005) The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Soergel, D. (2002) A Framework for Digital Library Research: Broadening the Vision D-Lib Magazine 8 (2). URL: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december02/soergel/12soergel.html