Cypress Payne contributed groundbreaking linked data transformation work as a student employee, and continued her role on an international project into her first professional position.
November 17, 2025
By: Crystal Yragui
When Cypress Payne joined the University of Washington Cataloging and Metadata Services Department as a student employee, an exciting new linked data project had just gotten off the ground. Theodore Gerontakos and Crystal Yragui were leading an international effort to map and transform legacy MARC21 Bibliographic data into linked data using the LRM/RDA/RDF Ontology.
MARC21 Bibliographic is the format we are all used to seeing in our library catalog–a widely used standard which facilitates the representation and exchange of bibliographic data between libraries all over the world. While MARC21 has done its job well, it is beginning to show its age as far as integration with current web technologies is concerned.
Tools and applications such as search engines and machine learning applications prefer to ingest data in formats developed with more extensive machine-readability in mind, such as Resource Description Framework (RDF). Increasingly, Integrated Library Systems and international data-sharing efforts between libraries are also favoring RDF. RDF data and technologies are what metadata librarians refer to when they talk about “linked data”.
Resource Description and Access (or RDA) is a cataloging content standard used by catalogers across the globe in several language communities to specify what data is included in catalog records and how it ought to be recorded.
RDA is an implementation of a data model called the Library Reference Model, or LRM, set forth by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA).
The LRM/RDA/RDF Ontology is a way to encode RDA (Resource Description and Access) descriptions as linked data. In order for libraries to take the fullest advantage of current web technologies and share data as seamlessly as possible between language communities, the adoption of the LRM/RDA/RDF ontology is desirable. Before this goal can be realized, the international library community needs a way to convert decades of legacy MARC21 data to LRM/RDA/RDF.
If this all sounds complicated, it is. MARC21 Bibliographic consists of thousands of distinct pieces of data, represents cataloging practices spanning several decades, and can seldom be mapped in a straightforward manner to any linked data ontology. LRM/RDA/RDF is complex in its own right, featuring thousands of properties and implementing a data model which was not yet used when most legacy MARC21 Bibliographic data was created. Creating a machine-driven mapping and transformation between the two formats is similar in complexity to translating millions of books in one language into another language with entirely different grammatical rules, idioms, and approaches to the subject matter. Despite challenges, an enthusiastic international team came together to map and convert the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC)’s BIBCO Standard Record (BSR) to LRM/RDA/RDF as Phase I of the MARC2RDA Project in 2021.
Cypress joined the University of Washington Libraries with a Bachelor’s degree in computer science and a strong desire to learn about library metadata. She quickly picked up the programming language used by the project’s transformation team, XSLT, and familiarized herself with both MARC21 Bibliographic and LRM/RDA/RDF. Cypress made enormous early contributions to both the mapping and transformation work. She added novel approaches to complex tasks such as selecting the correct RDA element for a MARC field based on a relationship label by writing code to navigate tables of variables rather than hand-coding hundreds of pieces of logic individually. By the time she graduated with her MLIS in December 2024, she had assumed leadership of the transformation portion of the MARC21 to LRM/RDA/RDF project. Cypress was hired as UW Libraries staff on a temporary basis after graduation to continue this important work and to help the Metadata and Cataloging Initiatives Unit manage a transitional phase after the departures of two full-time metadata librarians, Benjamin Riesenberg and Theodore Gerontakos. Since she was a student employee, Cypress has trained several University of Washington iSchool students and library professionals around the world to perform project transformation work, onboarding new volunteers multiple times per year. Her patient, methodical, and creative approach to technical training and metadata workflow development are highly valued by her colleagues.
In March 2025, Cypress was hired as the full-time Metadata and Cataloging Librarian at West Virginia University. She continues to lead the transformation team and has joined Crystal Yragui in co-supervising the MARC2RDA Project more broadly. In returning to the project on a volunteer basis, Cypress ensured the success of Phase I and enabled the team to move confidently into Phase II. We are incredibly proud of Cypress, and look forward to hearing about her future accomplishments in the library metadata field.
The Lives of UW Libraries Catalogers and Metadata Specialists
Student Spotlight Series
You may be surprised to hear that before you can access a library resource when you need it, a lot of work must be done to get that resource into the UW Libraries catalog. A whole department of librarians, staff, and students are quietly working away behind the scenes to get new resources into the catalog and to find innovative ways to enhance the Libraries’ metadata.
This series continues our previous UW Libraries Blog Series, “The Secret Life of UW Libraries Catalogers and Metadata Specialists,” highlighting our brilliant student employees and the work they do to make your tasks of searching, identifying, selecting, and obtaining library resources easier and more effective.