October 11, 2023

The Secret Life 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 of blog posts will highlight 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.  

Student Spotlight #1: Melissa Morgan

When Melissa Morgan was accepted into the MLIS program at the University of Washington Information School, she expressed interest in volunteering with the University of Washington Libraries. Melissa’s undergraduate work at the UW demonstrated that she was an exceptional student, having earned a Bachelor’s of History with honors and won the UW Libraries’ Library Research Award Grand Prize in 2018. In April 2019, she joined the University of Washington Libraries Linked Data Team, an informal group within the Cataloging and Metadata Services Department (CAMS) focused on semantic web projects, with the aim of gaining some linked data experience. Linked data (or semantic web data, or RDF (Resource Description Framework)) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries.

Linked data is exciting for libraries because it makes relationships between things described on the web computer-readable and more shareable and discoverable across information repositories through integration with the open web. Once she joined the Linked Data Team, Melissa hit the ground running. She began participating in the Libraries’ Linked Data for Production (LD4P2) Mellon Foundation subgrant project and familiarizing herself with linked data analysis, application profile development, and collaboration using GitHub.

Melissa’s remarkable ability to learn new skills quickly and on-the-fly earned her a paid student position as a Linked Data Specialist for the duration of her MLIS study. Under the supervision of Theo Gerontakos and Benjamin Riesenberg, Melissa proactively took responsibility for several areas of highly technical work, much of which involved designing innovative workflows using programming languages she was not yet familiar with. She quickly became one of the most technically skilled members of the Linked Data Team and began contributing at a professional level. One example of Melissa’s outstanding work was a large-scale data conversion project, described below by Benjamin Riesenberg, Metadata Librarian:

“Melissa wrote thousands of lines of Python code to implement ontology mappings and convert data, developing expertise in the mapping language specification and communicating directly with developers to improve the open source specification. Another of her significant contributions to this project was the creation of Python code for parsing human-readable mappings and converting these to RML syntax.” 

-Benjamin Riesenberg, UW Libraries Metadata Librarian 

Melissa collaborated with the Linked Data Team on several such projects, picking up programming languages and learning linked data ontologies quickly in order to solve practical problems in creative ways. Melissa showed herself to be a capable workflow designer and project leader during her time as a student employee.

What is ontology mapping and linked data conversion? Ontology mapping and linked data conversion sound technical, but they bear resemblance to processes most people are already familiar with. Linked data is expressed in RDF (Resource Description Framework) using well-defined vocabularies called ontologies. These ontologies can be thought of as similar to languages. Humans use languages to communicate information. In a less-sophisticated but similar way, the semantic web uses linked data ontologies to express information in a way that computers and software applications can understand. There are several ontologies currently being used to describe library resources. Two important ones are the Resource Description and Access ontology and the BIBFRAME ontology. In order for computers (and users) to understand data from multiple sources which use different ontologies, these ontologies must be mapped to one another and large batches of data must be machine-converted from one ontology to another. This work is complex, and in a human language context resembles the act of translating a work of literature from one language into another.

After assessing project goals, identifying and learning the skills required to solve problems, and learning them quickly, Melissa designed effective workflows and patiently taught new skills and workflows to other Linked Data Team members. She is a skilled writer, and wrote a blog post on her RML project that helped us explain the work to colleagues in non-technical positions. Melissa’s work as a student employee was so helpful to the Linked Data Team that the Libraries kept her on as a temporary library technician after her graduation from the MLIS program. During that time, Melissa continued her linked data work and also studied traditional cataloging with Crystal Yragui, a science cataloger in CAMS. Melissa learned to create catalog records using national cataloging standards and controlled vocabularies.

As with Melissa’s other work, her cataloging was superb. The experience and skills developed as a student employee were foundational to forging her career in the field of librarianship. She is now the full-time Cataloging & Metadata Specialist at Pacific Lutheran University. We are proud of Melissa and grateful for the time she spent at the UW Libraries!

Join Us! 

We are currently hiring for a similar student position – Cataloging and Metadata Services – Linked Metadata Student Specialist! If jobs like Melissa’s sound interesting to you, or you are just curious about other student jobs in the Libraries, visit our Student Jobs page! 

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