Educatters,

As some of you may know, there is a promising activity currently underway
to develop a web clearinghouse which will be a useful resource for
cataloging and metadata educators.

As a bit of background: The ALCTS/ALISE Task Force for Preparing Cataloging
and Metadata Educators and Trainers was created in response to a report on
Cataloging and Metadata Education prepared for the LC Action Plan on
Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium, available at
(http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/CatalogingandMetadataEducation.pdf).

One charge for our task force group was to develop a web clearinghouse for
metadata materials and also to develop a Metadata Basics Package, as
described in the Action Plan report.  Prof. Marcia Zeng, on the LIS faculty
at Kent State is working on the Metadata Basics Package, and Anita Coleman,
LIS faculty member at the University of Arizona, is serving as consultant
for the Web Clearinghouse project.

Anita has been making excellent progress on the clearinghouse, and has
completed some draft documents for our review. I would appreciate it if you
would look this over and give us your feedback so that Anita can proceed
further with the work.

The documents include:

1) a workplan indicating milestones and deliverables,

2) a proof of concept version of the basic categorical structure for the
clearinghouse web page,  and

3) background notes containing some possible topics, formats, and sample
items.

Workplan:
http://www.sir.arizona.edu/faculty/coleman/lc/wplanascv2.html

Topical categories - proof of concept:
http://www.sir.arizona.edu/faculty/coleman/lc/cameproof.html

Background Notes (which has some questions for feedback):
http://www.sir.arizona.edu/faculty/coleman/lc/camenotes.html


Please  send your feedback to our Educat list. We would appreciate your
comments by Sept. 20, so that Anita can keep to her deadline.

Later on, we will also be sending you draft documents from the work that
Marcia Zeng is doing on the Metadata Basics package.


We look forward to your comments. Thanks!

Olivia

C. Olivia Frost
Associate Dean and Professor
School of Information
University of Michigan