This meeting will be devoted to the work that Adam Chandler (CTS), Elaine Westbrooks (Mann Library), and Vivek Uppal (graduate student in Computer Science) are doing with their CUGIR metadata grant: "Enhancing Access to Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository (CUGIR): Federal Geospatial Data Committee (FGDC) Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM) to MARC/Dublin Core Conversion Project".

The primary goal of this project is to expand access to CUGIR geospatial data files. We are accomplishing this through semi-automatic conversion of existing CUGIR metadata. The converted records are being placed in non-FGDC Clearinghouse metadata systems, including the CUL OPAC (MARC format), CORC/WorldCat (MARC/Dublin Core formats), and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Metadata Harvesting Protocol (Dublin Core/XML format/DC-RDF). These new records will hyperlinked to the full CSDGM metadata description within CUGIR by way of the MARC 856 field using Michael Nelson's "Bucket" concept. Our project will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the CORC system as a classification and authority control tool for geospatial data.

Elaine Westbrooks began the presentation with a description of the project she and Adam Chandler have been working on (with the help of Vivek Uppal) to increase access to geospatial data, specifically CUGIR, the Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository. (See the slides from their Powerpoint demonstration on the web.) CUGIR was launched in 1998, and uses CSDGM, the Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata. This standard has 335 elements, and the records can be very long. The project consists of translating the content into multiple forms of metadata (CORC, MARC, OAI), then making them accessible on the Voyager OPAC, on WorldCat, and through the Open Archive Initiative. One innovative aspect of this project is the use of "buckets" which can be used to manage the metadata, pointing to specific locations for the data using persistent (consistent) URL's. The project was started in May, and it is hoped that all 2,600 metadata records will be in CORC by December. In January, the use of the data will be analyzed. One problem is that the library computers do not support the files that will be accessed by clicking on the URL's in the OPAC. CUGIR II will have a webmapping feature that will help somewhat with this problem.