This project may be of interest to some on this list as an experiment to explore extracting structured data from free text in MARC. You also have a chance to help make it easier to find film and video in libraries if you're willing to take a few minutes to participate.

OLAC (http://www.olacinc.org/) is working on project to try to make the process of finding film and video in library catalogs better. Please help us by annotating some film and video credits at http://olac-annotator.org/. It only takes a few minutes to make a contribution. We are challenging OLAC members to do annotate three credits per day this week to see how many we can get done. Please join us in this endeavor. We are especially looking for people who know languages other than English to help us translate credits in languages from Chinese to Spanish to Urdu. Full announcement below. Please share this information with anyone you think might be interested.

Kelley

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The OLAC Movie & Video Credit Annotation Experiment (http://olac-annotator.org) is part of a larger project to make it easier to find film and video in libraries and archives. In the current phase, we're trying to break existing MARC movie records down and pull out all the cast and crew information so that it may be re-ordered and manipulated. We also want to make explicit connections between cast and crew names and their roles or functions in the movie production. Adding these formal connections to movie records will allow us to provide a better user experience. For example, library patrons would be able to search just for directors or just for cast members or only for movies where Clint Eastwood is actually in the cast rather than all the movies that he is connected with. Libraries would have the flexibility to create more standardized and readable displays of production credits, such as you see at IMDb (see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1205489/ -- not that we necessarily want IMDb's display, but that we would have much more flexibility in designing displays) , rather than views like a typical library catalog (such as http://janus.uoregon.edu/record=b3958782).

We therefore want to convert our existing records into more structured sets of data. Eventually, we intend to automate most of this conversion. For now, we need help from human volunteers, who can train our software to recognize the many ways names and roles have been listed in library records for movies. Give us a hand at http://olac-annotator.org. For an explanation with more library jargon thrown in, see http://olac-annotator.org/#/more.

The OLAC Movie & Video Credit Annotation Experiment was conceived by Kelley McGrath, developed by Chris Fitzpatrick and funded by a Richard and Mary Corrigan Solari Library Fellowship Incentive Award from the University of Oregon Libraries.


Kelley McGrath
Metadata Management Librarian
University of Oregon Libraries
541-346-8232
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