Comments on: Generating Metadata on a Shoestring sans Programmer, with Our Good Friend, Excel (or Any Spreadsheet)

By: Andrew Marlow

Andrew Marlow — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:03:33 +0000

What you have done is very interesting. It confirms my belief that there is a desperate need to amend the metadata standards such as dublin core so that collections can be organised by journal, volume, issue and article.

Furthermore, this organisation is for the collections own sake whether or not there are any citations. In the few cases I have found where others have expressed this need the metadata is unfortnately expressed as citation data. I think journals, volumes, issues and articles are independent of citation.

By: Monica Rivero

Monica Rivero — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:55:47 +0000

These are great tips. We use excel for data processing quite a bit as well. I find it very flexible especially for processes that are somewhat manual or ad hoc in nature and when a full script would be overkill. As an example of excel’s diversity, another way do to parse out data is to use the Data>Text to Columns or use the vLookup formula to match up designated values for your parsed data.

Enjoyed reading it!

By: Jennifer Parsons

Jennifer Parsons — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:33:59 +0000

First of all, I enjoyed this article a great deal– thank you.

Secondly, I wonder if something like the metadata harvesting-and-parsing technique used here could be employed to help library and archival students better understand metadata. Using a familiar program like Excel can help ease people into the idea of how it is created, used, and reused. Otherwise, too often metadata can be seen as a “black box”– a mysterious, hypertechnical discipline that is only peripherally related to what a librarian does.