Webinars on DCMI

Generating Smart Data for Cultural Heritage in the AI Era

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Smart data means the trusted, contextualized, relevant, cognitive, predictive, and consumable data at any scale, revealing the most important V(value) of big data. In the new era of AI, smart data may be efficiently processed using AI technology while also being used by AI to generate intelligent applications and produce high-quality data. However, since information-bearing cultural heritage entities are usually non-textual and non-machine-readable, generating smart data for diverse cultural heritage resources presents complexities in data processing. This webinar will bring some special cases in recent innovative research projects in the world, involving processing of manuscripts, symbols, images, sound, scent, museum objects, rock arts, etc.

AI Empowered Metadata Research in Uncertain Environments

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This webinar presents studies on AI empowered metadata research and information analysis in uncertain environments. Metadata research in uncertain environments involves various aspects of events, information, and people. The traditional metadata elements include the time, location, and stakeholders of an event, title, keywords, author and length of information as well as age, gender, and occupation of people, etc. In addition to traditional metadata elements, AI can also dynamically generate implicit metadata, such as semantic features and credibility of textual and visual information, severity levels of events, as well as needs, attentions, opinions, and influence of people, etc.

AI and the Transformation of Metadata Research and Practices

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This presentation reports the major findings from a large-scale, multilingual global survey conducted by the DCMI Education Committee AI Task Group, offering a comprehensive analysis of AI adoption in metadata practices from diverse global and regional perspectives. The results indicate a strong consensus toward a positive outlook on AI's role in metadata tasks, with perceived benefits as the most significant factor shaping this optimism. The most pressing challenge identified is a widespread lack of professional AI skills training.

Chinese Students in Archives: Radical Empathy & Metadata

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This webinar explores the representation of early Chinese international students at the University of Illinois, focusing on archival materials and metadata. Using the principle of radical empathy, the study identifies key issues— inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and inappropriateness—affecting discoverability and engagement. Introducing the “Three-I Framework,” the session highlights systemic factors shaping archival records and advocates for holistic, empathetic strategies beyond metadata enhancement to address subtle marginalization and improve access to these historical narratives.

Centering LGBTQ+ Voices in Catalog Research

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Libraries are addressing barriers faced by marginalized communities through improved catalog metadata. The Inclusive Catalog Use Lab (ICUL) focuses on user-based research to understand LGBTQ+ needs. Dr. Karen Snow and Dr. Brian Dobreski will share ICUL’s findings, highlighting user studies, focus groups, and solutions to support inclusive access for diverse communities.

On the Duality of Provenance Metadata

Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Explore how metadata is exploited to craft deceptive narratives and influence public discourse on platforms. Explore tactics used by bad actors to manipulate social media and evade content moderation by obfuscating provenance information. Understand metadata's duality in preventing data misuse and its exploitation for disinformation campaigns. Discover connections between responsible data management in open access and potential misuse. Information professionals and researchers play a crucial role by promoting data literacy and critical engagement with digital content.

Metadata in Scholarly Research: Collection, Management, and Standardization

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this webinar, Dr. Mayernik will discuss findings and insights from multiple projects focused on metadata collection, management, and standardization within the context of scientific data curation. The webinar will discuss important socio-technical dynamics that influence what metadata get generated in different situations, and how data archives and repositories work to ensure quality and standardization.

AI & NLP for Open-Source Archival Linked Data Workflows

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Join our webinar to harness AI and NLP for efficient archival linked data creation. Explore computer vision, NLP, and Python techniques to transform metadata into linked data, saving time and uncovering hidden collection details. Gain insights on tools for automatic data generation, appreciate the value of linked data in rediscovery, and learn its role as a new gateway to your collections.

Critical Data Modeling

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this DCMI webinar, Dr Karen Wickett will present critical data modeling: the use of data modeling and systems analysis techniques to build critical interrogations of information systems. Dr Wickett will describe the results of critical data modeling of a police arrest record dataset and discuss how conceptual modeling can help us synthesize critical information studies and identify new opportunities for modeling and critique.

Getting Started With SQLite

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

SQLite is a powerful relational database engine widely used in many applications. SQLite is the most used database engine in the world and implements most of the SQL standards. This webinar will cover the features of SQLite, the basics of SQL, the SQLite file format, the SQLite command line interface, and popular tools for managing and interacting with SQLite databases.

Linking Challenges for Pseudonyms

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This presentation examines and explores how to improve the linking relationships of persons with more than one identity in VIAF, LCNAF (LC National Authority File) and Wikidata through definition comparisons and case studies in terms of the semantic web.

Querying Wikidata: All the Knowledge in the World

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Knowledge Graphs have become a common asset for representing world knowledge in data driven models and applications. Wikidata is one of the largest crowdsourced Knowledge Graphs, with over 90 million entities and 1.5 billion edges.

Centering Relationality in Indigenous Knowledge Organization

Thu, 05 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this talk, Dr. Littletree will discuss a conceptual framework that centers on the concept of relationality, a framework that can be used to understand Indigenous systems of knowledge in the LIS context.

Applying FAIR Principles to Ontologies

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

About the webinar

This webinar addresses ontologies for the semantic web and how FAIR principles could be applied to ontologies. This includes metadata best practices and registries to publish the ontologies as Linked Open Vocabularies. Objectives are: To become familiar with ontologies for the semantic web and linked data principles; To become familiar with FAIR principles; To understand how FAIR principles could be applied to ontologies.

Natural history data curation: maintaining infrastructures and turning documents into datasets.

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

About the webinar

Natural history collections constitute an important and complex knowledge infrastructure. The heterogeneous data in these collections include specimens, genomes, field notes, ecological monitoring data, and more -- all of which have huge potential for reuse in biodiversity, medicine, climate science, agriculture, and many other domains. However, facilitating this integrative reuse requires first maintaining the fragile infrastructures used to store and share these data, and second, novel approaches to migrating data from legacy (and often analog) formats into datasets that are more fit-for-use.

Information and Knowledge Organisation in Digital Humanities: Global Perspectives

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This webinar, organized by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Education Committee, will provide an overview of and reflections on the edited book, Information and Knowledge Organisation in Digital Humanities: Global Perspectives. This volume explores the potential uses of, and challenges involved in, applying the organisation of information and knowledge in the various areas of Digital Humanities. By focussing on how information is described, represented, and organised in both research and practice, this work furthers the transdisciplinary nature of digital humanities.

Introduction to OpenRefine

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

About the webinar

OpenRefine is a freely available desktop application for cleaning and processing data. This webinar will introduce the basic features of OpenRefine and discuss its use in some common scenarios for metadata cleaning and improvement.

Modeling Intangible Entities in the Cultural Domains for Digital Archiving

Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

About the webinar

There is a variety of new cultural domains for which we need to design metadata schemas. It is widely recognized that data models are crucial to design metadata schemas – we need to identify objects for which we create metadata. This webinar aims to present a set of generalized data models designed for metadata about resources in cultural domains such as intangible cultural heritage and popular culture. The presenter will first introduce the generalized data models and then discuss data models designed in the Media Arts Database project and related projects in which they are involved.

Introduction to the DDI Metadata Standard

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

About the webinar

In this presentation, we discuss the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standard for describing the data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences. We spend the bulk of our time highlighting DDI-Codebook and DDI-Lifecycle. DDI-Codebook is a more light-weight version of the standard, intended primarily to document simple survey data. DDI-Lifecycle is designed to document and manage data across the entire life cycle, from conceptualization to data publication, analysis and beyond. It encompasses all of the DDI-Codebook specification and extends it to more complex, linked, and longitudinal data. Based on XML Schemas, DDI-Lifecycle is modular and extensible.

Introduction to KNIME

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

KNIME Analytics Platform is an open source software for working with all kinds of data. It uses visual workflows that are created with an intuitive, drag and drop style graphical interface, without the need for coding.