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Ten more days ’til Toronto

Ginny Hendricks – 2018 November 02

In CommunityMeetingsAnnual Meeting

Our LIVE Annual Meeting is back in North America for the first time since 2015, and with just 10 days to go, there’s a lot going on in preparation. As you’d expect with a How good is your metadata? theme—the two-days will be entirely devoted to the subject of metadata—because it touches everything we do, and everything that publishers, hosting platforms, funders, researchers, and librarians do. Oh, and it’s actually super awesome too—and occasionally fun.

Metadata is what is used to describe the story of research: its origin, its contributors, its attention, and its relationships with other objects. The more machines start to do what humans cannot—parse millions of files through multiple views—the more we see what connections are missing, and the more we start to understand the opportunities that better metadata could offer.

We love metadata so much that we’re producing an 8-foot-high depiction of the ‘perfect’ record, in both XML and JSON, for people to gape at and annotate in person. Sneak preview:

Both days feature plenary-style talks, insights from ourselves and guests who will regale us with tales of metadata woes and wonders.

Lisa will be there at the end of Day 1 to update everyone on some recent and potential governance changes, and—the reason we started these gatherings—to reveal the results of our 2018 board election, the second contested election we’ve held, and already with twice the voters from 2017.

Our amazing guest speakers are too brilliant and too experienced to highlight in just one blog. But check out the LIVE18 schedule to see what they’ll be talking about:

We’ll be taking over the entire second floor of the Toronto Reference Library, whose three rooms will house a bunch of conversational sessions as well as some more formal talks:

• Rally is the main room where we’ll have the plenary-style talks, a corner for Unscheduled Maintenance offering live support for your questions about billing or tech for Ryan, Shayn, Isaac, Jason, Chuck, & Mike. Running down the whole left side of this room is also the You-are-Crossref wall where the community will showcase their work with metadata through posters - feel free to bring one along and find Patricia to get the sticky tack.

• The LIVE Lounge is where you can eat, drink, rest, and chat and where you’ll likely find Rosa as she laises between the caterers, the venue, AV, and all of us. The Lounge is also where we’ll gather for much-needed post-election refreshments at the end of Tuesday.

• The Bigger Ambitions Room is where a lot of the Unplugged sessions will take place. This room will feature three separate stations:

  • R&D & Product where you can chat with Geoffrey, Esha, Jennifer L, Patrick, and Christine about your big ideas for us, and what we’re working on already.
  • Metadata discussions and annotations of the perfect record (previewed above) with Patricia, together with space to ideate around metadata principles.
  • Uses and users of metadata where Jennifer K will help us understand just how far Crossref metadata can reach, and who and what people are doing with it.

We cannot wait to show you what else we have planned :-)

For those of you not able to attend, recordings of the presentations will be made available on the event page directly soon after.

Otherwise - see you there!