Doctoral candidate Jacob Jett presented his research in digital cultural heritage collections at the Japanese Association for the Digital Humanities annual conference (JADH 2018), which was held September 9-11, in Tokyo, Japan. The theme of this year's conference was "Leveraging Open Data."
Jett presented the paper, "Towards Unifying our Collection Descriptions: To LRMize or Not?," which he coauthored with Professor J. Stephen Downie and Katrina Fenlon (MS '09, PhD '17). The paper examines a new aggregate model set forth by International Federation of Library Association's Library Reference Model (LRM) which treats aggregates like digital-cultural heritage collections as FRBR manifestations. According to Jett and his coauthors, this modeling choice results in metadata that fails to express the topicality of digital collections. In the paper, the researchers maintain that these collections should be treated as first-class bibliographic objects in their own right. This approach would benefit scholars by providing a method for linking collections together by topic thereby fulfilling FRBR’s identification and selection user tasks.
Jett's research interests include the conceptual foundations of information access, organization, and retrieval, especially with regard to web and data semantics. He received his MS/LIS from the iSchool in 2007 as well as his CAS in digital libraries in 2010.