Theodore Gerontakos, the Web Page

Theodore Gerontakos, the Web Page

Occupation: Librarian

Job Title: Head, Metadata and Cataloging Initiatives

Organization: University of Washington

Location: Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.

email: tgis@uw.edu

Telephone: (206) 276-6209

Pronouns: he, him, his

Current projects (January, 2022):

Web standards for librarians
MARC-to-RDA alignment
PCC Wikidata Pilot
NISO Content Profile/Linked Document standard
RDA/LRM application profiles in Sinopia
UW Libraries Semantic Web Blog
XML tools in libraries

Areas of interest:

Metadata
Linked data
Semantic web
Library data
Application profiles
Data validation
Data modeling
XML technologies
RDA (Resource Description and Access)
LRM (IFLA Library Reference Model)
BIBFRAME
Python programming language
Data engineering

Theo, Say something:

"I've been a Metadata Librarian since 2001. Some 2020s library data needs stand out as we seek a more useful data exchange format than MARC. After years of experimentation, we now have the infrastructure to commit to RDF data. In past years, this required "getting under the hood" of many processes; there was a lack of standards, tools, and practices, which we now have in abundance, including data publishing platforms. Our data stores remain MARC-based, but we see more and more data expressed as RDF. With this turn, our practice can shift considerably. Metadata specialists can focus more on data modeling than data processing, although the ability to code will remain a necessity. Projects currently under my direction at the University of Washington focus on allowing data to be input and output on demand. As a result, our focus is moving data across data models. We hope to become part of, and help develop, a community of data standardization that is fluid and capable of serving diverse needs."

last update: 2022-01-11