Beth Burnett, Metadata Librarian, National Transportation Library
at the Stegastein Viewpoint in Norway
Beth Burnett is the Metadata Librarian for the National Transportation Library (NTL). NTL is a fully virtual library with over 60,000 resources, datasets, and briefs catalogued in its Rosa P portal. While she isn’t NTL’s first metadata librarian, the position has been vacant for a few years, so this is an excellent opportunity for Beth to employ strategic thinking and create a metadata plan for the library. She’s only been in her position since December 2023, and already she’s improved some of NTL’s metadata guidelines around resource authorship. Two talented contract catalogers work for Beth, and she plans to help with some of the hands-on cataloging too from time to time so she can identify challenges that her cataloguers encounter.
Beth was raised in Florida, obtained her bachelor's degree in psychology from Auburn University in Alabama, and her graduate degree in library science from University of Alabama. Her previous positions included working as a digital scholarship librarian and head of technical services for Georgia Southern University.
She resides in Savannah, GA. In her spare time, you’ll find Beth hiking, crafting, and reading. One of Beth’s favorite things about Savannah is going to the annual book festival, where she has seen several of her favorite authors speak including Stephen King, T.C. Boyle, Kiley Reid, Tom Perrotta, Joe Hill, Ruth Ware, Victor LaValle, Lauren Groff, Grady Hendrix, Karen Thompson Walker, and Gabrielle Zevin.
Beth also enjoys traveling with her husband. She’s been to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Japan, and the British Isles (where she enjoyed visiting the library at Trinity College in Dublin). Since NTL staff work remotely, she hopes to meet her colleagues in-person someday at a meeting or conference.
The “most popular” resource may well go to the Transportation Statistics Annual Report. This report presents an overview of the U.S. transportation system and key indicators, including data and statistics on passenger travel, freight movement, transportation and the economy, system reliability, safety, energy use, and the environmental impacts of transportation.
Beth sees all the new resources catalogued for ROSA P and likes resources with creative titles. For example, one new title is Hammer Time: Using the Schmidt Hammer to Improve the Forecasting Accuracy of the Rockfall Activity Index (RAI). Anyone who remembers the MC Hammer song “U Can’t Touch This” will probably smile at that reference.
Mondays are always great days for Beth. She and NTL Digital Librarian Mary Moulton kick off the day by meeting to review all the cataloguing records from the previous week, often adding additional Transportation Research Thesaurus (TRT) terms, and additional subject terms that are not in the thesaurus. After that is a cataloging meeting, followed by various projects. While she doesn’t staff the virtual reference desk, the work that technical services does is used in many ways by reference services.
Beth would like to get to know her colleagues (including fellow NTKNers), start providing metadata metrics, and publicize the good work that the NTL cataloguers are doing.
Metadata is complicated! Beth advises that if you get stuck, look at previous work by other cataloguers to get “unstuck.” Don’t reinvent the wheel. She’s interested in seeing what artificial intelligence (AI) may bring to the domain of metadata – it may prove useful for scanning for errors.
Decluttering and organizing. Beth finds it energizing and satisfying to bring order to environments of any size, whether it be a drawer, a closet, or a room.
0 Comments.