Bobby Bothmann is professor and catalog & metadata librarian in Library Services at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Bobby catalogs all formats and attends many meetings. He is a member of the editorial board for Cataloging & Classification Quarterly and an active member of OLAC (OnLine Audiovisual Catalogers) where he has served in various leadership roles including treasurer and president. Bobby is a past chair of the Cataloging and Metadata Management Section (CaMMS) of the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) and of the CaMMS Competencies and Education for a Career in Cataloging Interest Group, and a past delegate on the Cataloguing Section Committee of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutes (IFLA), where he contributed to the recent revision of the International Cataloguing Principles. He holds an MLIS from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MS in Geography and English Technical Communication from MSU Mankato. Bobby is the recipient of the 2007 Esther J. Piercy Award from ALCTS, the 2009 Graduate of the Last Decade Award from UW Milwaukee, and the 2012 Nancy B. Olson Award from OLAC. Bobby moonlights as an adjunct instructor for the School of Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he teaches cataloging and classification courses and tries to convert one student per semester to the cataloging side of the Force. Bobby is owned by three dogs and is a frequent host of his dogs’ many dog friends.
Bobby’s capstone project “Core Metadata Elements for OER” examines best practices for the use of metadata elements in OER repositories and recommends a core set of elements that will best enable OER discovery. The study uses the Dublin Core (DC) metadata elements provided in the IEEE-LOM standard and the DC to LOM mapping to compare other schema, including LRMI, MERLOT, and OER Commons. The study presents nine metadata elements as proposed core data elements for any OER metadata scheme.