Inquiring Librarian

So I had a dream last night where Lorcan Dempsey had a really good idea that I want to riff on

2011-02-27T08:37:00.002-05:00

So I had a dream last night where Lorcan Dempsey had a really good idea that I want to riff on. Of course, it was "dream Lorcan" who got my mind rolling which I guess is essentially me and not him. Which is weird. I also don't believe this idea is really new, though at the moment I can't lay my brain on exactly where it is being discussed, at least in the way I'm thinking about it. (Please show me those places if I don't know about them or learned about them and have forgotten all but the nugget of their ideas, which obviously I'm appropriating just now.) I'm not sure what this all says about me, but that's never stopped me in the past from just going ahead and talking, so here we are. I've also been fixated on this idea enough that I'm writing this pre-coffee and pre-the rest of my usual weekend wake up routine, so we'll see how that goes. Moving on now.

I've recently switched jobs within libraryland (loving the new one, thanks!), and am not doing on the ground metadata work any more. It was time for a shift, though I do definitely miss working with metadata issues. But that shift has given me some distance to reflect more on the overall state of the library metadata landscape. In this dream, I was setting up at table in the front of the room for some conference or another. The session was a good ways away from starting, and for a while it was only the other speaker and me in the room. We were supposed to be presenting about really big picture issues in libraries, and we were chatting a bit about what we were going to say, about the overall dearth of big ideas in libraries (especially in metadata), and about our own personal insecurities about what we were about to say in the session. Enter Lorcan. He heard us, and entered the conversation. He had some amazing ideas that the other speaker wrote down and said "oh, great, I should definitely talk about that!" Of course, since this was a dream, I have no recollection of what those were, but in the dream they were brilliant, trust me. And then he said it. "You know, we really need professional help."

What dream Lorcan meant by that is that libraries are entering new areas of work, trying out new ideas, and talking the big talk about interoperating beyond our borders, but that were really not very good at all about truly working with others outside of our own culture to do this, or to do anything beyond us taking inspiration from something going on outside then working only inside to try to appropriate them. And, in my opinion, that's a problem.

Of course we want to take ideas from elsewhere and make them our own. And of course, "we" understand our culture, mission, goals, ideals, etc., so we need to be core players in adopting ideas from other communities, and in many cases we can indeed do it on our own. But this idea has me thinking doing that alone for some critical ideas is too insular an approach. Much of library culture is good, but not all of it is. Sometimes when we try to work on ideas and services from other communities we corrupt them in ways that we really shouldn't. Sometimes when we adopt an idea to work for our core values and vision we also impose some of our baggage on that idea. And we need someone to call us on that, but there's nobody that doesn't have that baggage close enough to do it.

I see library metadata as a prime example of this problem. Take the RDA Vocabularies work (aka "try to turn RDA into something that allows library metadata to interoperate outside libraries.") [1]. There's a core team of great people working on this that really understand the issues from the library perspective, and are able to think beyond many of the constraints libraries place on ourselves. I share their frustration with the lack of engagement in this aspect of RDA within the library community, and with them desperately seek ways to raise awareness within libraries of the issues raised by this work. However, the work is being done by library people learning about other communities' expectations and models, and attempting to map library metadata practices on top of them. They're making progress: identifying areas that might be problematic beyond libraries such as the explicit connection of many RDA properties to FRBR entities, and the packaging together of different data elements into a publication statement. But these are details. I worry that there are more fundamental mismatches that we're not seeing because we don't have the right people at the table. And by this I'm not exactly thinking FRBR vs. non-FRBR, though indeed that is going to be an issue. I'm thinking somehow higher level than that, but I'm having trouble articulating what that is exactly. What I think we also need is non-library people learning about library expectations and models to help us more effectively work towards library metadata being useful "out there." I won't say there are none of these people and partnerships today, but where they do exist I believe they're result of individual interest, or small-scale partnerships set up through personal connections. What we're missing is the high-level engagement of the two communities. Libraries in the large sense need to be visible enough to cause other communities to be interested in the data we could potentially provide. If this is going to work we need both organizational weight and grassroots efforts that will eventually meet in the middle. Right now we only have the grassroots stuff.

And when I talk about outside, professional help, I most definitely DO NOT mean a traditional consultant that's paid to come in, talk to some people, and produce a report on some relatively short time frame (a year or less). These folks rarely understand the underlying issues of the situation they're asked to comment on, and typically produce reports that are more about their own agendas than about the work they're analyzing. What I mean is more of an ongoing dialogue and partnership, and the library community has to find ways to get other interested in spending time, energy, and resources on that work. More on that in a moment.

Another area where this might have worked better is the Linked Library Data Incubator Group from the W3C. This is very much an "outside" thing, which of course is promising. I don't know the deep history of this group, but it seems to me to have been put together largely from outside interest and not from library leadership. There are LC folks involved, but I get the sense that's more individuals rather than the organization as a whole. They're at the table (thankfully) but I haven't heard that LC as an organization is a real leader for this initiative. It's as if LLD, id.loc.gov, and the MADS RDF Ontology are reduced to experimental status rather than true strategic directions for LC (at least beyond one department). LC also hasn't put much weight at all behind the RDA Vocabularies work. They're kind of milling about rather than leveraging their position. And beyond LC (and a bit of OCLC, which suffers from the same problem) the LLD group looks to me like outsiders and theorists. They've done an admirable job of publicly calling for use cases, but it seems to me this effort is too far on the other side of the continuum from the RDA Vocabularies work. They're to be absolutely commended for putting this together at all, don't get me wrong. I totally believe in what they're doing. But I don't see this yet as the true strategic partnership geared at getting the right people in the room to find all the places where we say the same word but mean two different things yet. Maybe we just need to try a few more of these types of these efforts before we really understand what the right makeup is.

But if LC and OCLC are at this cocktail party but mostly talking to each other near the wall rather than having an impassioned theoretical discussion with someone they just met, DLF skipped the reception entirely to go see a show. They're not even in these discussions, at least not as far as I have heard. (Anyone want to correct me?) Some of the best public/private partnerships in libraries are represented by the DLF community. I believe the big, looking outside issues facing library metadata are core to what DLF does, but even if others disagree, surely we can learn from the mechanics of these types of partnerships that have been set up for non-metadata work, using the collective knowledge of DLF. Now I'm thinking I should step up or shut up and say specifically what DLF should do in this area. Good point, I'll definitely work on that, and have some inklings of ideas that aren't quite ready for a forum like this yet.

Here's the core of what I'm saying: if it's time for a sea-change in library metadata, we have to truly shift our thinking. It's not just about making RDA data RDF-ified (though we do have to go through that exercise as one way to expose differences between the models). It's going further than that to truly understand where our assumptions collide. And we have to do that from both ends: library people learning about other models, and people with other models learning about libraries. I don't believe we're facilitating enough of the latter. We have lots of smart library people working on this problem, but they're primarily working by reading and experimenting on their own. We also need more opportunities for actual engagement between our community and others. Right now basically we're writing each other memos rather than actually hashing it out.

And this is all because dream Lorcan told me that I (well, we), need professional help. Aren't dreams funny?

[1] Hillmann, Diane, Karen Coyle, Jon Phipps, and Gordon Dunsire. (January/February 2010) "RDA Vocabularies: Process, Outcome, Use." D-Lib Magazine 16, no. 1/2. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january10/hillmann/01hillmann.html

Visualization of the Metadata Universe

2010-06-21T19:29:00.001-04:00

I know, I know, this poor blog is basically abandoned. I really do want to find more time to spend on it. But in the meantime, I wanted to post here an announcement I just sent out to a bunch of places. I'm pretty excited about this!

The sheer number of metadata standards in the cultural heritage sector is overwhelming, and their inter-relationships further complicate the situation. A new resource, Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe, , is intended to assist planners with the selection and implementation of metadata standards. Seeing Standards is in two parts: (1) a poster-sized visualization plotting standards based on their applicability in a variety of contexts, and (2) a glossary of metadata standards in either poster or pamphlet form.

Each of the 105 standards listed is evaluated on its strength of application to defined categories in each of four axes: community, domain, function, and purpose. Standards more strongly allied with a category are displayed towards the center of each hemisphere, and those still applicable but less strongly allied are displayed along the edges. The strength of a standard in a given category is determined by a mixture of its adoption in that category, its design intent, and its overall appropriateness for use in that category.

The standards represented are among those most heavily used or publicized in the cultural heritage community, though certainly not all standards that might be relevant are included. A small set of the metadata standards plotted on the main visualization also appear as highlights above the graphic. These represent the most commonly known or discussed standards for cultural heritage metadata.

Work preparing Seeing Standards was supported by a professional development grant from the Indiana University Libraries. Content was developed by Jenn Riley, Metadata Librarian in the Indiana University Digital Library Program. Design work was performed by Devin Becker of the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science, and soon to be Digital Initiatives & Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Idaho.

I hope this resource proves to be helpful to those working with metadata standards in libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions.

Completely backwards

2009-09-23T17:50:00.002-04:00

Emails, blog posts, and tweets are flying by regarding OCLC's recent message to OAI-PMH data providers asking them to agree to a set of Terms & Conditions allowing OCLC to include data harvested via OAI-PMH in both free and toll services that OCLC provides. We do love our drama in the library community!

I agree with the predominant theme that this has all been handled very poorly, but I think the biggest problem lies somewhere else entirely. OCLC has set this whole system up completely backwards. OAI-PMH is a mechanism to share metadata widely, without having 1:1 agreements between data providers and service providers (harvesters). The entire point is to reduce the overhead of sharing. OCLC asking each data provider to check their status and preferences against OCLC's ideal is the wrong way 'round! The way this really should be done is with data providers making clear statements about what can and can't be done (per both copyright and license) with the metadata they're sharing. And, oh, look, OAI-PMH, already lets data providers do that.

To be fair, there's lots of data provider software out there that doesn't support this optional part of the profile. Still others are using software that provides for this but they don't go to the effort to use it. My own repository doesn't have this mechanism in place. (Working on it, I promise!) But this really is the way it has to be for any kind of open data initiative to work. I as a data provider put my metadata (and content if I can!) up, make it clear what copyright terms apply and what license terms I place on its use, and let the sharing begin. The burden must be on the service provider (or harvester, OCLC/OAIster in this case) to determine if the use they want to put the data to conforms with my terms. Service providers should bear the load of managing multiple data providers - it's part of the work they have to do to set up the service. If they want the free stuff, they have to do the work to figure out if their efforts are kosher. OCLC must be responsible for protecting themselves from lawsuits stemming from their use of stuff they're not supposed to, rather than transferring that responsibility to us as data providers.

But I have to temper the other side of this too. I was a member of the group that developed this set of recommendations, urging data providers not to put undue restrictions over reuse of their metadata. I really believe this is the right way to go. Of course we as data providers are sometimes under legal (copyright, contract, etc.) constraints that limit what we can do with our metadata. We have to honor those agreements. But for the vast majority of our stuff, we can share without restriction if we choose to. Giving up control is part of sharing, and we have to learn to live with that. Blessing certain uses and banning others is a dangerous business, and one that doesn't mix very well with the open sharing of information libraries are all about. As the Creative Commons recently found, even "non-commercial use" isn't a very straightforward issue, so I don't think it serves us well to fall back on that old standby. Freedom is about taking the inevitable small amounts of bad with the overwhelming good, and I really do believe those principles apply to information sharing as well. Let's spend our efforts on sharing more and better information, and less on metering out what we do have.

Thoughts on FRSAD

2009-07-27T21:13:00.002-04:00

I don't usually publish my individual comments on things sent out for review within our community, but I've decided to make an exception for the FRSAD report. I'm actively working with a FRBR implementation (and trying to take in as much of FRAD as we can), and anything I can do to help push FRSAD (FRSAR? what's in a name? ha - there's got to be a FRAD joke in there somewhere...) to be useful to the work I'm doing I see as a good thing. So here are the comments I sent in through official channels.

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In short, I think good work has been done here but it doesn't meet my needs as someone working diligently (and actively implementing FRBR and FRAD) to re-imagine discovery systems in libraries.

While I am a great believer in the power of user studies to inform metadata models, I believe inappropriate conclusions have been drawn here. It doesn't surprise me at all that users had trouble sorting actual subjects into categories such as concept, object, event, place. But that doesn't mean our models shouldn’t make that distinction. Users wouldn't be able to distinguish between Work/Expression/Manifestation/Item, either, but those are still useful entities for us to use underlying our systems.

The draft report rightly notes that the concept/object/event/place division is only one way of looking at it, that other divisions such as those outlined by Ranganathan and the framework (which seems to be basically abandoned?). But that's the very essence of a *model* - to pick one of many possible representations and go with it, in order to achieve a purpose. The fact that competing interpretations are possible is not a rationale for abandoning selecting one that can advance the purpose of the model (even taken together with user studies showing users don’t gravitate to any one specific division). By choosing concept/object/event/place (or Ranganathan's model, or , or any other option) we can delve deeper into the modeling we need to do and provide a way forward for our discovery systems. By refusing to do so, we don't advance our case the way we must.

The thema/nomen structure outlined here is very useful. However, I believe strongly the report should not stop here. Going further is often stated here as "implementation dependent" but I think there is a great deal of room for the conceptual model to grow without venturing into actual implementations. Certainly FRBR and FRAD take that approach.

In general, the thema/nomen structure could apply to any attribute or relationship under vocabulary control. There is great (and unfortunately here unexplored) potential for this model to apply beyond simply aboutness. Limiting it in this way I believe is a disservice to those of us who are attempting to use these models to reinvent discovery systems.

I'm concerned about the significant lack of cohesion between the FRBR, FRAD, and FRSAR reports. They show their nature of independently generated by different groups with different interests over a long span of time. This limitation definitely needs to be overcome if these reports are to be useful as a whole for the community. Each could be used on its own, but we need a more coherent group. In fact, the thema/nomen structure in the FRSAD draft isn't really all that different than the (whatever entity)/name structure presented in FRAD. Much greater cohesion of the three reports could be made - what's written here seems to ignore FRAD in particular. I believe this is a missed opportunity. I think the most significant mismatch between the three reports is where they draw the boundary for how far a "conceptual model" should go.

On a higher level note, the report reads more as an academic paper outlining alternative options rather than providing a straightforward definition of the conceptual model. I respect the background work done here, and believe it needs to be done. There's a lot of room for papers like that in this environment; however, this report series needs to serve practitioners better and stick closer to the model.

On a more practical note, in the report the Getty AAT is often referred to by example. Yet most of the facets in the AAT bring out the "isness" (which in the introduction is explicitly described as out of scope) rather than "ofness" or "aboutness". For example, on p. 45, #7 under "select," "ale glass" in AAT is intended to be used for works of art that ARE ale glasses, not works (presumably textual) that are ABOUT ale glasses. This internal inconsistency is a serious flaw in the report.

I'm certainly not one to promote precoordinated vocabularies, but they exist in library metadata and we must deal with them. It's unclear to me from this report how these fit into the model proposed.

DLF Aquifer Metadata Working Group "Lessons Learned" report available

2009-05-03T10:36:00.002-04:00

That moment when a long-term project comes to an end is always simultaneously filled with relief and sadness. Relief in that new opportunities can be embraced and a pretty package placed around what was accomplished, with appropriate rationales for what didn't make its way into the package. Sadness in that productive and creative working relationships come to a close or change, and that there is always more to be done that cannot for practical reasons be embarked upon at this time.

The Digital Library Federation's Aquifer initiative wrapped up this spring, and causes me to experience that moment of relief and sadness. (Well, to be honest, several moments!) I've been involved with Aquifer from the beginning, and during that time my relationship with it evolved from skepticism to "just jump in and see what you can do" to "bite off one reasonable chunk of a problem and do your best to make this chunk work with other chunks." A report the Metadata Working Group just released, "Advancing the State of the Art in Distributed Digital Libraries: Accomplishments of and Lessons Learned from the Digital Library Federation Aquifer Metadata Working Group," reflects that last approach, attempting to place our work in an ever-evolving context. There is much more that could have been done, and the limitations and benefits of a volunteer committee to do work like this is more evident to me now than ever. Nevertheless, I'm proud of the work this group did. Congratulations to all involved on sucessfully navigating through our many tasks.

The message I sent out about this report to various listservs included the following "thank you":

The Aquifer Metadata Working Group would like to thank all who have been involved with the initiative, including current and past Working Group members; the Aquifer American Social History Online project team; participants in ground-breaking precursor activities such as the DLF/NSDL OAI-PMH Best Practices; individuals and institutions who tested, implemented, and provided feedback on the Metadata Working Group's MODS Guidelines and other work products; and of course DLF for its ongoing support. It's been a wild, educational, and wholly enjoyable ride!

I can't state with enough gratitude the role the community has played in what the Aquifer Metadata Working Group was able to accomplish. I like to talk with those thinking of entering the digital library field just how much of our work is figuring it out as you go - we're constantly refining models to apply to new types of material and take advantage of new technologies. My absolute favorite part about working in this area is navigating the tricky path of effectively building on previous work while pushing the envelope at the same time. I hope the Aquifer Metadata Working Group's contributions continue to be useful as building blocks for a long time to come.

Must Watch! Michael Edson: "Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person"

2009-03-05T18:02:00.002-05:00

I heard Michael Edson (Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian) speak at the IMLS WebWise conference last week. He delivered an astonishingly good talk centering around an animation entitled "Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person." It's a riot, and the animation sets a lighthearted attitude that reinforces his disclaimer that he's not poking fun or diminishing the very real tensions cultural heritage institutions face as our communication, collection, and even the dreaded B-word (business!) models change underneath us. Instead, I believe it's effective in using exaggeration to highlight some underlying issues and think intelligently about what it takes to say we CAN do something rather than taking the easy road and saying no. We can't just dismiss the challenges - understanding them will help us address them.

Google vs. Semantic Web

2009-03-01T22:22:00.002-05:00

On a number of fronts recently I've been thinking a bunch about RDF, the DCMI Abstract Model, and the Semantic Web, all with an eye towards understanding these things more than I have in the past. I think I've made some progress, although I can't claim to fully grok any of these yet. One thing does occur to me, although it's probably a gross oversimplification. The difference in the Semantic Web/RDF approach from the, say, Google approach is this: is the robustness in the data or is it in the system?

The Semantic Web (et al) would like the data to be self-explanatory, to say itself explicitly what it is it is describing and with explicit reference to all the properties used in the description. The opposite end of the spectrum is systems like Google which assume some kind of intelligence went into the creation of the data but doesn't expect the data itself to explicitly manifest it. The approach of these systems is to reverse engineer that data, getting at the human intelligence that created it in the first place.

The difference is one of who is expected to to the work - the sytem encoding the data in the first place (Semantic Web approach) or the system decoding the data for use in a specific application. Both obviously present challenges, and it's not clear to me at this point which will "win." Maybe the "good enough and a person can go the last bit" approach really is appropriate - no system can be perfect! Or maybe as information systems evolve our standards for the performance of these systems will be raised to a degree where self-describing data is demanded. As a moderate, I guess I think both will probably be necessary for different uses. But which way will the library community go? Can we afford to have feet in both camps into the future?

Wow.

2008-12-21T20:32:00.003-05:00

This poor blog has been sorely neglected lately, and for that I apologize, both to you and to myself. Life has gotten a bit too crazy and I'm still trying to find a way to set some boundaries. But in the middle of several big work deadlines and several personal deadlines (including a 2000 mile road trip starting tomorrow, unexpectedly a day early!), I feel I have to take a minute to comment on this.

lcsh.info is no more.

Wow. I really don't know what to say. There's obviously a story behind this, and I know nothing of it. What I do know is that LC has been promising remote, machine-readable access to their authority files (SKOS is frequently mentioned, and if my memory serves being cited [indignantly] during the leadup to the release of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control as something LC is already working on, so stop harping on it already...) for YEARS now, but such a thing, as Ed notes, has not come to pass. Taken in the context of the recent controversy over the change in OCLC's record use policy, one has to wonder what's up.

I know our library universe is complex. The real world gets in the way of our ideals. (Sure I can share my code! Just let me find some time to clean it up first...) But at some point talk is just talk and action is something else entirely. So where are we with library data? All talk? Or will we take action too? If our leadership seems to be headed in the wrong direction, who is it that will emerge in their place? Does the momentum need to shift, and if so, how will we make this happen? Is this the opportunity for a grass-roots effort? I'm not sure the ones I see out there are really poised to have the effect they really need to have. So what next?

I mean, wow.

This week's revalation

2008-09-27T09:44:00.002-04:00

Too many interesting things going on, too little time to put them into words that others can read...

Something has been stewing in my head for a long time about RDA, and this week I'm at the OLAC/MOUG joint conference where the topic has come up a bit. RDA is supposed to be "made for the digital world." This is something I can completely get behind. But the drafts I've read (and I admit I gave up on them at some point, so maybe this has changed) don't seem to me that they're actually accomplishing that. It's the right goal, but the products I've seen don't meet it. And then it occurred to me: by "for the digital world" I think what the RDA folks actually mean is "catalog digital stuff" rather than "create data that can be used by machines as well as people." I'm interested in the latter, so that's what I was assuming they were interested in. But I'm now wondering if that assumption was false. If we have this problem with terminology for this long within our own profession, how in the world are we going to communicate effectively with others?

I couldn't resist

2008-07-07T08:35:00.002-04:00

I'm not one to participate in many blog memes, but seeing all the Wordle clouds out there, I just couldn't resist creating one for FRBR.

LC statement on RDA

2008-05-07T18:22:00.002-04:00

I've long been on the fence with regards to the development of RDA - is it a transformative event or total folly? I think I've finally come to the opinion that RDA is overall a positive thing, and that it represents a necessary (although of course not perfect) step forward in the ongoing evolution of libraries.

What got me thinking about these issues again was a recent letter from Deanna Marcum at LC explaining why LC was issuing a joint statement with the National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library outlining a testing and decision-making plan for determining whether or not to fully implement RDA. The letter and statement essentially say that wide participation in RDA development is a Good Thing (tm), yet so is substantive evaluation of it. Not much to argue with there. (Well, we always do find something to argue about, don't we?)

The stated goals of RDA, as well as its scope and underlying principles, speak to me strongly. I like the idea of a content standard written with FRBR principles in mind. The goal of making library description interoperate better in the current information environment outside of libraries is of course a laudable one. In this way, just by clearly stating these and a handful of others as the rationale behind the work being done, we've made a significant step forward. We're responding to the world as it exists around us today.

The world is changing, though. The environment today won't be the environment tomorrow. There's no indication, and perhaps even no real hope, that what we decide today will be right in a year, three years, ten. That's a reality we have to face, and I've decided I'm in the camp that says we have to move forward anyways, analyzing the risk but not being afraid of it. Looking at RDA through this lens, will it meet the goals it has outlined? Probably not. I see much in the current drafts that don't demonstrate the overall goals well. But we've never done this before, at least not in this way. We're learning. We're going to make mistakes. The stakes are admittedly high, but they're also high if we don't act. RDA has already evolved from community input, and I suspect it will continue to do so. Maybe it doesn't even stick around that long - maybe we learn enough from writing and trying to implement it that another round is warranted with some key needed improvements. We've investing many resources in this, but that's part of life as well. Many things don't pan out, and that's certainly not unique to the library world. I realize our resources are scarce, but they're going to be zero soon if we don't think creatively. I think RDA is an attempt to do that.

I'm still concerned that RDA as a content standard is stepping too far in the direction of a structure standard for my taste. It's explicitly defining "elements" whereas for content standards I like to think of "classes of elements" to help us remember that instructions in a content standard aren't necessarily a 1:1 match with fields in a data record - this is what enables us to mix and match content and structure standards as we see fit. But I'm the first to admit that the distinction between a structure and a content standard is an artificial one, and that any given standard can blur the line a bit. My concern still lingers, however - the RDA Scope & Structure document uses "elements" and "properties" interchangeably, but I believe these terms, even in the context given here, have very different connotations. We'll see, I suppose, whether my concerns are valid. Maybe I'm just being pedantic about terminology. Or maybe there's a fundamental conceptual problem here. I'm a pragmatist - I realize the only way we're going to find out is to try it.

A small, interesting, and potentially more powerful than it is now, example of user-contributed metadata

2008-04-18T08:27:00.003-04:00

I was rudely awakened just after 5:30 this morning by an earthquake. The odd thing about this is that I live in Indiana, not exactly a hotbed for such things. This being my first earthquake (does that mean I'm a "survivor"? heh) I got up to look around and turn on the local news. There wasn't anything at all about it on the local news for about ten minutes, and then when it did appear for a long time it was just the anchors saying "We thought we felt an earthquake, but we don't know anything yet. Call us if you thought you felt an earthquake too."

Meanwhile I'd long since found http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/, learned it was a noticeable and scary, but overall pretty routine 5.4 magnitude confirmed earthquake. The cool part (even at 5:45 in the morning) was the "Did you feel it? Tell us!" link. This link led to a form where one reports basic information like your zip code, how long the tremor lasted, and what kind of damage it caused. One question asks if your refrigerator door opened and food fell out. At that point I realized just how minor of an earthquake we'd had! But there are also some really interesting questions in there too - whether you were awake or asleep at the time, your level of fear, and what you did to protect yourself. I wonder what they're doing with this data - I can think of many interesting possibilities. I can think of more possibilities if the USGS were to provide this data for use by others. (Maybe they do - this is very much outside of my area of expertise!) We could have a lot of fun with this one.

Based on the, (ahem), "classic" design of this part of the USGS site, one might conclude this feature has been around for a while. Good for them - collecting this sort of data from users is a fantastic idea.

Scholars and practitioners

2008-03-25T11:03:00.004-04:00

I spent yesterday afternoon and this morning at an advisory board meeting for the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project, lead by UIUC. I'm sitting next to Jeremy Frumkin, who was able to blog briefly about the project while we were sitting here, so I took that as a challenge that I should be writing up my thoughts on these issues as well. (Poor lonely neglected blog - if it were a house plant it would be all dried up! I'm not out of ideas by any means, what I am out of right now is energy.)

The IMLS DCC project is starting a new phase concentrating heavily on understanding what collection descriptions really are, and how they could be used to improve retrieval of items within them. It's a researcher-driven project, with most project leaders in the library school at UIUC. There are a few investigators representing digital library practitioners as well, and the advisory board reflects a similar diversity. In the LIS field in general, there's a pretty wide gulf between researchers and practitioners, but I've aways considered UIUC as one of the places where the situation is better than most. This project shows some of that separation - looking at the problem from both the theory and practice perspectives, and hoping to meet in the middle along the way. I see many potential pitfalls in this, but I also see paths that could work.

I'm overall very interested (and concerned, because I don't see a lot of good activity in this area!) about how we move practitioners (such as myself!) towards more consistent and useful work without all of us having to become researchers in the theoretical realm. I'm very interested in the theoretical research in areas like the ones DCC is studying, and see value (and fun!) in figuring things out just for the purpose of figuring them out. But we need better bridges between that theoretical work and how the greater understanding gained from it could be used to build better products. I think the IMLS DCC project is really trying to do that, and hope that the practitioners on the project staff (and advisory board, like me!) are able to help them reach the practitioner community that needs to hear it. I see this with my own work, thinking, "well we published a paper, what more do they want?" but I've found that's not enough. Some combination of publishing, conference papers, informal distribution like listservs and blogs, plus the crucial step of showing a concrete (if test) system that illustrates a research result is necessary. And possibly other mechanisms as well - I don't claim to know exactly how to do this, I'm just muddling through like the rest of us. But it's something I think it's worth our time to work on.

Woohoo!

2008-03-01T16:20:00.001-05:00

The metadata book I recently co-authored is now available. And only four months late. :-)

Metadata interoperability

2008-01-28T20:11:00.000-05:00

I'm not especially handy. (Get up, those of you who just fell on the floor laughing at the understatement of the century. Stop it. Right now. I know who you are.) Inspired by a recent minor home repair (which would probably be a trivial repair for you normal folks!) involving a screwdriver (flathead, if you were wondering, I'm not quite that inept), I've been thinking about how to explain metadata interoperability in terms of tools.

I've long held that interoperability by prescribing a single way of doing things is unsustainable, even at a relatively small scale, and it seems to me those sets of many-sized gadgets can show us a path forward. Wrenches, bolts, sockets and the like are not all the same. Rather, a bolt is chosen based on what it needs to do - what functions it needs to support and the environment in which it needs to fit. The same is true for descriptive metadata standards. The ones used for a specific class of materials need to both match well with the materials themselves and are supported in the institutional environment.

On the other side, how to deal with a bolt may not be immediately obvious, but it's not all that hard to figure it out. There are many options for what size socket wrench would be needed to tighten or loosen it. It would be nice if the bolt clearly stated what size it was, and this happens in some cases but certainly not in the majority. The wrench needed might be of the type measured in inches or the type measured in millimeters. We can consider these akin to the different approaches to description taken by libraries and archives. A practiced eye can examine the bolt and guess at the right size wrench to try. They'll likely get close, maybe with one or two mis-steps. With trial and error, a novice can find the right wrench as well. I believe the same is true for a system using metadata from an outside source - a skilled human can tell a lot about how best to use it from a quick glance, and trying various tactics out on it will inform how well various choices work for both an expert and a novice. With time and expertise we can transfer some of these evaluations to a system rather than a human (we can do some of this now; for example determining which metadata format from a predefined list is in use can be easily automated), but the process is still the same.

The point as I see it is that for these types of tools there are many options, but each of them are well-defined and well-documented. The same is true for metadata. As we gain more experience, we work towards defining various approaches that work for a given class of materials in a given environment. We then don't need to re-evaluate everything every time we start something new; we can refer to existing knowledge to see that in this case that approach has proven to be useful.

Maybe this analogy fails once you look closer (especially on the tool side - what's here pretty much represents my entire understanding of those types of things), but, like any analogy, it's bound to break down at some point of examination. But I've been pondering a bit and for now I still think it's useful. Feel free to argue with me, though!

Musings on RDA, LC Working Group Report, and various other random things

2008-01-20T19:28:00.000-05:00

I’ve been staying on the outskirts of the flurry of activity the last few months surrounding RDA and the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. Various things have been swimming around in my brain during this time, and I think now they’re finally ready to come out. I don’t know that I have any conclusions or suggestions for future directions, but that’s what I see as the function of this blog – to think through things that may or may not end up anywhere interesting.

I read the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control’s draft report, and submitted comments via the web form designed for quick email questions rather than substantive feedback in time for the Working Group’s consideration. I didn’t post my comments on the blog, as many others did, as I felt my comments were pretty boring – they mostly were of the type “this paragraph seems to say x, but I wonder if you really meant to say y….” Overall, I was impressed with the report, and thought it represented an admirable vision for the directions in which libraries should be heading. It also struck me as largely avoiding library politics, although I thought it was odd a specific reference to FAST disappeared between the draft and final reports – I wonder what that was about? I liked the boldness of the report pushing attention for special collections, and the tough questions about the continued utility of MARC and LCSH.

But I, like many others, found a bit of schizophrenia in some of the specific recommendations. The report is not afraid to take a bold stand on MARC, but stops well short of recommending a move away from tens of thousands of distributed copies of bibliographic records, and (new in the final version, I think) questions RDA’s move away from ISBD. The report recommends moving quickly to work on new bibliographic frameworks but even more forcefully says that RDA should wait before proceeding. It provides many recommendations discussing how to improve moving information in and out of the catalog but provides little in the way of rethinking the function of the catalog itself. I believe some of this inconsistency is the result of trying to address comments the WG received (although I don’t see any changes related to any of my comments in there!), but most of it is probably due to the fact that this is a committee effort, written and revised on a short schedule. The biggest disappointment for me in the final report was that my favorite recommendation from the draft lost all of its power. In the draft report, one of the recommendations relating to LIS curricula described some extremely technical and theoretical topics as essential to offer. I believe cultivating individuals with both system and information expertise is the single most effective things we can do to ensure libraries play a part in the future information environment. In the final report, this recommendation was sanitized to simply say LIS curricula should include “advanced knowledge and topics.” Bleah. That could mean anything.

One other thing regarding the LC WG report: representatives from both Google and Microsoft served on the Working Group, but I see little if any evidence in the report that these individuals contributed points of view that haven’t been making the rounds within the library community already. That’s unfortunate. We need some outside points of view in this community.

I know the term “bibliographic control” has been questioned in relationship to this report. Roy Tennant suggests “descriptive enrichment instead. I recognize the problems with bibliographic control – it sounds so authoritarian in the face of the open vision the report outlines. But all labels are words, and words have baggage. I’m not clever with names (my dog is named Daisy, if that gives you a sense of how un-creative I am in this area), but I’m skeptical that any brief name could capture what we’re trying to do here. “Descriptive enrichment” to me calls up images of armies of humans manually adding things to records, an image I think we don’t want to be promoting. So I’ll remain neutral on the name issue – if someone comes up with a new one that folks like, I’d be happy to start using it. But I’m unlikely to be the one thinking that new label up.

I read many of the responses to the LC WG report that appeared on blogs, and found myself agreeing with many of the points made, and disagreeing with others. Pretty standard reaction, I suspect. I found OCLC’s response quite odd, however. It had the general tenor of “we’re doing all that stuff already, don’t worry, just trust us…” while at the same time oversimplifying the issues in a way I found totally inappropriate for a response to a committee of experts. For example, the OCLC response touts its FRBR work as testing the WG didn’t realize was happening, but it glosses over the fact that the Work-level clustering and other FRBR-like things OCLC has been doing aren’t true FRBR implementations. This community needs clarity and hard truths on these issues right now, not something that’s been reviewed by marketing. OCLC Research and RLG Programs are now and have been doing extremely interesting things recently, but few if any of them make their way to the productized mainstream of OCLC in ways that promote the state of the art or even fit well with the vision outlined in the LC WG report. I hope OCLC takes the report’s recommendations to heart in the same way LC and the rest of us are trying to do.

I found RDA’s reaction (or lack thereof) to the LC WG report to be of note as well. The folks behind RDA (the “Committee of Principals” for those of you in the know for such things) have on the RDA web site a response dated the same day the WG closed its call for comments. Presumably they submitted this document as an official comment in the appropriate time frame. The response, as the preface to the final LC WG report notes, smacks of “we’re too far along to stop now,” which in my mind is equivalent to “we/he/she have worked really hard, so what we came up with must be good,” which I believe is completely and totally bogus. It also lays the guilt trip on LC – saying basically “we’d hate to lose your input.” What the response doesn’t do is address directly (aside from listing a few pseudo-FRBR implementations that one can’t imagine the LC WG didn’t know about) any of the concerns raised in the report. It looks to me like more of people talking past each other and being defensive rather than trying to find common ground. Of course, the RDA response says they won’t be stopping development, which is no surprise at all. (Really, did anyone think they would? Wishful thinking doesn’t count.)

Through all this, I remain agnostic about RDA. I figure at some point I’m going to have to form an opinion, but frankly, I haven’t had the time to invest to develop an informed one. I haven’t read the last set of drafts (released December-ish), and with previous drafts I had trouble devoting the mental energy to them to see the forest of general vision and effectiveness for the trees of specific rules. I like the idea of more explicit connections to FRBR being behind the new organization, but it looks awfully complex. FRBR of course is complex, but I can’t help wondering if there’s another way to make the connection. I also understand (but again, haven’t seen myself) that the new drafts and/or supporting documents use terminology from the DC Abstract Model, including “literal value surrogate” and the like. I’m as intimidated by the terminology as the next person, but I do think it’s worth it to introduce some intellectual stringency to this process. I’m just not sure how to do that and still make the documents accessible.

Martha Yee has put online a set of cataloging rules she’s developed as a response to what seems to be the insanity surrounding us. I’ve long thought Martha was a clear voice in pushing against the book-centric focus of the cataloging community and realizing the importance of the display of information to users (in addition to just how we store it), but I’ve found myself disagreeing strongly with some of her more recent work that seems not to understand the state of the art with regards to search engines, information retrieval, or artificial intelligence. I haven’t read her cataloging rules yet, but I’m encouraged that she’s come up with some sort of concrete alternative (rather than just complaining, like the rest of us do), and apparently seems to be working towards an RDF model for her cataloging rules – bravo! I think any new set of rules, to be successful, however, need to be written to take advantage of current machine processing technologies. Not having read either the latest RDA drafts or Yee’s rules, I can’t say whether they do this or not. One can only hope.

And hope is where I am for the future of libraries. We have a lot going on right now in libraries, and I consider that a good thing. To use an old adage, we can’t be so afraid we’ll make a mistake that it prevents us from doing anything at all. Because we will make mistakes. We’re human. No matter how many people we involve, no matter how many levels of review we have, there will be things we try that don’t work out. If we realize that ahead of time we’ll be able to recover and try new things that will work. We’ve done so much already, and we have in our community an enormous number of insightful, dedicated individuals with a vision for where we’re going. Now we just have to find a way to let that vision emerge from the bureaucracy and the power of inertia.

A bright future for bibliographic control

2007-11-18T09:08:00.000-05:00

I was able to take some time this weekend to watch the webcast of the presentation to LC staff by the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. Given that the presentation covered draft, rather than final, recommendations (the full draft report will be distributed on Nov. 30), I think it's best that I not get too hung up in the details based on the presentation.

For example, the recommendation that RDA development be abandoned until FRBR is better understood could be a very good thing or a very bad thing, in my opinion, depending on how the recommendation is written. Karen Coyle, consultant to the group, involved in helping to write the report, has already indicated that the report's recommendations will be presented differently than they were in the presentation, addressing RDA and FRBR separately. I fall in the camp that the currently-released RDA drafts fall short of the sea-change for which it strives, but I also think we need to be making this change sooner rather than later. We'll see, I suppose.

I was also thrilled to hear in Barbara Tillett's question from the audience that LC is close to making some of their vocabularies (she didn't say which ones, presumably things like the language codes - I suppose it's too much to hope LCSH would be included) available via SKOS. This is the first I've heard of that initiative, but I think it's fantastic. It's something my institution would be able to take advantage of fairly quickly.

But back to the big picture, which I think is the most significant part of this week's presentation. The working group has outlined a vision that goes far beyond the mechanics of bibliographic control, into the scope and functions of discovery and use applications. I think this is a significant development, one that has gone in exactly the right direction. It only makes sense to analyze how we do bibliographic control if we fully understand what it is that work is supporting. I don't recall any of the webcast presenters saying this in so many words, but the vision that was outlined was not just one for library catalogs as we define them today. It covered information systems in the larger sense, and how they could interact. The future of bibliographic control is not just the design of records we create and store; it's a fluid, connected, living information environment in which libraries are but one (albeit important) player. What an exciting time to be a librarian!

Google Book Search and... LCSH?

2007-10-23T20:09:00.000-04:00

The Inside Google Book Search Blog recently announced that they've "added subject links in a left navigation bar as additional entry points into the index." This, predictably, piqued my interest. I followed the links in the blog entry, poked around a bit, then looked at this book. (Hope that link is persistent... the book is "Asian American Playwrights: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook By Miles Xian Liu") [UPDATE: Either that link evaporated or I screwed up and pointed to the wrong place. Try this one.] See that "Subjects" heading over on the right. Expand it. At least some of those are LCSH! ("Asian Americans in literature" is a dead giveaway.) The first three are close to what one sees in the book and e-book records in Open WorldCat. I've been something very close to living under a rock recently, so maybe this isn't news, but it's news to me at least.

I don't quite know what to think of this. I've heard Google was getting MARC records for books they're digitizing from libraries, but this doesn't appear to be one of those books. Is this a sign they're incorporating library cataloging from other places as well? And to date we haven't seen them do much with that data. Is this the sign of a change? I don't know that we can interpret it that way. This is perpetual beta, remember, and it's Google with roughly a zillion servers, and the ability to try all sorts of things out simultaneously. Just because I see those headings now doesn't mean they'll be there tomorrow, or today for you who is hitting the service through a different route.

To some extent I think this is a good thing. We have a great deal of data in our catalogs that deserves to be put to better use than it currently is. It's great to see this data making its way into services such as GBS, and for GBS to realize "subjects" are useful, perhaps even essential, access points. (I'll skip in this post a rant about the many things "subject" can mean, including "genre" [pet peeve warning!], and my thoughts on when this data needs to be human-generated and when it doesn't.)

But I'm surprised to see the precoordinated headings there. One of them seems to have the free-floating --Biography and --Dictionaries removed, but Dictionaries stays in two of the headings. It's also interesting, although I don't know what it means, that the delimiter between parts of the heading in GBS is / rather than --. I'm wondering if there's any intelligent processing at work here or if this is a quick and dirty approach to providing subject access. These headings have a subfield structure that would make it trivial to just leave in the topical aspects (according to some definition of topical that doesn't match mine, especially for music) and remove the rest. Why wasn't this done? Does GBS perceive value in the precoordinated headings? Or have they just not spent time focusing on this yet?

It's my great hope that the way in which GBS ends up using library-originated subject headings sparks a great rethinking of how we provide subject access in the library community. We're very vested in the way we do things, and there's a great deal of value behind those ways. But just because there's some value doesn't mean that we can rest on our laurels. We simply must be continually evaluating how well our vocabularies perform in ever-evolving systems and user expectations. How closely services like GBS stick to those vocabularies will be a litmus test for us. Ever the optimist, I hope we can use what they do as data to help us shape our evolution, rather than dismissing it as uninformed or not applicable to us. Only time will tell.

Catalog vs. search engine - or is it?

2007-10-13T10:18:00.000-04:00

Discussion on the future of library catalogs is common today. In these conversations, I often hear an argument something like this: “Catalogs and search engines have different goals; are trying to accomplish different things. Therefore we shouldn’t be making direct comparisons between them. By extension, we shouldn’t be comparing their functionality and features either.” This is of course an oversimplification of what’s generally said, but the spirit is there.

I’m concerned about this line of thinking. The original posit makes sense on the surface, in the sense that there is a history of analyzing and documenting the goals of the catalog (Panizzi, etc.), and that the business goal of search engines is to make money by selling advertising. But I think this approach both sells search engines short and doesn’t go far enough thinking about catalogs. From the search engine point of view, the business argument is true, of course, but overly simplistic. We can extend the definition of the goal of search engines to say that they strive to make money by selling advertising in a system that connects people to information they seek. Google wasn’t a business at first, it started as a research project by CS students to better index information. That’s a pretty simple and laudable goal – to help people find things. The catalog is the same. With all the talk about the goal of the catalog being collocation (and all the other related goals well-documented in the literature), it’s easy to forget that those goals exist (wait for it…) to connect people, today and in the future, with information they seek. So in this very basic sense, catalogs and search engines are trying to accomplish the same thing. The methods are often different, but I don’t think we’re serving ourselves well if we just write the success of search engines and the current struggles of library catalogs off because of those differences.

Early search engines had one big difference from library catalogs: the materials they index. But this is no longer true to any significant degree. I’m no fan of cataloging web sites in MARC to make them searchable in our catalogs, and I see this as largely out of favor now, but this was only the first step towards blurring the line between the content indexed by search engines and that in our catalog. Google Book Search, for example, provides access to many of the same materials that are in our catalogs. The methods of searching are very different, with full-text indexing being a strong component of GBS and bibliographic information the strongest component of our catalogs, but again, the goal is the same – getting people to books relevant to their information need. The argument separating catalogs from search engines by format of materials indexed is waning, but I still hear it from time to time. The conventional argument that a catalog provides access to things a library owns is also waning, for obvious reasons.

So what’s left to distinguish the goals our catalogs from search engines, giving us a convenient excuse for why our catalogs perform so poorly? Not much of substance, I think. To me, the different is all in style instead. Let’s certainly keep those goals of the catalog in mind, but let’s not assume that the methods we’ve used to achieve those goals in the past are the only methods that can be effective. If the goals of search engines and catalogs aren’t all that different in the end, maybe we can mix and match some methods too. We’ll never know until we try.

Can LIS education learn something from CS?

2007-08-02T17:59:00.000-04:00

It seems the discussion about what can and cannot, and what should and should not be taught as part of an LIS Master's degree has a life all its own. From time to time, the same issues boil up over and over - often centering around this one: how do we give students the experience they need during the course of a professional degree to actually get a job? I'm a big believer in practical experience as the best teacher, and in the past have thought internships and other practicum-type setups were really the only way to get that experience.

But seeing some discussion recently about whether or not some of the more technical positions in libraries should require an MLS, I'm wondering if there's something we can learn from the CS community. Technical jobs commonly require a BS in Computer Science (note: NOT a graduate degree, whether it be research-based or professional), or demonstrated expertise in the task at hand, say, programming. That expertise can be demonstrated through that degree, through various certification programs, or by showing code one has written. While I suspect some would argue that the MLS is equivalent to those certification programs, I'm not so sure. A certification program for, say, Windows server administration, would be based on many practical tasks, and we don't see many of those in our library schools.

While I do agree we should be teaching the theory of things and then apply the practice on top of it, I see our library schools failing our students by ONLY teaching the former and providing no opportunity for the latter. Even single undergraduate programming classes manage to teach both. Can't we learn something from that?

Cutting through the rhetoric about subject headings

2007-07-30T21:52:00.000-04:00

I’ve returned from a vacation to see discussion on AUTOCAT of the utility of precoordinated vs. postcoordinated subject strings. I’m not all the way through my email list messages yet, but this discussion has prompted me to finally put into words something I’ve been stewing on for a while.

It seems to me that a great many of our disagreements in the library realm have at their root people talking past each other, each side meaning something different by a given term or two, but not cognizant of that fact. I see LCSH as a prime example of this phenomenon. A great deal of debate occurs over whether precoordinated subject strings or postcoordinated subject strings are more useful. But I see a fundamental difference in the way various participants in these discussions define “postcoordinated.”

One definition is that postcoordinated headings have no subdivisions at all; in LCSH-speak, have no --. The other definition is that postcoordinated headings are “faceted” (to introduce another term that complicates the issue); that each heading reflects only one characteristic of the work, such as “topic,” “place,” or “date.” The difference here is the difference between “subdivisions” and “facets.” These two concepts are not identical. A common criticism of postcoordinated headings is that they would not represent the essential distinction between concepts like “History--Philosophy” and “Philosophy--History.” While (ignoring the syntax; whether or not the double dashes are used is a style issue) this would be true according to the first definition, it’s not necessarily true according to the second—a “topical” facet may very well represent a complex concept. I’ve never seen a discussion on this issue in which this distinction is made clear to both sides. It’s unclear to me whether the “traditional” definition of postcoordinate allows the faceted interpretation or requires the subdivision interpretation, but I think what’s needed here is clarification of current definitions rather than historical ones.

I don’t have all the answers in this debate, nor does anyone else at this point. My inclination is toward the postcoordinate side, although I do very much want to keep an open mind on the issue. I’d like to see a well-reasoned argument for a postcoordinate system presented according to the facet definition (something I’ve long been wanting to write but find this is one of the many issues that have trouble finding their way from my brain to a shareable form). I personally read arguments for precoordinate indexing and think to myself, “We can do all of this with postcoordinate headings if we had systems that operated reasonably.” (Big IF there, considering our current state of affairs!) We need to have more room to experiment with these options to see if my interpretation is a good one. The Endeca use of precoordinated strings shows powerful promise; we need more large-scale implementations of systems working off of postcoordinated data to allow us to compare both user functionality and cataloging time (a much-forgotten but essential factor) of the two approaches. I want data, darn it! We can only go so far with the philosophical argument; to get beyond our current roadblock we need to see what will happen if we follow the various paths available to us.

Everything I know about librarianship I learned from Star Wars

2007-07-08T14:43:00.000-04:00

Forgive the hyperbole—of course it’s not everything. But hear me out.

In celebration of meeting a major deadline and milestone in my career, I took some time for myself this weekend and watched the original Star Wars trilogy. (Yes, the good one.) This is something of a ritual for me, albeit one I’ve only performed only one other time in recent memory. It stretches back to junior high days when my brother and I, when we had a day off of school, would frequently watch all three movies right in a row off of a somewhat wobbly VHS tape made from early HBO airings. (If you’ve ever done this, you know just how very boring Jedi gets in the middle, but I digress.) Nowadays, three movies in three days is about all I have patience for (and Jedi still got boring), but it was comforting nonetheless.

While watching, I found myself saying lines out loud before they were said on screen, an annoying habit of mine. A few of these lines struck me as interesting, however. While Star Wars isn’t exactly the pinnacle of Western philosophy, my brain made some funny connections between the storylines and dialogue I know so well and librarianship. Here are a few examples:

“Use the force, Luke.” (Disembodied Obi-Wan voice to Luke, in the first movie.) We need to trust ourselves as skilled professionals. We know what we’re doing. Most of us in the library profession are in it because we love the work and believe we really can make a difference. This heavy personal investment in our work gives us the luxury to rely on our instincts in many cases, pushing forward with initiatives that are simply the right thing to do. Now we need to back up that instinct with reasonable plans, budget justifications, and all that administrative stuff, but I really do believe the best ideas come out of pure inspiration and vision, facilitated by the connections between us.

“R-2, you know better than to trust a strange computer.” (C3PO, Empire.) Now, the computer turned out to be right in this case, but we as librarians consider it part of our job to promote the effective evaluation of information. Many of the discussions today around this issue take an adversarial tone, as if the goal is to spot the misinformation and quash it. But we simply can’t just look at it as ferreting out the bad. We must not be judgmental. Instead, this evaluation can and should be just a routine part of our information flow. We simply need to evaluate everything. The source is only one factor among many that should be considered.

“What I told you is true, from a certain point of view.” (Blue-energy Obi-Wan dude, Jedi.) The role of perspective in truth or falsehood could provide more commentary on the evaluation of information theme, but I’ll take it in a slightly different direction – the role of metadata records in libraries. I find myself talking about this topic, inspired by Carl Lagoze, a great deal (and I believe on this blog before). A metadata record is necessarily a surrogate for a resource, and thus inherently takes a certain perspective on that resource in what it includes, what it leaves out, and the vocabularies it uses. We need to dispel ourselves of the myth that our records can or should be all things to all people, and instead focus on defining the views our metadata records need to support.

And of course the overall theme of the movies that a relatively small, smart, dedicated movement can effect sorely needed, large-scale change gives me good feelings for the future of libraries as well. So there you go. Little did Mr. Lucas know he was providing the library profession with a model to help guide our work. :-)

Oh, and I learned that my dog is strangely fascinated by Ewoks. Go figure.

Re-imagining browsing

2007-06-16T16:37:00.000-04:00

In a recent issue of Educause Review, Robert Kieft describes work at the Tri-Colleges outside Philadelphia to plan for adding tables of contents and sample text to a prototype library catalog. The impetus behind these experiments is to provide users with a robust browsing experience in a world where distributed collections make shelf browsing insufficient.

I like this idea, as when I do shelf browsing, I do open up books, read a random page or two, and just generally poke around to see if the book looks interesting. I also believe this is an area in which our current catalogs don’t remotely match the physical experience.

But I also think there’s more to browsing than having something catch your eye then explore it further. When shelf browsing, we don’t look at everything – we only look at select things. In a bookstore, a cover might catch one’s eye, but this is less likely to happen on shelves with plain library bindings. A title or an author might be the hook that causes one to pick up one book and not another. To some extent, this type of browsing activity is random.

But what if it were less random? Can we re-imagine (or at least extend) our notion of browsing to make it more targeted? I like to think of browsing both as the ability to “look inside” a resource to learn more about it before committing to it, and as a “more like this” feature that introduces me to resources that I didn’t previously know existed. Shelf browsing of course does this but is also obviously limited by physical constraints, so that only one aspect of a work can be brought out by a classification scheme that locates it on the shelf. This isn’t news to anyone—see for example, the much-blogged-about Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger for a discussion of what he calls first-, second-, and third-order methods of organization.

What I’m interested in is the ability of our catalogs to bring out more flexibility in browsing. If I’m looking at a resource, I want to be able to note one feature of it, and instantly get other resources that share that feature. I’ll then want to be able to add or subtract features to exert control over the size and characteristics of my results set. Say I’ve just read The Godfather. I might want more mafia fiction after that. But that’s a long list that I might consider too broad. Perhaps I’d limit myself to novels about the Sicilian mafia, or set in the 1940s or ‘50s. Then after I select a work or two, I may want to move on to real-life mafia stories, but only from the mobster’s perspective (not law enforcement’s). I’d likely find Henry Hill’s story in Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy, which could lead me to watching the movie Goodfellas, and start wondering what happened to Hill. From there I might start exploring the history of the witness protection program, then FBI training methods, then perhaps all the way to Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs and the film that was made based on the novel! And now imagine we can do all of that in a few clicks, without having to type anything in, or to know any of those books or films exist. And imagine if this could happen across multiple databases of content (including those from outside the library sector, such as IMDB), without me ever having to know that.

This vision is also nothing all that new. Certainly the faceted browsing features that are becoming increasingly common are a major step towards the overall goal. Technical protocols for connecting distributed databases are similarly emerging at a fast pace. I don’t think that massive initiatives that attempt to solve all the connection and interface problems at once are the answer. Instead, I see that smaller initiatives that perform a proof-of-concept of one issue at a time is the most effective way forward. It’s a sort of survival of the fittest – different people develop a few different ways of solving one particular issue, and let others adopt the one they believe works best. Each of these smaller solutions can then be building blocks for larger solutions – solve a problem, undertake an initiative to glue some of the smaller technologies together, iterate. Focusing on the smaller problems doesn’t mean we have to lose sight of the larger picture, and can help us avoid the paralysis that’s possible when the problem looks so large as to be intractable.

Partnership announced between CIC libraries and Google

2007-06-06T12:41:00.001-04:00

I don't normally use this blog for news, but hey, it's my blog so I can do as I please. :-)

The CIC Libraries are now participating in Google Book Search, announced today.

DC and RDA - the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

2007-05-06T19:04:00.000-04:00

An interesting announcement was made this past week that the DC and RDA communities will be working together to do the following:

development of an RDA Element Vocabulary
development of an RDA DC Application Profile based on FRBR and FRAD
disclosure of RDA Value Vocabularies using RDF/RDFS/SKOS

The news isn’t exactly taking the library community by storm, but the commentary I have seen has all been of the “this is a good thing, I’ll follow this with interest” theme. But something bothers me about this plan, and I’m having trouble deciding exactly what it is I find, well, wrong in some way.

There’s nothing in the announcement that indicates the development of RDA proper will be affected by this work; in fact, the indication in the announcement that funding will be sought for the activities outlined implies the work is a long way off, likely entirely too late to have any real effect on RDA. This seems to be to be entirely backwards – trying to harmonize DC principles with RDA after the fact. Didn’t the DC community learn its lesson about the pitfalls of this approach when developing the Abstract Model, only realizing long after developing a metadata element set that it would benefit from an underlying model?

This general approach failed miserably with the DC Libraries Application Profile. There, the application profile developers wanted to use some elements from MODS, but weren’t able to because MODS doesn’t conform to the DCMI Abstract Model. So basically what the DC community said here was that application profiles are great, they form the fundamental basis of DC extensibility, but, oh yeah, you can’t actually use elements from any other standards unless they conform to the Abstract Model, even though are no approved encodings for even DC itself more than two years after the Abstract Model was released. OK then. Way to foster collaboration between metadata communities.

Won’t the same problem arise with this RDA work? Yes, yes, RDA is a content standard and MODS is a structure standard, so this could make a difference, but won’t the same issues arise regardless? How in the world will the mess that is the set of RDA drafts right now possibly conform to the DCMI Abstract Model? Even if RDA was really consistently based on FRBR principles (which seems only a surface connection at best right now, with inconsistent use of FRBR terminology and some separation of content from carrier rules, but no real relationship), won’t a clash of conceptual models still occur? I’m the first to admit I have a very poor understanding of the DCMI Abstract Model, but given the history in the DC community of initiatives like this I’m not optimistic.

But maybe the DC community will change paths and realize flexibility and collaboration get more users than intellectual rigor. It’s sad in some respects, but true. It wouldn’t be the first time there’s been a major shift in the direction of the DCMI. I don’t know that this is a good thing, but I’ll certainly follow it with interest.

ALA Draft Digitization Principles

2007-04-14T11:33:00.000-04:00

The ALA Digitization Policy Task Force recently released a draft set of digitization principles for public comment. The comments on them that I've seen boil down, basically, to "duh" and "expand the scope even further." Regarding "duh," I agree that the general ideas here don't have a great deal that many would say should not be true, but that's OK. We need to state principles like this, even when they're not controversial, to help frame further discussion. The blog where these were introduced has some thoughtful comments on the details explaining the principles, which is where I think reaction is best focused.

One big-picture issue I don't think is clear, however, is the label "digitization." The principles are for the most part not about the digitization (conversion from analog to digital format) process, nor do I think they should be. They're more about the properties of "digital libraries" as a whole, which have content that was once analog, content that is born digital, and perhaps even metadata about objects that aren't digital at all. These principles seem to describe systems and organizations more than just objects.

The "expand the scope even further" commentary is also particularly apt. Coming from ALA, the focus on "libraries" could, as one comment on the blog mentions, to exclude other producers and maintainers of digital content, even others in the cultural heritage sector such as archives and museums. The direction I'd like to see these principles expand is related to (buzzword warning) interoperability. (Don't fall asleep--although that term that is often empty in its usage it really does describe some essential concepts.) My reading of the principles seems to focus inward, on developing maintaining digital collections within a single institution or close consortium. But we have an opportunity now to move away from the traditional (another buzzword warning!) "silo" approach to libraries, and create systems that operate in a much more open fashion, promoting re-use and exchange of content and metadata in new and unexpected ways. The digital libraries we maintain shouldn't just be accessible through our well-designed interfaces intended for a human to interact with - we need to supplement that access with additional methods. These methods are constantly expanding, and it will be difficult for us to keep up, but we can't ignore them.

Weighing in on speaker compensation

2007-04-12T19:11:00.000-04:00

The library blog drama over speaker fees is past its useful life, and I've not expressed an opinion on the issue because, well, first of all I don't usually weigh in on topics like this as they make the rounds, and second, I see the complexity of the problem and that doesn't exactly make good reading. I do think, however, that the "invited speakers get free registration for that day only" model is actually detrimental, in that it encourages invited speakers to blow in and blow out in a single day, and not talk to anybody or participate in any way other than their own session. Is this really the environment we want to be cultivating? Don't we want those individuals we
choose as invitees to engage in coffee conversations, eclectic dinner meetups, and learn from each of our communities through attending others' presentations? Certainly, not every invited speaker will be able to (or in some cases, want to) stay much longer than his or her talk, but we need models that encourage them to do so rather than making it difficult for them.

Staying out of it, for now

2007-03-24T15:44:00.000-04:00

Inquiring Librarian has seen only tumbleweeds coming through recently. Various professional and personal challenges recently have put blogging on the back burner for me—challenges of the sort we all face from time to time. I’m woefully behind on blog, mailing list, and professional literature reading as well. As I’m starting to wade through some of what I’ve missed, I’m seeing a boiling-up of issues related to cataloging practice and its future in number of different forums.

Many of the discussions are ebbing to the point where it doesn’t make sense for me to weigh in, but even if they weren’t, my inclination is to sit back and watch rather than participate. Perhaps I’m a bit disillusioned thinking that my words will have very little impact. I’m glad the discussion is ongoing, and I still believe that most people out there are reasonable, and can behave themselves while engaging in professional discourse. But many of the current discussions have taken on an “us vs. them” bent, and when that happens I tend to stay away, avoiding situations where emotions and stereotypes start getting in the way of dialogue.

I am sad for feeling this way, but we all must make decisions about how best to spend our precious time. I believe I have a great deal to offer these discussions, particularly in expanding their scope beyond just “catalogs” to the types of digital library systems I’m involved with building and with types of materials not well-served by the MARC/AACR2/LCSH/etc. suite that’s the main focus of these discussions. I’ll probably post some thoughts to this blog (please do comment – I’m not afraid of discussion overall!) but for now I feel the time and intellectual investment of communicating in some of these other forums is best left to others. I’m hoping my aversion to participation is temporary, and that as I get caught up both with others thoughts and my own, I’m able to jump back into the community. See you soon.

Modular Vocabularies

2007-01-30T20:50:00.000-05:00

I read an article recently describing efforts to create a faceted (yay!) music thesaurus to describe the performance archives at BYU, and the implications of this project for the development of an international music thesaurus. It’s an interesting piece. I’m all for more specialized vocabularies and think one for the field of music is sorely needed. Here’s the citation:

Spilker, John D. “Toward an International Music Thesaurus” Fontes Artis Musicae 52/1, January - March 2005: 29-44.

The mention in the article of the debate about whether to include a facet for “content subjects” which would include “extra-musical associations” (i.e., topics, things the music is “about”) gave me pause, however. Looking more closely, I also see that they propose a “philosophies and religions” facet, ask the question if “distant” terms that appear in source vocabularies as compound terms relating them to music (e.g., “astrology and music”) should be retained in any way, and copy terms from an existing instrument vocabulary into their own instrument facet. This duplication of effort bothers me a great deal. I see this phenomenon fairly often—projects that try to do everything end up doing nothing very well. LCSH does this, trying to shove everything under the heading “subject” and not making very good distinctions between what type of subjects those terms are. Even in faceted vocabularies, I see communities (like the one described in this article) try to include everything that might be needed to index material for that community. The emerging Ethnographic Thesaurus, facing an enormous task in developing a vocabulary for a very large and diverse field, shows signs of this as well, but I know the editors are considering these issues as they move forward with development. I think this would work much better if these communities focused instead on only those facets that they have particular expertise in, and “borrowed” the rest from other communities.
There’s often an assumption in the library world that a record needs to use a single “subject” vocabulary. But as we move forward, surely that’s a constraint (even if it’s only perceived) we can break out of. There’s no reason vocabulary for different facets (notice how I’m assuming a faceted, post-coordinate structure here) has to come from the same vocabulary. Let’s leave each specific vocabulary to its experts, and not try to have musicians developing terminology for religion and astronomers developing terminology for book bindings.
There are many details to work out, for example, the user implications of one vocabulary using singular forms by default and another using plural (there are standards for such things, but let’s be realistic about how many vocabularies that are otherwise useful we’d throw out of consideration because of the tense of its headings), but there are technological means for doing this. I’d hate to see an inordinate focus on the (potentially many) small challenges derail the larger, necessary, move in a more flexible direction.

I love this

2006-12-18T19:01:00.001-05:00

I'm talkin' 'bout the new version of OCLC's FictionFinder. Specifically, the browse feature in FictionFinder. You heard me. Browse. In a library system. Not the LCSH browse with pages upon pages upon pages upon pages of subdivisions with no discernable grouping, but a real browse.

The best is the "genre" browse (but take out those --Young adult fiction subdivisions and move them to an audience facet). It's not a short list, but it's not too long either. It would be interesting to arrange these hierarchically and see if navigating that list made any sense to users. And "settings"! How cool to be able to locate fiction that takes place in the Pyrenees. This is what library catalogs should do for our users.

I'm also intrigued by the "character" browse. This is something I've never thought of before. My general rule for browsing facets is to only include facets that have a (relatively) small number of categories, each with a (relatively) large number of members. At first, I didn't think characters met this requirement. Then I clicked on Captain Ahab, and I realized just how many works of fiction there are about him! Great works inspire derivatives, and exploring those is a fun way to guide new reading, in my opinion. It would be interesting to have access to a browse list of all characters in some situations, and only those with a large number of works (note works here, not publications) in other situations. Exploring which situations warrant which presentation would be another interesting line of inquiry.

The next improvement I want to see is allowing users to combine these facets (and others) dynamically so I can find Psychological fiction set in the Pyrenees, then narrow it to works after 1960, then remove the Pyrenees requirement, then add in Captain Ahab to the requirements that are left.... ad nauseum. Our catalogs need to support discovery of new works, not just those we already know the author and title. Systems like this are light years (sci fi fan here!) ahead of LCSH-style "browsing". I want more!

(Note to OCLC - the link to "Known problems" is broken. I'm interested to find out what challenges you've faced when building this beta system. I have a very strange idea of fun.)

I love this

2006-12-18T19:01:00.000-05:00

True confessions

2006-12-08T14:26:00.000-05:00

I recently checked out David Allen's Getting things done from my local public library, thinking I could use a little help calming down the craziness that my life seems to have turned in to. Probably predictably, I turned it in late having only read the first 2 chapters. Oh, well.

In light of this and other related events, I've been thinking a bit about what I do get done and why. I believe I've been spoiled by having jobs for a number of years now where I find the work interesting. It's a whole lot easier to get work done when it's engaging and I care about the outcome. I find the tasks I find interesting are the ones I end up working on for the most part, leaving the ones I find un-interesting until right before a deadline.

So what does this mean for libraries? I think it means that we need to make sure to allow our staff to step up and get involved in projects as deeply as interests them. There are many of us out there who get motivated by understanding and buying into the big picture. Don't "protect" your staff from those high-level discussions - allow them to participate as much as they see fit. Sure, there are lots of folks in library-land that are just interested in the paycheck. We need to meet their needs too. But reward those who think beyond the next five minutes - they're going to be running the place soon enough.

Children's Book Week

2006-11-15T10:27:00.000-05:00

Reading all the touching stories of favorite childhood books across the biblioblogosphere in honor of Children's Book Week has guilted me into posting my own contribution. I still smile when I think of The Little Old Man Who Could Not Read, Irma Simonton Black (Author), Seymour Fleishman (Illustrator). It's a story of a man (who cannot read) who goes to the grocery store and selects items based on the box size and color, trying to match them to products he knows he has at home. Of course, he ends up with an amusing assortment of unintended purchases. The story is touching and the illustrations really make the point. Like many books from my childhood, I think it's out of print (and I see it was first published in 1968, before I was born), but it looks like Amazon can hook you up with a copy, as could many local libraries.

More structured metadata

2006-11-07T15:55:00.000-05:00

I often encounter people who see my job title (Metadata Librarian) and assume I have an agenda to do away with human cataloging entirely and rely solely on full-text searching and uncontrolled metadata generated by authors and publishers. That’s simply not true; I have no such goal. I am interested in exploring new means of description, not for their own sake, but for the retrieval possibilities they suggest for our users. So here are a few statements that begin to explain my metadata philosophy:

I want more automation. Throwing more money at a manual cataloging process is not a reasonable solution. First of all, it would take waaaaaaayyyyy more money than we can even dream of getting, and second, much metadata creation is not a good use of human effort. Let’s automate everything we can, saving our skilled people for the tasks current automation means are furthest from performing adequately. Let’s get more objective types of metadata, such as pagination, from resources themselves or from their creators (including publishers). Let’s build systems that make data entry and authority control easy. Yes, there will be some mistakes. There will be mistakes if the whole thing is done by humans too. Are catching the few mistakes that will happen from these automated processes more important than devoting our human effort to that extra few resources? More automation means more data total, and the sorts of discovery services I have in mind need lots of that data.

I want more consistency. Users can’t find what’s not there. While we can’t prescribe all records for all resources everywhere have to have a large number of features (I’m against metadata police!), the more of those features that are there mean more discovery options for those users. Imagine a system that provides access to fiction based on geographic setting. Cool, huh? I read one book recently set in Cape Breton Island and can’t wait to get my hands on more. We can’t do that very well today because that data is in very few of our records, and when it is there, isn’t always in the same place. The more consistent we are with our metadata, the better able we’ll be to build those next-generation systems.

I want more structure. I’m a big fan of faceted browsing. The ability to move seamlessly through a system, adding and removing features such as language, date, geography, topic, instrumentation (hey, I’m a musician…), and the like based on what I’m currently seeing in a result set is something I believe our users will be demanding more and more. But we can’t do this if that information isn’t explicitly coded. Instrumentation (e.g., “means of performance”) as part of a generic “subject” string isn’t going to cut it. Geographic subdivisions (even in their own subfield) that are structured to be human- rather than machine-readable also aren’t going to cut it. Nor are textual language notes, [ca. 1846?], or most GMDs. Many of these things can be parsed, and turned into more highly structured data with some degree of success. But why aren’t we doing it that way in the first place? More structure = better discovery capabilities.

What this all means is I’m glad there are lots of extremely bright people with all sorts of perspectives and skills thinking about improved discovery for library materials, but that doesn’t necessarily mean throwing out metadata-based searching. The sorts of systems I envision require more, more highly structured, more predictable, and higher-quality metadata. I want more, not less.

I’ll stand on one last (smallish) soapbox before wrapping this up. In many communities (including both search engines and libraries), discussions about retrieval possibilities often center around textual resources. However, not everything that people are interested in is textual. That’s of course not a surprise, but I’m shocked at how often discovery models are presented that rely on this assumption. I’m all for using the contents of a textual resource to enhance discovery in interesting ways, but we need systems that can provide good retrieval for other sorts of materials too. Let’s not leave our music, our art, our data sets, our maps hanging out to dry while we plow forward with text alone.

Thinking bigger than fixing typos

2006-10-29T10:21:00.000-05:00

The Typo of the Day blog, which presents a typographical error likely to be found in library catalogs every day, and encourages catalogers to search their own catalogs for this error, has generated much discussion and linking in the library world. I’m all for ensuring our catalog data is as accurate as possible; however, I would like to think beyond the needle-in-a-haystack approach presented here. I want our emphasis to be on systems that make it difficult to make a mistake in the first place, rather than focusing on review systems that emphasize what’s wrong over what’s right and give a select few a false sense of intellectual superiority over those who do good work and make the occasional inevitable simple mistake.

There are many ways our cataloging systems could better promote quality records and make it more difficult to commit simple errors. I’ll mention just two here: spell checking and heading control. We hear frequent complaints about the lack of spell checking in our patron search interfaces, but few talk about this feature of being useful to catalogers. And I’m not talking about a button that looks over a record before saving it—I’m talking about real interactive visual feedback that helps a cataloger fix a typo right when it happens. Think Word with its little red squiggly lines—they show up instantly so all you have to do it hit backspace a few times while you’re thinking about this particular field and not miss a beat. If it’s not really an error, the feedback is easy to ignore. Word also has a feature whereby it can automatically correct a misspelling as you type based on a preset (and customizable) list of common typos. Features like this require a bit more attention to make sure the change isn’t an undesired one, but for most people in most cases it saves a great deal more time than it takes, and the feature can be tuned to an individual’s preferences. Checking the entire record after the fact requires a higher cognitive load—turning back to a title page, remembering what you were thinking when you formulated the value for that field, checking an authority file a second time, etc., and is less helpful than real-time feedback.

Heading control is the second area in which our systems could make it easy to do the right thing. Easier movement between a bibliographic record and an authority file, widgets that fill in headings based on a single click or keystroke, and automatic checks that ensure a controlled value matches an authority reference before leaving the field can all help the cataloger avoid simple typographical errors in the first place and make the sort of treasure hunt common typo lists provide less necessary.

Consider also the enormous duplication of effort we’re expending by hundreds of individuals at hundreds of institutions all looking up the same typos in our catalogs and all editing our own copies of the same records. This local editing makes an already tough version control problem worse by increasing the differences between hundreds of copies of a record for the same thing. We have way more cataloging work to do than we can possibly afford, and duplication of effort like this is an embarrassingly poor use of our limited resources. The single most effective step we can take to improve record quality is to stop this insanity we call “cooperative cataloging” today and adopt a streamlined model whereby all benefit instantaneously and automatically from one person fixing a simple typo.

Grant proposals

2006-10-17T19:39:00.000-04:00

Writing competitive grant proposals for putting analog collections online is difficult, and is becoming more so as more institutions are in a position to submit high-quality proposals and digitization for its own sake is no longer a priority for funding agencies. Collections themselves are no longer enough. There are many more collections that deserve a wider audience, that will significantly contribute to the work of scholars, and that will bring new knowledge to light, than can possibly be funded by even a hundred times the amount of grant funding available. The key is to offer something new. A new search feature. Expert contextual materials. User tagging capabilities. Something to make your project stand out as special and test some new ideas.

The trick is that in order to write that convincing proposal, you have to do a significant amount of the project, even before you write the proposal and before you get any money. Most of the important decisions, such as what metadata standards you will use, must be made before you write the proposal, both to convince a funding agency you know what you are doing and to develop reasonable cost figures. To make these decisions, an in-depth understanding of the materials, your users, the sorts of discovery and delivery functionalities you will provide, and the systems you will use are all necessary. Coming to those understandings is no small task, and is one of the most important parts of project planning. Don’t think of grant money as “free”—think of it as a way to do something you were going to do anyways, just a bit faster and sooner.

Librarians in the Media

2006-09-30T17:15:00.000-04:00

CNET news published an article this week entitled, “Most reliable search tool could be your librarian.” While it’s nice to see librarians getting some press, I remain concerned about our image, both as presented in the media and as we present ourselves.

The article contains the usual rhetoric about caution in evaluating the “authority” of information retrieved by Web search engines, the need for advanced search strategies to achieve better search results, and the bashing of keyword searching. Here, as in so many other places, the subtext is that “our” (meaning libraries’) information is “better” – that if only you, the lowly ignorant user, would simply deem to listen to us, we can enlighten you, teach you the rituals of “quality” searching and location of deserving resources rather than that drivel out there on the Web, that could be written by (gasp!) any yahoo out there.

Of course we know it’s not that simple. But the oversimplification is what’s out there. We’re not doing ourselves any favors by portraying ourselves (or allowing ourselves to be portrayed) as holier-than-thou, constantly telling people they’re not looking for things the right way or using the right things from what they do find, even though they thought they were getting along just fine. We simply can’t draw a line in the sand and say, “the things you find through libraries are good and the things you don’t are suspect.” There are really terrible articles in academic journals, and equally terrible books, many published by reputable firms. There are, on the other hand, countless very good resources out there on the Web, discoverable through search engines. And the line between the two is becoming ever more blurry as scholarly publishing moves towards open access, libraries are putting their collections online, government resources are increasingly becoming Web-accessible, and search engines gain further access to the deep Web.

The first strategy I feel we should be taking is to move discussion away from focusing on the resource and its authority to the information need. Evaluating an individual resource is of course important, but it’s not the first step. Let’s instead talk first about all the resources and search strategies that can meet a given need, rather than always focusing on resources and search strategies that can’t meet that need. There are many, many ways a user can successfully locate the name of the actor in the movie he saw last night, identify a source to purchase a household item at a reasonable price, find a good novel to read on a given theme, or learn more about how the War of 1812 started. Let’s not assume every information need is best met by a peer-reviewed resource, and make those peer-reviewed resources and the mediation services for them we can offer more accessible when these resources and our services are appropriate to meet those information needs. Let’s be a part of the information landscape for our patrons, rather than telling them we sit above it.

On "authority"

2006-09-02T14:49:00.000-04:00

I recently got around to reading the response from Encyclopedia Britannica to the comparison of the “accuracy” of articles in Britannica and Wikipedia by Nature. It’s got me thinking about the nature of authority, accuracy, and truth.

Britannica’s objections to the Nature article arise from a different interpretation of the words “accuracy” and “error.” The refutations by Britannica fall into two general categories. The first is the disputation of certain factual statements, mostly when such facts were established by research. Here, these facts aren’t truly objective, rather, they’re a product of what a human is willing to believe based on the evidence. Different humans will draw different conclusions based on the same evidence. And then there’s the other human element: mistakes. We make them, both those of us who work for Britannica and those who work for Nature. The “error” rates Nature reported for both sources are astonishingly high. Certainly not all of these are true mistakes, maybe not even very many of them, but they exist, in every resource humans create, despite any level of editorial oversight.

Second, and more prevalent, are differing opinions among reasonable people, even experts in a given domain, about what is appropriate at what isn’t to include in text written for a given audience. Anything but the most detailed, comprehensive coverage of a subject requires some degree of oversimplification (and maybe even those as well). By some definition, all such oversimplifications are “wrong” – it’s a matter of perspective and interpretation whether or not they’re useful to make in any given set of circumstances. Truth is circumstantial, much as we hate to admit it.

I’d say the same principles apply to library catalog records. First, think about factual statements. At first glance, something like a publication date would seem to be an objective bit of data that’s either wrong or right. But it’s not that simple. There are multitudes of rules in library cataloging governing how to determine a publication date and how to format it. Interpretation of those rules is necessary, therefore often two different reasonable decisions based on them as to what the publication date is are possible. In cases where a true mistake has been made, our copy cataloging workflows require huge amounts of effort to distribute corrections among all libraries that have used the record with that mistake. Only sometimes is a library correcting a mistake able to reflect this correction in a shared version of a record, and no reasonable system exists to populate that correction to libraries that have already made their own copy of that record. The very idea of hundreds of copies of these records, each slightly different, floating around out there is ridiculous in today’s information environment. We’re currently stuck in this mode for historical reasons, and a major cooperative cataloging infrastructure upgrade is in order.

More subjective decisions are not frequently recognized as such when librarians talk about cataloging. We talk as if one would only follow the rules, the perfect catalog record would be produced, and that if two people were to just follow the same rules, they would produce identical records. But of course that’s not true. There will always be individual variation, no matter how well-written, well-organized, or complete the instructions. Librarians complain about “poor” records when subject headings don’t match their ideas of what a work is about. But catalogers don’t (and of course can’t) read every book, watch every video, or listen to every musical composition they describe. Why have we set up a system whereby we spend a great deal of duplicate effort overriding one subjective decision with another, based on only the most cursory understanding of the resources we’re describing, and keeping multiple but different copies of these records in hundreds of locations? How, exactly, does this promote “quality” in cataloging?

An underlying assumption here is that there is one single perfect cataloging record that is the best description of an item. But of course this isn’t true either. All metadata is an interpretation. The choices we make about vocabularies, level of description, and areas of focus all preference certain uses over others. I’m fond of citing Carl Lagoze’s statement that "it is helpful to think of metadata as multiple views that can be projected from a single information object." Few would argue with this statement taken alone, yet our descriptive practices don’t reflect it. It’s high time we stopped pretending that the rules are all we need, changed our cooperative cataloging models to do it truly cooperatively, and use content experts rather than syntax experts to describe our valuable resources.

What about dirty OCR?

2006-08-08T21:25:00.000-04:00

I often hear discussions as part of the digital project planning process about how best to approach full-text searching of documents. A common theme of these discussions is whether or not “dirty” (uncorrected, raw) OCR is acceptable or not. The “con” position tends to argue that OCR is only so effective (say, 95%) and that the errors made can and will adversely affect searching. The “pro” position is that some access is better than none, and OCR is a relatively cheap option for providing that “some” access.

The con position has some convincing arguments. Providing some sort of full text search sends a very strong implication that the search works – and if the error rate in the full text is more than negligible, it could be said that implied promise has been broken. Error rates themselves are misleading. A colleague of mine likes to use the following (very effective, in my opinion) example, noting that error rates refer to characters, but we search with words:

Quick brown fix jumps ever the lazy dog.

In this case, there are two errors (fix and ever), out of 40 characters (including spaces), for an accuracy rate of 95%. However, only 75% (6 of 8) words are correct in that example.

So uncorrected OCR has some problems. But the costs of human editing of OCR-ed texts are high – too high to be a valuable alternative in many situations. Double- and triple-keying (two or three humans manually typing in a text while looking at scanned images) tends to be cheaper than OCR with human editing, but these cost savings are typically achieved by outsourcing the work to third-world countries, promoting ethical concerns for many. And both of the human-intervention options themselves represent a non-zero error rate. No solution can reasonably yield completely error-free results.

I’ll argue that the appropriate choice lies, as always, in the details of the situation. How accurate can you expect the OCR to be for the materials in question? 90% vs. 95% vs. 99% makes a big difference. What sorts of funds are available for the project? Are there existing staff available for reassignment, or is there a pool of money available for paying for outsourcing? TEST all the available options with the actual materials needing conversion. Find out what accuracy rate can be achieved via OCR with all available software. Ask editing and double-keying vendors for samples of their work based on samples from the collection. Do a systematic analysis of the results. Don’t guess as to which way is better. Make a decision based on actual evidence, and make sure you get ample quantities of that evidence. Results from one page, or even ten pages, are not sufficient to make a reasoned decision. Use a larger sample, based on the size of the entire collection, to provide an appropriate testbed for making an informed choice between the available options. Too often we assume a small sample represents actual performance and accept quick support of our existing preferences as evidence of their superiority. To make good decisions about the balance of cost and accuracy, we must use all available information, including accurate performance measures from OCR and its alternatives.

No more magic bullets

2006-07-10T21:16:00.000-04:00

This week OCLC announced worldcat.org, a freely-available site for searching WorldCat data, which will be released in August 2006. Here’s their one-sentence explanation of its purpose:

Where Open WorldCat inserts "Find in a Library" results within regular search engine results, WorldCat.org provides a permanent destination page and search box that lets a broader range of people discover the riches of library-held materials cataloged in the WorldCat database.

I’m a huge fan of this addition to the OCLC arsenal. I’m also a fan of Open WorldCat, however. I think these two tools need to work together (and along with many others) to provide the full set of services our users need. Like others, I use various tricks to limit search engine results to Open WorldCat items when I’m looking for basic information about a book I know exists, and, like others, I’ve never seen an Open WorldCat item appear in a Google search result set that wasn’t intentionally limited to Open WorldCat results. While Open WorldCat has its benefits, it can’t be all things to all users.

And there’s the rub: in libraries (and, to be fair, in many other fields as well) we tend to think there’s a magic solution. We just need to be more like Google. Federated searching is the answer. If we had Endeca, like NCSU, everything would be fine. Shelf-ready cataloging will make all of this affordable. Put like this, it sounds absurd. Yet the magic bullet theory drives all too many library decision-making processes. Of course, only by combining these and many other technologies in innovative ways will we make the substantive changes needed in the discovery systems libraries provide to our users. Systems of different scope need different means of presenting search results. A system with a tightly-controlled scope may be able to present search results in a simple list (note: these are few and far between!). The wider the scope of the system, with regards to format, genre, and subject, the more sophisticated we need to get in presenting the search results. Grouping, drilling down, dynamic expanding and refining of results all need to be incorporated into our next-generation systems. Single books in Google results aren’t going to cut it – we need to find ways to represent groups of our materials in aggregated resources.

For many user needs, sophisticated searching options for a specific genre or format of resource are absolutely essential. For others, more generic access to a variety of resources is the appropriate approach. Flexibility is the key, and the data we’re talking about here will never live in a single location. Mashups of data from multiple sources, presented with a variety of interfaces and search systems, can provide the advanced access envisioned here. We need to stop accepting the quick fix; instead, we must broaden our expectations, and move forward evaluating every option as to its place in the grand vision.

A quest for better metadata

2006-06-28T21:32:00.000-04:00

I wasn’t able to attend the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries this year, but the buzz surrounding the paper by Carl Lagoze (et al) about the challenges faced by a large aggregator despite using supposed low-barrier methods such as OAI led me to look the written version of this paper up. This paper demonstrates very well that now matter how “low-barrier” the technology (OAI) or the metadata schema (DC), bad metadata makes life difficult for aggregators. Garbage in, garbage out had been a truism for some time, and the “magic” behind current technology can help, but can only go so far to mediate poor input.

There has been spirited discussion in the library world recently about next generation catalogs, but that discussion has heavily centered on systems rather than the data that drives them. I’d argue that one needs both highly functional systems and good data in order to provide the sorts of access our users demand. How we get that good data is what I’ve been interested in recently. Humans generating it the way libraries currently do is one part of a larger-scale solution, but given the current ratio of interesting resources to funding for humans to describe them, we must find other means to supplement our current approach.

So what might we do? Here are my thoughts:

Tap into our users. There are a whole lot of people out there that know and care a lot more about our resources than Random J. Cataloger. Let’s harness the knowledge and passion of those users, and provide systems that let them quickly and easily share what they know with us and other users.

Get more out of existing library data. As Lorcan Dempsey says, we should “make our data work harder.” Although MARC and other library descriptive traditions have many limitations in light of next-generation systems, they still represent a substantial corpus of data that we must use as a basis for future enhancements. Let’s use any and all techniques at our disposal to transform this data into that which drives these next-generation systems.

Look outside of libraries. Libraries do things differently than publishers, vendors, enthusiasts, and many other communities that create and use metadata. We should keep in mind the cliché, “Different is not necessarily better.” We need to both look at ways of mining existing metadata from other communities to meet our needs, and re-examine the way we structure our metadata with specific user functions in mind.

Put more IR techniques into production. Information retrieval research provides a wide variety of techniques to better process metadata from libraries and other communities. Simple field-to-field mapping is only a portion of what we can make this existing data do for us. We must work with IR experts to push our existing data farther. IR techniques can also be made to work not just on metadata but the data itself. Document summarization, automatic metadata generation, and content-based searching of text, still images, audio, and video can all provide additional data points for our systems to operate upon.

Develop better cooperative models. Libraries have a history of cooperative cataloging, yet this process is anything but streamlined. We simply must get away from models where every library hosts local copies of records, and each of those records receives individual attention, changing, enhancing, even removing (!) data for local purposes. Any edits or enhancements performed by one should benefit all, and the current networked environment can support this approach much better than was possible when cooperative cataloging systems were first developed.

My point is, we can’t plug our ears, sing a song, and keep doing things the way we have been doing. Let’s make use of the developments around us, contribute the expertise we have, and all benefit as a result.

Finding new perspectives

2006-06-24T11:21:00.000-04:00

I spent last week at a conference with an extremely diverse group of attendees. Almost all were trained musicians; among these were traditional humanist scholars, librarians of all sorts, and a smattering of technologists. I spoke at two sessions, each on a topic related to how library systems might better meet the needs of our users. I was pleasantly surprised by the environment in these sessions, and in the conference as a whole.

Due to the diversity of attendees, I had feared that my ideas might be either rejected wholesale in light of very real and valid practical concerns, or ignored due to a perception that they were irrelevant to the work of many attendees. I was wrong. I had many stimulating and mutual idea-generating discussions with other attendees, most of whom don't spend their time thinking about system design like I'm lucky enough to do. My perspective of thinking big and not being satisfied by what current systems deliver us was greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm, showing me in no uncertain terms just how connected and devoted many librarians (and those in related fields) are to the needs of our users. Perhaps those who disagreed with my approach were just being polite in not expressing major differences in perspective publicly or privately (it was an international conference and I admit to not fully understanding all the cultural factors at work); I hope not, or at least I'd like to think that such disagreements could take the form of collegial conversation that starts in a session then continues afterward to the mutual benefit of both parties. But, then again, I can be an optimist about such things.

Perhaps the most surprising thing was that my point of view wasn't the most progressive there. I had a number of conversations with attendees whose vision was broader, more visionary, more of a departure from the current environment than mine. I view myself as striking a reasonable compromise between vision and practicality in the digital library realm, but my preconception of this conference was that I would be very far outside the attendees' respective norms. I was certainly on that side, and it was good to see I had company, and even a few compatriots that were further out to stimulate discussion.

What I took away was that we in the digital library world have a tendency to navel-gaze, to think we're the only ones that can plan our next-generation systems. This week I found an excellent cross-section of groups we need to more fully engage in this discussion. Without them and others like them, we're missing vital ideas.

An RDF Revelation

2006-05-29T21:10:00.000-04:00

While doing some reading recently, I had an RDF revalation. I've long felt I didn't really get RDF. This time, the parts that sunk in made a bit more sense. I'm not a convert in this particular religious war, but I do feel like I now understand both sides a bit better.

I've read the W3C RDF Primer before; several times, I think. The first thing that struck me this time was a simple fact I know I'd read before but that I'd forgotten--that an object can be a either a URIref or a literal (a URI referencing a definition elsewhere, or a string containing a human-readable value). This means the strict machine-readable definitions of things RDF strives to achieve is potentially only half there--only the predicate (relationship between the subject and object) is expected to be a reference to a presumably shared source. I assume this option exists for ease of use. Certainly building up an infrastructure that allows for all values to be referenced rather than declared represents unreasonable startup time. This sort of thing is better done in an evolutionary fashion rather than forcing it to happen at the start; a reasonable decision on the part of RDF.

RDF contains some other constructs to make things easier, for example, blank nodes to group a set of nodes (or, in the words of the primer, provide "the necessary connectivity"). Blank nodes are a further feature that allow lack of formal identification of entities. The primer discusses a case using a blank node to describe a person, rather than relying on a URI such as an email address as an identifier for that person. A convenient feature, certainly, but also a step away from the formal structures envisioned in Semantic Web Nirvana.

So now I'm looking at the whole XML vs. RDF discussion much more as a continuum rather than opposing philosophical perspectives. The general tenor of RDF is that it expects everything to be declared in an extremely formal manner. But there are reasonable exceptions to that model, and RDF seems to make them. I'd argue now that both RDF and XML represent practical compromises. Both strive for interoperability in their own way. It's just a question of degree whether one expects a metadata creator to check existing vocabularies, sources, and models for individual concepts (RDF-ish) or for representing entire resources (XML-ish). I see the value of RDF for use in unpredictable environments. Yet I'm still not convinced our library applications are ready for it yet. The reality is that libraries are still for the most part sharing metadata in highly controlled environments where some human semantic understanding is present in the chain somewhere (even in big aggregations like OAIster). (Of course, if we had more machine-understandable data, that human step would be less essential...)

I'm a big champion of two-way sharing of metadata between library sources and the "outside world." I just don't think the applications that can make use of RDF metadata for this purpose are yet mature enough to make it worth the extra development time on my end. And, again, the reality is that it really would take significant extra development time for me. The metadata standards libraries use are overwhelmingly XML-based rather than RDF-based. XML tools are much more mature than RDF tools. I fully understand the power of the RDF vision. But this is one area I just can't be the one pushing the envelope to get there.

Whither book scanning

2006-05-15T18:52:00.000-04:00

A recent New York Times Magazine article entitled Scan this Book! by Kevin Kelly is getting lip service in the library world. The article describes the current digitization landscape, discussing the Google book project, among other initiatives, and describes both the potential benefits and current challenges to the grand vision of a digitized, hyperlinked world. I was specifically glad to see the discussion not just centering around books, but around other forms of information and expression as well. However, library folk are starting in on our usual reactions to such pieces, finding factual errors, talking about how tags and controlled subjects aren't mutually exclusive, pointing out the economics of digitization efforts, discussion of how the digitization part is only the first step and how the rest is much more difficult. All of these points are perfectly valid.

Yet even though these criticisms might be correct, I think that we do ourselves a disservice by letting knee-jerk reactions to "outsiders" talking about our books take center stage. Librarians have a great deal to offer to the digitization discussion. We've done some impressive demonstrations of the potential for information resources in the networked world. Yet we don't have a corner on this particular market. Like any group with a long history, we can be pathetically short-sighted about changes we're facing. I believe it would be a fatal mistake to believe we can face this future alone. We have solid experience and many ideas to bring to Kelly's vision for the information future. However, we simply can't do it alone, and not just for economic reasons. We simply must be listening to other perspectives, just as we expect search engines, publishers, and others we might be working with to listen to ours. Let's keep our defensiveness in check, and start a dialog with those who are interested in these efforts, instead of finding ways to criticize them.

On the theoretical and the practical

2006-05-09T22:13:00.000-04:00

When I do metadata training, I make a point to talk about theoretical issues first, to help set the stage for why we make the decisions we do. Only then do I give practical advice on approaches to specific situations. I’m a firm believer in that old cliché about teaching a man to fish, and think that doing any digital library project involves creative decision-making, applying general principles rather than hard-and-fast rules.

Yet the feedback I get from these sessions frequently ranks practical advice as the most useful part of the training. I struggle with how to structure these training sessions based on the difference between what I think is important and what others find useful. I learned to make good metadata decisions first by implementing rules and procedures developed by others, and only later to develop those rules and procedures myself. It should make sense that others would learn the same way.

The difference is that I learned these methods over a long period of time. The training sessions I teach don’t ever claim to provide anyone with everything they would need to know to be a metadata expert. Instead, their goal is to provide participants with the tools they need to start thinking about their digital projects. I expect each of them will have many more questions and ample opportunity to apply theory presented to them as they begin planning for digital projects. This is where I see the theoretical foundation for metadata decisions coming into play. I can’t possibly provide enough practical advice to meet every need in the room; I can make a reasonable attempt to address theoretical issues that would help to address these issues.

I realize the theory (why we do things) can be an overwhelming introduction to the metadata landscape. Without any practical grounding, it doesn’t make any sense. Yet I know it’s essential in order to plan even one digital project, much less many. I and many others out there need to continue to improve the methods by which we train others to create consistent, high-quality, shareable metadata, finding the appropriate balance between giving a theoretical foundation and providing practical advice.

Thesauri and controlled vocabularies

2006-04-28T19:36:00.000-04:00

I had a very interesting conversation recently with two colleagues about the differences between thesauri and controlled vocabularies. Both of these colleagues are developers who work in my department. One is finishing up a Ph.D. in Computer Science, is currently in charge of system design for a major initiative of ours, and has a knack for seeing all the aspects of a problem before finding the right solution; the other is a database guru with whom I've collaborated on some very interesting research and has just started pursuing an M.L.S to add to his already considerable expertise. I like and respect both of these individuals a great deal.

The interesting conversation began when the database-guru-and-soon-to-be-librarian (DGASTBL) (geez, that's not any better, is it?) asked if the terms "controlled vocabulary" and "thesaurus" are used interchangeably in the library world. He asked because from our previous work and a solid basis in these concepts he knew they really aren't the same thing, yet he had seen them used in print in ways that didn't match his (correct) understanding. The high-level system diagram we had at the time had a box for "vocabulary" which was intended to handle thesaurus lookups for the system. We discussed how a more precise representation of that diagram would have an outer box for "vocabulary" to handle things like name authority files and subject vocabularies with lead-in terms but no other relationships, and an inner box for "thesauri" (as a subset of controlled vocabularies) with full syndetic structures that the system could make use of. We lamented that the required outer label in this scenario of "controlled vocabulary" isn't as sexy as its subset "thesauri." The latter sounds a great deal more interesting when describing a system to those not involved in developing it.

The system designer then presented a different perspective on the issue. While the librarian types considered thesauri a subset of controlled vocabularies (perhaps party for historical reasons - we've been using loosely controlled vocabularies a lot longer than true thesauri), the system designer viewed the situation as the opposite - that controlled vocabularies were a specific type of thesauri using only one type of relationship (the synonym), or perhaps also some rudimentary broader/narrower relationships that don't qualify as true thesauri (think LCSH). I found the difference in point of view interesting - that the C.S. perspective expected a completely structured approach to the vocabulary problem, and the library perspective represented an evolving view that has never quite gotten to the point where we can make robust use of this data in our systems. It struck me that the system designer's perspective in this conversation was overly optimistic as to the state of controlled vocabularies in libraries.

Yet there's light at the end of this particular tunnel. Production systems in digital libraries are starting to emerge that make good use of controlled vocabularies in search systems, rather than relying on users to consult external vocabulary resources before searching. Libraries have not taken advantage of the revolution in search systems shifting many functions from the user to the system (think spell-checking), to our supreme discredit. Making better use of these vocabularies and thesauri is one way of shifting this burden. I hope this integration of vocabularies into search systems will push the development of these vocabularies further and make them more useful as system tools rather than just cataloger tools. By providing search systems that can integrate this structured metadata, we can improve discovery in ways not currently provided by either library catalogs or mainstream search engines.

"Orienteering" as an information seeking strategy

2006-04-17T19:37:00.000-04:00

I was introduced today to the notion of "orienteering" as an information seeking strategy, through a paper presented at the CHI 2004 conference by Jamie Teevan and several other colleagues. The paper discusses orienteering as a strategy by which users make "small steps...used to narrow in on the target" rather than simply typing words in a search box. For some time, I've been struggling inside my head with trying to articulate the differences between the search engine model with a wide-open box for typing in a search and the library model with vast resources but a need for users to know ahead of time which of those resources are relevant to their search. This paper very clearly spoke to me, by demonstrating that real users (to use one of my favorite phrases) are somewhere in the middle.

Users have resources they like. We prefer one map site over another, one news site over another, one author over another. And we know where each of our prefered resources can be accessed. For many types of information needs, we know the right place (for us) to start looking. Even as we make the hidden Web more accessible, the resource (like an email) we need often won't be something a generic Web search engine can get to. But for many information needs, a box and "I'm feeling lucky" is an effective solution. I think the point is that we need a wide variety of discovery models to match the wide variety of our searching needs. We can't expect all users to start with the "right" resource (what's "right"?), but we should provide seamless methods for users to move, step by step, towards what they're looking for.

techessence.info launched

2006-04-06T09:38:00.000-04:00

I was recently honored to be asked to participate with a stunningly informed and diverse group of library technology types in an online initiative called TechEssence. TechEssence is envisioned as a rich resource for library decision-makers to learn just enough about a wide variety of technologies to allow them to make good decisions. I'm a big fan of this approach - not everyone can know everything, and many of us need succinct information with just the right amount of evaluation from those with experience. As of yesterday, the site is now officially launched!

Here's a summary from Roy Tennant, our fearless leader:

TechEssence.info
The essence of technology for library decision-makers

A new web site and collaborative blog on technology for library
decision-makers is now available at http://techessence.info/.
TechEsssence provides library managers with summary information about
library technologies, suggested criteria for decision-making, and
links to resources for more information on essential library
technologies.

A collaborative blog provides centralized access to some of the best
writers in the field. By subscribing to the RSS feed of the
TechEssence.info blog, you will be able to keep tabs on the latest
trends of which library administrators should be aware.

To accomplish this I am joined by a truly amazing group:

* Andrew Pace
* Dorothea Salo
* Eric Lease Morgan
* Jenn Riley
* Jerry Kuntz
* Marshall Breeding
* Meredith Farkas
* Thomas Dowling

For more information on the group, see our "about us" page at http://techessence.info/about/.

Library digitization efforts

2006-04-05T21:30:00.000-04:00

Many libraries are seeing efforts such as the Google Books Library Project, and think they need to follow suit by digitizing books in order not to be left behind. I worry that many of these libraries are jumping in just to be on the bandwagon without fully considering wheir their efforts fit in with those of others. Digitizing books, performing dirty OCR, and making use of existing metadata is about as easy as it gets in the digital library world (not that this is exactly a walk in the park), so it's an attractive option for libraries looking to make a splash with their first efforts to deliver their local collections online.

I argue that this is not the right approach for most libraries. That impact libraries are looking for as a result of digitization of local collections is achieved through the right ratio of benefit to users versus costs to the library. While the costs to the library are lower to digitize already-described, published books sitting on the shelves, the benefits are also lower than focusing on other types of materials (more on which materials I'm thinking of later...). We already have reasonable access to the books in our collection. I'll be the first to go on and on ad infinitum about the poor intellectual access we currently provide to our library materials. But there is some intellectual access. For books a library doesn't own, interlibrary loan is a slightly cumbersome but mostly reasonable method of delivering a title to a user. There are also a (comparatively) great many digitized books out there, without good registries of what's digitized and what isn't, or good ways to share digital versions when they do exist and the institution that owns the files is willing to share. Take the Google project - they're digitizing collections from five major research libraries, yet libraries planning digitization projects don't have access to lists of materials that are being digitized as part of this project, even though we expect to have some (not complete) access to these materials through Google's services at some point in the next few years. Even though library collections have surprisingly less duplication than one might expect, a library embarking on a digitization project for published books would be duplicating effort already spent to some non-negligible extent.

Libraries in the aggregate hold almost unimaginably vast amounts of material. We're simply never going to get around to digitizing all of it, or even the proportion we would select given any reasonable set of selection guidelines. An enormously small proportion of these materials are the "easy" type - books, published, with MARC records. The huge majority are rare or unique materials: historical photographs, letters, sound recordings, original works of art, rare imprints. These sorts of materials generally have grossly inadequate or no networked method of intellectual discovery. While digitizing and delivering online these collections would take more time, effort and money than published collections, I believe strongly that the increase in benefit greatly outweighs the additional costs. In the end, the impact of focusing our efforts on classes of materials that we currently underserve will be greater than taking the easy road. Our money is better spent focusing on those materials that are held by individual libraries, held by only few or no others, and to which virtually no intellectual access exists. Isn't this preferable to spending our money digitizing published books to which current access is reasonable, if not perfect?

On metadata "experts"

2006-04-04T20:12:00.000-04:00

I'm often asked how one gets the skills required to do my job as a Metadata Librarian. My answer is one I can't stress strongly enough: experience. We need to know the theoretical foundation of what we do inside and out, and need to constantly think about why we're doing something - the big picture. But theory is not enough. The only way to become skilled at making good metadata decisions is practice--seeing what happens as a result of an approach and improving on that approach the next time. No matter how many times I've done a certain type of task, I see the next repetition as a way to re-use good decisions and re-think others.

I've found the metadata community in libraries to be a very open one. When I'm starting on a task that I haven't done before, I use what I can from my experience with similar tasks. But I also ask around for advice from others who do have that experience. "Metadata" is a very big and diverse area of work. Even with the best abstract thinking, applying known principles to new environments, we all often need a boost for getting started from someone who has been through a given situation.

I'm skeptical of the idea of "experts" overall. These things are all relative - only once you start learning enough to be able to effectively share what you've learned with others do you truly realize how much you still have to learn. I put much more stock in the goal of becoming good at thinking about generalized solutions, good at making decisions for classes of problems rather than simply repeating specific implementations over and over. I'm not a programmer, and neither are many in the metadata librarian community. Yet this type of thinking that makes a good programmer can, in my opinion, make the best metadata experts as well.

What exactly is the "catalog"?

2006-03-18T10:08:00.000-05:00

From reading UC's Bibliographic Services Task Force report on "Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California," and participating in an initiative to write a similar white paper at MPOW, I've been thinking a great deal recently about what people mean when they talk about the future of the "catalog" or the "OPAC" in libraries.

Many people, when referring to the future of the catalog, mean the future of MARC. These arguments tend to center around how we can adapt the MARC record to handle new types of materials. Others mean the cataloging/metadata creation system present in the library's Integrated Library System. Many vendors (and OCLC) are talking about including metadata formats other than MARC in these systems. This sounds like a reasonable idea on the surface, but given the track records of ILS vendors, I'm not holding my breath for this one to work out very well. Another common usage is to mean "those things which the library owns," but this model has become problematic with the advent of licensed and free online resources, so this meaning is falling out of use.

I do think we need to figure out what systems locally-created metadata will go into. However, it's not realistic to expect we're moving towards an environment in which everything our patrons want access to is in a single database. As I'm fond of saying in this context, "That ship has sailed." Consider article-level access to the journal literature as the "elephant in the room" example of this phenomenon. Many vendors provide databases for this purpose that we happily subscribe to. It would be madness for libraries to try to replicate this information. We need to focus our attention instead on systems to make all the various information sources (including the catalog!) work together to provide seamless access to our users. Federated searching products on the market today are a step in this direction, but I've been decidedly underwhelmed by their functionality. We have a long way to go, one step at a time.

After all of this, I'm still not sure what my definition of "catalog" in ten years will be. I toyed briefly with the idea of "metadata records we created locally," but our current models with my library having a local copy of a shared record don't really fit with that definition. It could be something more like "records we manage locally" but that seems to administrative to be useful to anyone other than ourselves. Perhaps we should just bite the bullet and call the as-yet-still-imaginary single front end to all resources of possible interest to our users the catalog.

We're starting to tackle these issues in a big way, and I hope we can continue to make progress by agreeing on some semantics so we're not constantly talking past each other.

RSS feed gone

2006-03-07T09:47:00.000-05:00

For some reason the conversion from the native Blogger Atom feed to RSS via 2RSS for Inquiring Librarian (and a bunch of other Blogger blogs, I see!) seems to be down. I haven't had time to look into this yet, unfortunately. So in the meantime, you can subscribe to the Atom feed. 'Course, if you read this via the RSS feed, you won't be seeing this note...

More of four

2006-03-01T10:52:00.000-05:00

Yikes! I'm way behind in my blog reading. As I start to catch up, I find I was pseudo-taged for 4 things by Kevin two weeks ago. Congrats on the new addition to the family, Kevin. Seems like there must be something in the water up there in Princeton! ;-)

I see a variety of categories floating around out there. I'll pick my favorites.

4 Jobs I’ve Had
Metadata Librarian, Indiana University Digital Library Program
Circulation Supervisor, Indiana University Cook Music Library
Phone answerer/order taker, TIS Music Catalog
Camp counselor at the Brevard Music Center

4 Places I've Lived
Bloomington, IN
Coral Gables, FL
Marietta, GA
Satellite Beach, FL

4 Movies I Can Watch Over & Over
When Harry Met Sally
The Empire Strikes Back
Dune
Moulin Rouge (I have no idea why.)

4 TV Shows I Love To Watch
NYPD Blue
Deadwood
The Simpsons
Baseball (does that count?)

4 Novels
Lucia, Lucia by Adriana Trigiani
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov
The Stand by Stephen King

4 Places I’ve Been On Vacation
Gatlinburg, TN (it's a family thing…)
The Grand Canyon
Las Vegas
Walt Disney World (the Florida one)

4 Favorite Dishes
Pasta primavera (that's with veggies)
Potatoes, cooked any way
Salads with nuts and dried fruit
Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Fontina and Sun-Dried Tomato Sauce (mmm…)

4 Websites I Visit Daily
cnn.com
Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection
The Onion (well, maybe weekly, not daily)
Freecycle

4 Places I’d Rather Be
Hanging out with my puppy (aww)
The Grand Canyon
Camping in the middle of nowhere
Right where I am

4 Bloggers I’m Tagging
This tagging thing has really made the rounds in the biblioblogsphere, but here are 4 blogs I read I haven't seen 4 things on. My apologies if you've already been tagged and I missed it.

Metalibrarian
Vampire Librarian
Audio Artifacts
The FRBR Blog

FRBRizing Find in a Library

2006-03-01T09:10:00.000-05:00

Wow! I go traveling for a while and find all sorts of interesting things have happened while I was gone! OCLC's Open WorldCat now has FRBRized results. This is pretty darn cool. But I can't help but thinking, yet again, it hasn't quite gone far enough. I know, one step at a time. I have to do that in my job too. But I like thinking big, and I know the folks at OCLC Research like thinking big too. They've done a great job with Open WorldCat so far, and I hope they keep pushing the envelope.

Soooooo, how about limiting not just by format? What about language? There are probably other options I'm not thinking of right now in addition to these as well.

Also, as an extension to that last idea, how about mechanisms for moving about between related works? Do a search on "Gone with the Wind" in Google, limiting to the Find in a Library service. The novel, film, film score, etc., are all separate search results and once you pick one, I don't see a way to know the others exist. Yeah, I know there's no consensus on whether or not the novel and film version of Gone With the Wind are separate Works or two Expressions of the same work. Regardless, shouldn't we let our users move between them? Please?

I'm a huge FRBR fan as I think it gives us a very useful model for thinking about the relationshiops between things. But I think perhaps right now we're getting a bit too bogged down in the terminology when we start building services like this - a Work is selected, all Expressions are displayed, etc.- and we can forget that the exact definitions of these things aren't useful to our patrons. We should take full advantage of these relationships, and make sure our patrons can get between a film and a novel, even if they're separate Works related to one another. This leads me toward my current favorite rant about FRBR seeming to sideline Work relationships with this "Aggregation" idea, but I'll save that one for when I have more time...

Back to the Basics

2006-02-22T16:49:00.000-05:00

I spend a large proportion of my time thinking about pretty advanced library-type systems, and how we can always go one step farther in providing better access to our materials for our users. But every once in a while I hear someone talking or experience something that makes me step back and think about the basics, why we do this in the first place.

I've been an avid reader from a very young age. My biggest relief in finishing graduate school was that I could read books for fun again, without feeling like I should be reading something else (OK, well I still do this a bit because I'm always behind on my professional reading, but you get the idea…). The recent release of the film version of C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe pushed me to re-read the Chronicles of Narnia series. I haven't read these books since I was something like 10 or 12 years old. Reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe again was nothing short of a magical experience for me. I'd long forgotten the details of the story or even perhaps the major themes. But every page I turned while reading brought back a flood of memories and an overwhelming nostalgia. I did know what was coming next once I dove in. I did remember meanings behind the actions as I came close to them in the story. I completely lost myself in the book and read it through in two short sittings.

What fun it was to simply sit back and enjoy a book for its own sake. Information of any sort can be this enlightening to the right user. I'm going to remember that.

Copyright for Sound Recordings

2006-02-12T16:32:00.000-05:00

I've been catching up on reading I've been meaning to do while traveling recently. I found the CLIR report on Copyright Issues Relevant to Digital Preservation and Dissemination of Pre-1972 Commercial Sound Recordings by Libraries and Archives to be very interesting. Like discussions of copyright issues often must be, this report tends towards scenarios, likelihoods, and trends rather than absolute conclusions. I think that's OK. Even if there are no easy answers, knowing more about the issues involved is certainly beneficial.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this report is the discussion of how state copyright laws still affect audio preservation activities in libraries. The report's appendix summarizes state laws in California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Virginia. Each of the states examined include language in the criminal statute cited by the report indicating that reproduction for profit or commercial gain is illegal. Some, but not all, include specific exemptions for educational or non-profit use (under which library preservation activities would presumably fall?), but all specifically say what's illegal is profiting from the copying. This is a very different tone than today's discussions of copyright issues, where intent rarely enters into the argument. I wasn't previously aware of this shift, and wonder if state laws such as these could help serve as models as federal copyright law undergoes future revison.

Next-generation catalogs

2006-01-17T18:36:00.000-05:00

Bravo! I'll add my voice to the hubub surrounding the announcement that NCSU has launched a new library catalog, representing a new model for user interaction. I'm a huge fan of the "narrow by" menus on the left-hand side. (I should be--we did this in a digital library system a few years ago: here's an example and a paper describing the project.) I believe some of the options presented here are more useful than others, but different options would be useful in different situations and picking the right default is tricky.

I also love the idea of browsing the collection in the OPAC. Long have librarians extolled the virtues of the serendipity of shelf browsing. Our catalogs can and should try to replicate this experience online, and allow other sorts of browsing our shelves don't provide.

Despite the increased functionality of the NCSU catalog, the results within any given set, regardless of the sort option chosen, are the same sort of jumble we see in more traditional OPACs. I'm thrilled to see that FRBR-like grouping is on the list for the next release.

It's too bad that NCSU had to go to a third party (and presumably shell out some big bucks) in order to provide this innovative service. I hope this demonstration will push more of us to relentlessly push our OPAC vendors for similar improvements, and put our money where our mouths are.

User-contributed metadata failure?

2006-01-12T20:31:00.000-05:00

In November's D-Lib Magazine, there is an extensive article describing the development of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). I was interested to learn more about this project, and delighted to see they had put in a method for end-users to provide descriptive information into their system. Unfortunately, the DLESE staff felt user contributions weren't the right way to go:

One approach that did not work well for DLESE was "community cataloging." The idea behind community cataloging was that educators would contribute to the library by cataloging a few of their favorite on-line educational resources through an easy-to-use web interface. In spite of considerable effort spent on developing the web-interface, guidelines and best practices documents, this approach yielded few resources and the community-cataloged metadata often turned out to be incomplete or incorrect. The community cataloging functionality has been replaced by a simple "Suggest a Resource" web form.

I'm disappointed to see an example of this approach actually put into practice and then rescinded. I haven't seen the "community cataloging" interface they used, so I don't know what sorts of tools existed to assist the user in providing accurate and complete data. But I do wonder how closely the community cataloging tool resembled a professional cataloger's tool. Today's library catalog systems are designed for use by experts. They don't assist in data entry in any meaningful way, and they rely on catalogers to make use of a vast amount of outside resources in order to create quality records. If a system for user-contributed metadata followed the same model (some empty boxes and a dense set of instructions on what to put in each of them), I'd predict that system would fail.

I believe in order to make good use of our users' expertise, we need to build interfaces on new models. These interfaces need to make it easy to do the right thing. Users don't have to create entire records, for example. Interfaces for user-contributed metadata could allow those who believe they have supplemental or corrected information to a resource to target their efforts to the bit of information they possess, rather than asking them to provide a complete descriptive record. Interfaces could limit the fields users are allowed to contribute or edit, or enforce strict datatyping for small bits of metadata in order to prevent simple data entry errors.

User-contributed metadata is not just about shifting the effort from catalogers to end-users. It's really about supplementing our current practices with new models, in order to start to get a handle on the vast information landscape we face today.

Britannica vs. Wikipedia and a parallel in cataloging?

2006-01-04T18:47:00.000-05:00

An interesting new commentary in the Britannica vs. Wikipedia discussion following an article comparing the authenticity of the two in Nature was published yesterday in the NY Times, with a clever title: The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts (free registration may be required, yadda yadda yadda...). The NYT article supports Wikipedia pretty strongly, but it wasn't the conclusion that struck me. Rather, it was this idea:

"The idea that perfection can be achieved solely through deliberate effort and centralized control has been given the lie in biology with the success of Darwin and in economics with the failure of Marx."

I'm not overly informed on either Darwin or Marx, so I'll refrain from analyzing the validity of this claim. But reading it, I'm strongly reminded of arguments being made for library cataloging in the Google age. The effort and control described here could also apply to the effort and control spent in expert cataloging. But I believe the key here is the word solely. Just because effort and control in and of themselves don't get us where we want to be, doesn't mean we should abandon them entirely. It just means we can supplement them with other means and potentially end up better off.

The idea of "perfection" in this quote interests me as well. Proponents of the status quo in library cataloging frequently speak as if library catalog records are perfect. As if they are the pinnacle of description, meeting every user need, exactly right if only the rules are followed. But of course that's not true. The good news is that library catalogs and cataloging rules are evolving, and that our systems are just starting to make use of other sources of information supplementing those human-generated-through-blood-sweat-and-tears catalog records. There are many experts on our materials out there - each of our users has something useful to tell us about our resources. I think it's time we listen to them.

Ways of thinking and ways of representing

2006-01-03T19:53:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking lately about the interaction of ideas spreading and the labeling of those ideas. Every so often, a new technology trend spreads around, creating a buzz. But I'm getting to the point where the buzzwords no longer create much excitement for me, no longer represent to me a new way of thinking or approaching a problem. I suspect my changing attitude has two sources. First, I'm in touch with the field enough that I see the small bits of progress in ideas that precede the label and the hype. (Or at least once the trend gets a name I can identify signs of its development in hindsight!) Second, as I see more and more of these trends play out, I'm becoming more skeptical about the revolution each one promises. Often a single idea is represented as single-handedly altering the information landscape, but instead I for the most part see many factors converging to affect a change.

Rarely is the idea truly new and revolutionary once it gets a label. Consider "Web 2.0." One recent much-cited explanation from Tim O'Reilly appeared recently. It gets a label because it's emerging as a trend across many different implementers. In turn, the label inspires more implementers. But the O'Reilly article shows the label is intended to provide a convenient way of referring to an emerging paradigm, rather than as a means of causing a shift. But as this article indicates, labels can quickly descend in common usage to mean the catalyst rather than an assessment of an existing trend. True interactivity, meaningful end-user participation, and personalization aren't the result of "Web 2.0." Rather, "Web 2.0" gives us an easy way to refer to these and other similar trends that together represent an emerging shift in the norm of the Web.

I don't mean to say Web 2.0 is a "meaningless marketing buzzword," as the O'Reilly article warns against. I do, however, think we need to remember that the label is not the buzz. The work of countless people over a period of time finding ways to make their ideas a reality, which happen to coalesce around a theme, is what's really important.

Out of the loop

2005-12-19T20:33:00.000-05:00

Wow! I've been buried in deadlines recently, and am just starting to get caught up on email lists and the biblioblogsphere. Have I been missing out!

On Web4Lib, there was a ruckus recently about activism, copyright, and free expression. It at times descended into obscenities and name-calling, but also raised a number of thought-provoking questions about the information landscape and the maintenance of relevant and professional forums for discussion about issues that librarians should care about.

The Shifted Librarian, Jenny Levine, with a reasonable concern about the lack of comping registration fees for invited speakers at library conferences, sparked a rousing debate about conference economics, the value of institutional support for professional development, and a librarian's responsibility to give back to the profession.

I'm taking all of this as a reminder to step back from the inevitible daily emergencies and petty disagreements to think about the larger issues: why I'm a librarian in the first place, how I can contribute to our shared mission, and what our users really need in this day and age. I'm going to take some time over the next few weeks, as I have some time off (in between all the writing I have been putting off!), to reflect on these issues and re-focus my work. I hope everyone out there has a similar opportunity.

DLF MODS Implementation Guidelines available for public comment and review

2005-12-08T21:16:00.000-05:00

The Digital Library Federation's Aquifer Initiative is pleased to invite public review and comment on the DLF MODS Implementation Guidelines for Cultural Heritage Materials.

The primary goal of the Digital Library Federation's Aquifer Initiative is to enable distributed content to be used effectively by libraries and scholars for teaching, learning, and research. The provision of rich, shareable metadata for this distributed content is an important step towards this goal. To this end, the Metadata Working Group of the DLF Aquifer Initiative has developed a set of implementation guidelines for the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS). These guidelines are meant specifically for metadata records that are to be shared (whether by the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH) or other means) and that describe digital cultural heritage and humanities-based scholarly resources. The Guidelines are available at http://www.diglib.org/aquifer/DLF_MODS_ImpGuidelines_ver4.pdf (pdf document about 470 kb).

In order to ensure the Implementation Guidelines are useful and coherent, we are collecting comments and feedback from the wider digital library community. We appreciate any and all comments, feedback, and questions. These may be sent to DLF-MODS-GUIDELINES-COMMENTS-L@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU. The deadline for comments and review is January 20, 2006.

DLF Aquifer Metadata Working Group:

Sarah Shreeves (Chair) - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign John Chapman - University of Minnesota Bill Landis - California Digital Library Liz Milewicz - Emory University David Reynolds - Johns Hopkins University Jenn Riley - Indiana University Gary Shawver - New York University

Learning cool new things

2005-11-15T08:32:00.000-05:00

One of the things I love most about my job as a librarian is the enormous variety of content I get to work with. By partnering with content specialists for most if not all of our digital library projects, I get introduced to research areas I previously didn't know much about: the rise and fall of the "company town," victorian literature, "the commons," etc. One of the more recent topics is The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, a project in which I'm only tangentially involved. But this is really cool stuff. You can learn more about it too in a Nova episode titled Newton's Dark Secrets, premiering tonight in most areas.

True folksonomic thesauri?

2005-11-05T17:24:00.000-05:00

I saw on the Simile mailing list recently a thread discussing possible uses of relationships between user-supplied tags in an information system. This idea is intriguing to me. I've long believed we don't use the relationships recorded in our library-land controlled vocabularies in our systems for end-users to anywhere near their potential. A digital library collection I've been involved with demonstrates ways in which we might use these relationships. The methodology used is documented in this paper.

Yet I'd never thought about relationships for folksonomic vocabularies before. I think it's a fantastic idea, however. The same strategies for improving end-user discovery based on term relationships can be used no matter where these relationships come from. Relationships determined by methods such as this could be used in the same way human-generated relationships in a formal thesaurus could be used. I wonder if these relationships might be even more important in a folksonomic environment, as a method by which the vocabulary control us library folk hold so dear could be achieved.

Hierarchical catalog records

2005-10-26T20:28:00.000-05:00

The October issue of D-Lib Magazine has an article describing an experimental FRBR implementation in the Perseus Digital Library, by David Mimno, Gregory Crane, and Alison Jones, entitled Hierarchical Catalog Records. I'm thrilled to see reports of experiments like this be shared in outlets as widely read as D-Lib. I'm also extremely happy to see this particular experiment happen outside of the MARC environment. I've been becoming more and more convinced as some experiments we're conducting with MARC records for sound recordings progress that FRBRization really is a revolution in resource description. Statistics abound estimating the small percentage of works that exist in more than one expression, and expressions that exist in more than one manifestation. While I don't doubt these numbers at all, I think they way in which they're presented minimizes the enormity of the task ahead of us to reach a true FRBR environment.

I believe the same is true of efforts to use MARC for FRBRized records. The MARC format could be adopted for this purpose. But is it in our best interests to do so? Using MARC makes the task seem less scary, that it won't be that difficult. But it is a difficult task, and we're fooling ourselves if we pretend otherwise. I wonder if we aren't better off addressing the issue head-on, admitting to a change with a new base record format. The change would be one of mind-set, rather than functionality.

I've mentioned I believe the FRBRization task is difficult. I don't believe difficult means impossible in this case, however. We don't yet have a good sense of the cost associated with such a conversion, so any claim to its value will be tempered by that uncertainty. But I am convinced of that value, and I believe studies like that of the Perseus Digital Library are vital in demonstrating it. No cost can be justified without first understanding the associated benefit. We have a great deal more work to do to reach that understanding.

You know you go to too many conferences when...

2005-10-23T10:11:00.000-05:00

...you look down halfway through the morning session and realize you're wearing the name tag from the wrong conference. Sigh.

Separating data entry from data structure

2005-10-22T19:21:00.000-05:00

I believe we've fallen extremely short in at least one area of potential for improving our cataloging and metadata creation systems -- user interfaces. We're still stuck in a mindset developed in the early days of the MARC format, whereby data is entered in the exact form in which it needs to be stored. When Web-based OPACs and cataloging modules emerged, cursory attempts to "improve" the interface appeared, but the changes were almost exclusively surface changes (labeling, etc.), and not implemented with community involvement.

But of course current technology provides many possibilities for a design layer in between the data entry interface and the data storage format. Metadata creation by humans is expensive. We need to do everything we can to design data entry interfaces that speed this process along, that help the cataloger to create high-quality data quickly. Visual cues, tab completion, and keyboard shortcuts are just a few simple tricks that could help. More fundamental approaches like automatic inclusion of boilerplate text and integration of controlled vocabularies could provide enormous strides forward.

Yet with all of this potential, I frequently (WAAAAAY too frequently) have conversations with librarians where it becomes clear they're focused exclusively on the data output format. It never even occurred to them that a system could do something with entered data that doesn't require cataloger involvement. (Man, I knew we librarians were control freaks, but this really takes the cake.) Of course, librarians aren't on the whole system designers. That's OK. But all librarians still need to be able to think creatively about possibilities. I'm convinced that the way forward here is to take the initiative to develop systems that demonstrate this potential, that show everyone what is possible with today's technology. Everyone has vision, yet that vision always has limits. By demonstrating explicitly a few steps forward from where we are, vision can then expand that much further.

Museums and user-contributed metadata

2005-10-09T18:56:00.000-05:00

It's funny how often, once one starts thinking about a subject, one finds examples of it absolutely everywhere. I've been thinking about user-contributed metadata for a while now in the context of a digital music library project, where we can provide innovative types of searching, if only we could find a way to make the creation of the robust metadata that drives it cost-effective. I wrote about this topic recently, inspired by OCLC's Wiki WorldCat pilot service.

So imagine my pleasure when, catching up on my reading this weekend, I came across "Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement" by David Bearman and Jennifer Trant in September's D-Lib Magazine. (Yes, I do know it's no longer September. Thanks for asking.) I'm thrilled to hear about this initiative, especially how well-developed it seems to be. I haven't yet followed the citations in the article to read any of the project documentation, but it certainly looks extensive. In the digital library (and museum!) world, I firmly believe ongoing documentation such as this associated with a project can be of as much or even more value than formally-published reports.

Two features strike me about the "Steve" system described here, that make it clear to me there are many ways to implement systems collecting metadata from users. It also makes me realize these decisions need to be made at the very beginning of a project, as they drive all other implementation decisions. The first is an assumption that the user interacting with the system is charged with the task of description rather than simply reacting to something they see and perceive either as an error or an omission. The user is interacting with the system for the purpose of contributing metadata; finding resources relevant to an information need is not the point. I suppose different users end up contributing with this model than with one that allows users to comment casually on resources they find in the course of doing other work. Different users might affect the "authoritativeness" of the metadata being contributed, but I wonder to what degree.

The second feature I find notable is that the system is designed to be folksonomic; there is no attempt at vocabulary control. Us library folk tend to start from the assumption that controlled vocabulary is better than uncontrolled and move on from there. At first glance, some of the reports from this project seem to resist that assumption, and start from the beginning looking for a real comparison. I'm anxious to read on.

User-contributed metadata

2005-10-06T21:06:00.000-05:00

OCLC recently announced the Wiki WorldCat pilot service. What a fantastic idea! Too bad I'm having trouble trying it out. I looked at a few books in Open WorldCat (via Google), including this one that I read recently and the book shown on the Wiki WorldCat page (The Da Vinci Code), and I didn't see the reviews tab or the links to add a table of contents or a note shown on the project page. Hmm. I wonder what I'm missing.

But, anyhoo... incorporating user-contributed metadata into library systems is something I've been thinking about for a while. Librarians tend to be pretty wedded to the notion of authority, that as curators of knowledge we're the best qualified folks out there to perform the documentation of bibliographic information. Assuming for a moment that this is true for some data elements, there are still several classes of data that could easily benefit from end-user involvement.

The first is detailed information from specialized domains. I work on a number of projects related to music. Information such as exactly which members of a jazz combo play on any given piece on a CD or the date of composition of a relatively obscure work is the sort of thing our catalogs could be providing to serve as research systems instead of just finding systems. But this sort of metadata is expensive to create; it requires research and domain expertise on the part of the cataloger. Many of our users, however, do have this specialized knowledge and love to share it.

Other information that might be appropriate for supplying by end-users could be tables of contents, instrumentation of a musical work, language of a text, and others of this type of "objective" information. Before you say, "But what about standard terminology, spelling, capitalization?!?" in a panicked voice, consider basic interface capabilities in 21st-century systems such as picking values from provided lists rather than typing them in.

But should we restrict ourselves to these more obvious of elements? I've been hoping for some time to be able to test various degrees of vetting of user-contributed metadata to a digital library system. I have in mind a completely open Wiki-type system, one that simply sends a suggestion to a cataloger, and a number of options in between. I suspect the quality of the user-contributed metadata will be overall much higher than critics assume. Yet even if it isn't, what sort of trade-off between quality and quantity are we willing to make? Traditional cataloging operations don't have extensive quality control operations, perhaps because QC is expensive work. And catalogers make mistakes, every day, just like the rest of us. Assuming a system where users can correct errors, how quickly will errors (made by a cataloger or by another end-user) be found and corrected? Will the "correct" data win out in the end? Surely these issues are worth a serious look.

The more things change...

2005-09-27T21:11:00.000-05:00

I've just finished reading the short volume The MARC music format : from inception to publication / by Donald Seibert. MLA technical report, no. 13. Philadelphia : Music Library Association, 1982. The book is an account of the decision-making process involved in designing and implementing the MARC music format. I was both heartened and discouraged to read arguments in support of implementing MARC that mirror closely arguments I and others make today for moving beyond MARC.

The rationale behind the MARC music format reads full of hope, for improved access for users and higher quality data. Yet many of the improvements mentioned have not come to fruition. I'm heartened to see the vision represented here for the type of access we can and should be providing. Yet I'm discouraged to see more evidence that we haven't achieved this level of access in the time since the MARC format was implemented. I believe this serves to remind us that many factors other than database structure contribute to the success of a library system.

I also learned a valuable lesson reading this text that ideas and potential alone are not enough to convince everyone that any given change is a good idea. A large percentage of librarians out there have heard these very arguments before and seen them not pan out. I do believe, however, that this time can be different. (Yes, I know how that sounds...) Computer systems are much more flexible than they were when the MARC music format was first implemented, and can be designed to alleviate more of the human effort than before. We've learned a great deal from automation and implementation of the MARC format that we can build on in the next generation library catalog. We have a long road ahead of us, but I think it's time to address these issues head-on once again. I'd like to believe we can leverage the experience of those like Donald Siebert involved in the first round of MARC implementation, together with experts in recent developments, to make progress towards our larger goal.

The next big thing in searching?

2005-09-18T15:26:00.000-05:00

At a conference last week, I heard Stephen Robertson of Microsoft Research Cambridge speak about the primacy of text in information retrieval, whether for text, images, or any other type of medium. He made a statement in the talk that the first generation of information retrieval systems operated on Boolean principles, and the second generation (our current systems) provide relevance-ranked lists. This may be a truism in the IR world, but it's something I hadn't thought about in these terms before. Our library sytems certainly are primitive in terms of searching, and they operate on the Boolean model. But I hadn't thought of relevance ranking as the "next step" - probably because the control freak in me is suspicious of a definition of "relevance" not my own. But I think it's fine to look at the progression of IR systems in this way.

So what's the third generation? Where are we going next? I think the next step is grouping in search results. Grouping is where I see the power of Google-like search systems merging with library priorities like vocabulary control. Imagine systems that allow the user to explore (and refine) a result set by a specific meaning of a search term that has multiple meanings, by format, or by any number of other features meaningful to that user for that query at that time. I picture highly adaptive systems far more interactive than those we see today. Options for search refinement alone, I don't believe, go far enough, as they require the user to deduce patterns in the result set. I believe systems should explicitly tell users about some of those patterns and use them to present the result set in a more meaningful way. Search engines like Clusty are starting to incorporate some of these ideas. It remains to be seen if they catch on.

FRBR assumes this sort of grouping can be provided, using the different levels of group 1 entities. Discussions of FRBR displays frequently talk about presenting Expressions with a language for textual items, with a director for film, or with a performer for music, allowing users to select the Expression most useful to them before viewing Manifestations. What's missing is how the system knows what bits of information would be relevant for distinguishing between Expressions, since these bits of information will be different for different types of materials, and sometimes even with similar types of materials. We have a ways to go before the type of system I'm imagining reaches maturity.

Dangers of assumptions

2005-09-07T21:47:00.000-05:00

Over the holiday weekend, I read the paper by Thomas Mann, Will Google’s Keyword Searching Eliminate the Need for LC Cataloging and Classification? Mann presumes to know exactly what is possible (not just currently implemented) in a search engine - the paper is stuffed full of absolutes: "cannot," "only," and "will not." The paper seems to focus on Google as simply taking in words in a query, looking them all up in a word-by-word index of all documents, and performing some sort of relevance ranking on documents that contain the search terms. It not only assumes that Google takes this simplistic approach, it rejects that any further capabilities are even possible in a search engine.

I believe this is a thoroughly (and perhaps, in this case, deliberately) naive assessment of the situation. Just because library catalogs offer only simple fielded searching and straightforward keyword indexes doesn't mean all retrieval systems do the same. Mann ignores the possibility of a layer between the user's query and the word-by-word index. He states, "having only keyword access to content is that it cannot solve the problems of synonyms, variant phrases, and different languages being used for the same subjects." This statement confuses "keyword access" (just looking something up in a full-text index) with a system that uses a keyword index among other things for searching. Google could (and right now, does, with the ~ operator [thanks Pat, for the heads up on this!], and who of us library folk is to say they won't do this by default in Google Print) do synonym expansion on search terms before sending the query to the full-text index. Point is, it's not impossible to do this in a search system. The same idea goes for finding items in other languages - translation before the search is actually executed could be done. Ordering, grouping (yes, grouping!), and presentation of search results in this environment would require some advanced processing, but that's doable too.

Of course, there is a difference between what's possible and what's actually implemented in Google today. Mann's language confuses the two, by stating (incorrectly) what's possible using as evidence what's implemented. What's implemented today is the functionality in the Web search engine, but we shouldn't assume the same functionality will drive Google Print. This article uses rhetoric to stir the librarians up for their cause. But it does us a disservice by making false assumptions and obscuring the facts. There are arguments to be made for why libraries are still essential and relevant today. But rabble-rousing with partial truths isn't the way to make them.

Google Print and Fair Use

2005-08-29T08:36:00.000-05:00

Having thought some about the "copying" aspect of Google Print, it would now be prudent to think about exceptions to the exclusive right of copyright holders to reproduce a work. Google's stance seems to be that their activities fall under the scope of the Fair Use exception to copyright. Fair Use is by far a straightforward concept, and comparatively very few cases have served to clarify the issue. Here's the text of section 107 of the copyright act, which describes the fair use exception:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Note that whether the copyright owner objects or not is not a factor to be considered when determining fair use. That copyright owner could file a lawsuit, but the fair use claim is evaluated on these four factors only.

So how does Google Print stack up against the four factors?

(1) Purpose and character. Commercial vs. educational is singled out here, and certainly Google's use is commercial. But that's not the only purpose or character allowed to be considered. A lawyer for Google could claim that their service, meeting people's information needs and directing them to a copyright holder when a work meets that information need, is a Good Thing. They could then go on to argue that making money of this is secondary, but lots of folks wouldn't believe that.

(2) Nature of the copyrighted work. This is hard to pin down due to the scope of what's being digitized. Books that have been out of print for 45 years and aren't widely available in the used book marked would evaluate differently according to this criteria than Harry Potter. (Yes, research libraries collect fiction too.)

(3) Amount of the work. Again, tricky. Google is digitizing (copying) the entire work, and, presumably, using the entire work to create their index. The counter-argument seems to be they're only showing a small part to users of their service, but I don't believe that applies here. The exclusive right is the copying part, not what you show to other people.

(4) Effect on the market. Here is where only showing snippets to end-users comes in to play. Certainly the effect on the market is potentially severe if one could download, print, read a whole book from Google instead of purchasing it. The recording industry feels that way about file sharing, but there are many who disagree, claiming file sharing actually stimulates purchasing. (Sorry no citations right now, but there are gobs of studies out there on both sides of this issue.) I imagine Google would claim that by showing snippets they're telling users about resources they didn't know about before, and are thus adding to the market. This will be an interesting argument to follow.

My conclusion is that the fair use claim is far from a slam dunk in either direction. Personally, I'd love to see this litigated (and found in favor of Google!) to start what I consider to be much-needed reform in copyright law.

IANAL. Any misinterpretations or flawed analyses are entirely mine, and the result of me trying to pretend I know something about this stuff.

Musings on the state of coyright

2005-08-28T09:50:00.000-05:00

The recent brou-ha-ha (wow, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever written that word down!) over Google Print has me thinking about copyright law. I am not a lawyer. I have no legal training or education. I have picked up a bit about copyright law while working in the area of digital libraries for the past five years, however. I think what I think I know is accurate, but hey, I'm wrong a reasonable amount of the time.

The publishers who have objected to the Google Print project say that the project violates copyright law by scanning the books in question (copying, which is the first exclusive right granted to copyright holders by section 106 of U.S. copyright law) to index them. So how is this different than Google’s Web index? Well, in creating the Web index Google caches Web pages too. Caching may not actually be the right word there – Google probably more actively, intentionally, or permanently creates a copy than Random J. User’s Web browser does. One could argue there’s some sort of difference between the caching done by Google of Web pages and scanning page images of printed books, but it seems to me this difference is a matter of degree rather than of real substance. So if the digitization for Google Print is a copyright violation, does that mean all Web search engines are copyright violations?

Let’s take this exercise one step further. Indexes have been around for a very long time: the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, Academic Search Premier, the MLA International Bibliography, and on ad infinitum. I admit to being ignorant as to whether these more traditional indexes tend to operate with the blessing of the copyright holders (although many of them are actually produced by publishers to cover their content), but surely not all of them do, and the library world isn’t exactly abuzz with these copyright holders crying foul. One difference is that the processing that happens to create these more traditional indexes (although this may no longer be true today!) is entirely an intellectual exercise. Any “copying” of the work done to create the index is purely in a person’s head. Is this difference one of degree or of substance?

To go yet another step further, library catalogs use a copyrighted item to create a new representation – is there an argument there that catalog records are derivative works? Obviously we’re in danger of descending into the ridiculous here, but the need for some sort of balance is clear. The concept of balance between the rights of the creator of a work and the benefit to the public good from its use is inherent in copyright law. Too bad the specifics of maintaining this balance are in language that languishes far behind current technologies.

I think it will take a copyright challenge to a large for-profit like Google (rather than to even the most resource-rich library) to overhaul copyright law, to bring it up to the times. Google seems to me to have the desire and the resources to present a reasonable defense, and persist through a legal battle rather than settling the short-term problem through an agreement with publishers. But, as I’ve said, I’m wrong a reasonable amount of the time.

A billion and one, a billion and two...

2005-08-11T21:04:00.000-05:00

The OCLC folks are all abuzz with the addition today of the billionth holding to Worldcat, as reported all over. This is obviously an enormous milestone for OCLC and for libraries in general. Kudos are in order for all of us, I think!

The union catalog has transformed the way libraries provide access to their material. A billion holdings in one database seems to me to be proof positive of that. But OCLC Research staff and many others, researchers and practicioners, aren't content with the functionality our current union catalogs offer. The enormous wealth of data represented by those one billion holdings has the potential to be used in innumerable ways. I believe OCLC's FRBR activities are excellent examples of the sorts of creative things we can do with this data to better serve our users. We've made huge strides in access to materials, yet we have many miles to go.

UPDATE: I've discovered today the misfortune of having a book on The Monkees be Worldcat's one billionth holding. We're going to have a country of librarians walking around for two weeks now with that damn theme song stuck in our heads!

Keeping up with technology

2005-08-10T19:27:00.000-05:00

Podcasting, Web services, RDF, Flickr, Ebooks. Buzzwords, right? All of these are extremely useful technologies or applications, but I don't actually use any of them. Each has its place, each is good at solving certain types of problems. None, of course, is a magic wand that makes everything in life easier.

I follow a number of library- and technology-related blogs. Many of them hype a certain technology that is meaningful to the blogger for their particular needs. I learn a huge amount from these bloggers, the information they provide, and the fervor with which they provide it. But rarely do I go out and try any of the technologies being described just to see what they are. A few peak my curiosity and I go check them out, but for the majority I just mentally file the information away for when I have a problem the technology in question solves. There's just too much going on in this environment right now to really delve in and learn everything new that comes along. Each of us picks up on the emerging technologies most relevant to us in our personal or professional lives. Other technologies are only relevant to us at a later time, but hearing about them before we need them reminds us of the vast range of possibility out there. Sharing our experiences helps others both to adopt them right away when appropriate, but also to adopt them later as the need grows.

To each their own "metadata"

2005-08-02T07:42:00.000-05:00

I was introduced to someone today as the "Metadata Librarian," and received a reaction I seem to get a lot: "Oh, metadata, huh? Someday I'll understand that." On my optimistic days, I want to respond "Would you like to go get a cup of coffee and chat?" On my cynical days, "You've got an opportunity here to learn something new! Take it!"

Everyone has their talents and areas of difficulty. We're all really good at some things and equally bad at others. Me, I'm completely spatially inept. It once took me 3 hours to put together a futon frame (with instructions). I'm fine with that, because I know my talents lie elsewhere, although I do often think it would be nice to be handy. Despite my lack of innate talent in some areas, I've never thought I simply can't learn any of it. Little by little I'll learn to fix things around the house. I'll never be able to paint with any level of inspiration, but with a whole lot of practice I might be able to use color effectively or produce a still life that is recognizable. One might think metadata is uninteresting. That's cool. I find a lot of stuff out there uninteresting. But don't think it's unlearnable.

Part of the problem here is that "metadata" isn't a monolithic concept. Depending on one's perspective, it can mean virtually anything. To lots of people, all they need is descriptive metadata, and maybe even some version of qualified Dublin Core their content management solution provides them. GIS specialists delve deeply into an area of metadata many know very little about. For many, text encoding is the metadata world, of extremely rich depth and subtlety. I had an interesting conversation recently with a colleague about the definition of "structural" metadata. By some definition, TEI markup is structural metadata, indicating the stucture of the text by surrounding that text with tags. Does that same logic apply to music encoding? Music markup languages specify the musical features themselves, rather than "surrounding" them with metadata. But certainly there's some similarity to text markup. The boundary between structural metadata and markup isn't the same to everyone. Similarly, there are times when I use the word metadata to refer to something that might more accurately be "data," and when I use it to refer to something that might be "meta-metadata."

All of these views are valid. I'm constantly reminding myself of this. Often when my first reaction is that someone doesn't get it, it's really their view not quite meshing with mine. It's important that we have some common terminology and meanings, but I believe there's room for perspective as well. I can get better at my job if I listen more closely to these perspectives.

Music subject headings

2005-07-28T21:37:00.000-05:00

Wow, the blog has been lonely lately, hasn't it? It's almost as if there are too many things floating around in my head that I can't get any of them fully formed enough to even write about here.

One of those many floating thoughts has been subject headings for music. Many traditional schemes, like LCSH, make a distinction between headings used for works about music, and headings used for music itself. For example, "Symphonies" is used for music scores and recordings of symphonies. But "Symphony" is assigned to texts about symphonies.

Obviously at first glance the distinction between the two forms is subtle. Even if a user realized the potential for this distinction being made (!), it would be difficult for that user to determine which form to use in which case. In my library catalog, a subject browse on "symphonies" lists first an entry for 5407 matches, then second, "see related headings for: symphonies." Clicking on the latter yields a screen saying "Search topics related to the subject SYMPHONIES," but no way to actually do that. This is probably because the authority record for symphonies has no 550s specifying any related headings. Geez. Both because the system shows this anyways and because there are no related headings. [Yet another NOTE: the mechanism for specifying a heading is broader or narrower than another heading in the MARC authority format is ridiculously complicated. No wonder the relationships between LCSH headings are so poor.] This same screen is also where one would view the scope note for the heading "symphonies":

Here are entered symphonies for orchestra. Symphonies for other mediums of performance are entered under this heading followed by the medium, e.g. Symphonies (Band); Symphonies (Chamber orchestra). Works about the symphony are entered under Symphony.

OK. So to find out if "symphonies" is what I'm looking for, I need to click "see related headings for: symphonies"? Riiiiight. Sure, my catalog could handle this better. Not many do.

This distinction isn't always so obvious to specialists, either. I've been reading up on the topic for a project and I'm struck by how rarely it's made explicit. A huge majority of writings simply assume they're talking about one, the other, or both, but never say so. Many others indicate they're discussing one or the other but provide examples of both. I myself recently forgot the distinction at a critical juncture. :-)

I'm wondering if this distinction between headings for works about music and works of music is still needed in modern systems. [NOTE: I don't consider any of the MARC catalogs I'm familiar with to be "modern systems"!] We certainly now have mechanisms to make this distinction in ways other than a subject string. Most of me says this is an outdated mechanism. But in a huge library catalog covering both types of materials, the distinction does need to be made in some way. I'm still pondering over exactly which way that should be.

Structure standards and content standards

2005-07-11T21:23:00.000-05:00

It's funny how related things seem to come in spurts in our lives. Or maybe it's just that once we notice something once, it's easier to notice again. In my standard metadata spiel, I, like many others, distinguish between structure standards that tell you what "fields" (for lack of a better term) to record, and content standards that tell you how to structure values in those fields. The latter can be either rules for structuring content or actual lists of permissible entries. It's an extremely useful distinction. Yet I've been noticing recently that it's frequently misunderstood, or that the distinction is implicit in a conversation rather than explicit.

One place this trend caught my eye recently was in a blog post by Christopher Harris on using LII's RSS feed to generate MARC records, and subsequent comments and posts by several people, including Karen Schneider of LII. Most of the ensuing discussion was about keeping the two data sources in sync, which of course is important to plan for. But I noted a conspicuous absence of content standards in the discussion. MARC records, of course, do not have to adhere to AACR2 practices. In fact, there are millions of non-AACR2 records (mostly created pre-AACR2 and never upgraded for practical reasons) in our catalogs. But today if one is creating a MARC record, it would be prudent to either use AACR2 or have a compelling argument against it. Yet neither of those options appeared in this discussion. Reading between the lines, I suspect the transformation should be reasonably straightforward, but one shouldn't have to read between the lines to know.

I suppose what I'm really saying here is that when talking about these sorts of activities, we need to completely define the problem to be solved before a solution can be determined. And that includes dealing with content standards in addition to structure standards. Explicitly. Knowing which standards (or lack of them) are in use in the source data and which are expected in the target schema. Planning for moving between them. This is an extremely interesting topic, and I personally would love to see more discussion about it.

Oh, and, for the record, I'm with Karen that one would want to be careful about putting lots of records for things like LII content into our MARC catalogs. My vision (imperfectly focused, unfortunately!) is that because the format (and the content standard that is normally used with it) doesn't describe this type of material well, and the systems in which we store and deliver our MARC records don't provide the sort of retrieval we might desire for these materials, our users would be better served by a layer on top of the catalog that also provides retrieval on other information sources better suited to describing these materials. This higher-level system would provide some basic searching but most importantly lead a user down into specific information sources that best meet his needs. We have lots of technologies and bits of applications that might be used for this purpose. I wonder what will emerge.

So what's up with RDF?

2005-07-06T21:16:00.000-05:00

Kevin Clarke posted on his blog last week some thoughts on the recent ALA conference and a session on metadata interoperability. A discussion has ensued from this about RDF, with commentary by Leigh Dodds and a follow-up post by Kevin. I've learned a great deal from this exchange. I've always felt that I was missing something with RDF, that I needed a discussion on a much more practical level than those I'd been exposed to in order to understand what it could do for me better than the tools I already use. I've heard smart people I like and respect make comments like those by Kevin, Bill Moen, Dorothea Salo, and Roy Tennant quoted in these blog postings, and felt a bit of comfort that I wasn't the only one who felt left out. But it's not enough to have company in the "huh?" camp - I want to understand. I want to be able to make a reasoned argument against RDF, or embrace it for tasks it does better (in my world) than other things. Yet I've never felt like I can do either of those things. For now, I'll follow discussions such as this one in order to slowly absorb all the angles.

And all of this banter reminds me I need to learn RelaxNG and finally figure out what the deal is with topic maps. Anybody have a few extra hours in their day they're willing to send my way? :-)

Addition of dates to existing name headings

2005-07-05T20:57:00.000-05:00

The Library of Congress Cataloging Policy and Support Office recently announced a review and request for comments on a potential change of policy regarding addition of dates to existing personal name headings. Currently, dates are only added in certain situations, and once a heading is established, dates are never added to it after the fact. Personal name headings are frequently created while an individual is alive, leading to headings such as (from the CPSO proposal):

100 1# $a Bernstein, Leonard, $d 1918-

This heading then was not changed when Bernstein died in 1990. The CPSO proposal notes that libraries, including LC, receive frequent comments and complaints from users regarding the "out of date" nature of headings of this sort.

In discussion of this policy on the AUTOCAT listserv, the question arose as to whether name authority files served to simply generate unique headings for an person, or if they served a wider biographical function. Certainly historically the former is true. But many, including the CPSO, are recognizing that increasingly we may be well served by delving into the latter. We have an opportunity here to become more useful and relevant to the wider information community. To take that opportunity might seem to be a no-brainer.

However, the current cataloging infrastructure makes the implementation of this change challenging, to say the least. As authority data is replicated in local catalogs and the shared environment, and most integrated library systems store actual heading strings in bibliographic records rather than pointers to authority records, changing a heading would then require notifying all libraries that a change has been made, propagating that change from one library to the rest, then continuting to propagate that change in every local system to all affected bibliographic records. Clearly this mechanism is anachronistic in today's networked world, where relational databases are so entrenched as to be considered almost quaint. I fully understand the practical implications of the CPSO implementing this policy. Yet I believe that it is the right thing to do. We as librarians simply must have a vision for what we're trying to accomplish, and work tirelessly towards that goal. While we must keep the practical considerations in mind, we can't let them dictate all of our other decisions. Let's set the policy to do the right thing, and insist on systems that support our goals.

Back from ALA

2005-06-28T22:38:00.000-05:00

ALA Annual in Chicago was the usual flurry of old friends, Powerpoint presentations, and exposure to topics new to me. The blogger's get-together put together by the It's all good folks and generously hosted by OCLC was certainly one of the highlights. I've been a bit tentative in promoting my blog to date, so it was nice to mingle with other bloggers and talk shop (and beyond!). Another major highlight was Kevin Clarke's presentation on XOBIS. Nice to finally meet you, Kevin!

I spent most of my time at ALA attending presentations I "had" to attend--those related to my daily work. I was able to spend a small amount of time expanding my horizons, but I wish I could have done more. And this schedule is without being involved in any ALA committees that meet during the conference. There is simply too much going on to take advantage of it all.

On another note: on the trip home I started reading, but didn't finish, Martha Yee's recent paper outlining a "MARC 21 Shopping List." I should hold any substantial comment until I finish the article, but so far I'm impressed. The approach of looking very precisely at the criticism of MARC and current cataloging practice to determine what exactly is being criticized, I believe, is long overdue. I do find myself thinking of counter-arguments to some of the conclusions, however. But intelligent discourse is absolutely what we should be striving for!

Coming out of the woodwork

2005-06-23T11:32:00.000-05:00

I've been noticing lately just how progressive librarians are. It gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside every time I see evidence of this phenomenon.

FRBR is a good example. A colleague of mine recently described FRBR as a "religion," and I think that's not entirely untrue. But I'm increasingly seeing rank-and-file librarians (not just us "digital" folks or special collections librarians who do things "differently" anyways, according to one popular perception) show an interest in it. These folks commonly just want to learn what it is and what it can do for them. They aren't interested in jumping on a bandwagon just to be there. Rather, they genuinely want to evaluate for themselves the value of the model to them and their users. Sure, there are now and will always be extremists on both sides of the issue. I know librarians who want nothing to do with FRBR, and I know others who insist nothing from today's bibliographic control practices will be of any use in five years. But thankfully most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

I see huge numbers of librarians willing to talk about their ideas, even if they represent a departure at some small or vast level from current practice. I see huge numbers of librarians taking analytical approaches to solving real access problems they deal with every day. I see huge numbers of librarians keeping the overall goals of access and preservation of intellectual output foremost in their minds as they look for solutions. I see huge numbers of librarians having lively, interesting, professional discussions about options for achieving these goals. I love my job.

DCMI & Bibliographic Description

2005-06-17T09:10:00.000-05:00

This week the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative published a new recommendation, "Guidelines for Encoding Bibliographic Citation Information in Dublin Core Metadata." I'm finding it to be a muddled mess of possibilities and examples with few real, clear guidelines for an implementer to follow.

The recommendation is described as emerging from the need for describing journal articles in DC. The recommendations tend to center around putting the information that was previously problematic (journal title, volume number, issue number, page range, etc.) within a bibliographicCitation refinement for dc:identifier, while getting the rest of the citation information from other parts of the DC record. "Optionally, but redundantly, these details may be included in the citation as well." This optional part has huge consequences for anyone using DC metadata to get to these citations. One could never know if the complete citation is present in the dc:identifier.bibliographicCitation element, or if one needs to look elsewhere for information to complete the citation. Also, it results in a situation where some of the data needed for this citation is clearly fielded (author in dc:creator, article title in dc:title, etc.), but the rest of it is not. This is hardly an elegant solution to the problem at hand.

Also, "there are no recommendations for providing bibliographic citations in simple Dublin Core." However, it is "suggested" that citation information be put in dc:identifier or dc:description. How is anybody suppposed to use DC for this purpose if the "experts" on it can't bring themselves to turn a "suggestion" into a "recommendation?" This document says to all of us out in metadata-land that there's a solution (actually, TWO solutions - identifier and description - choose between them randomly!), but the powers that be can't or won't formally endorse it, perhaps because it's viewed as a hack. This passive-aggressive "well, we see you have a problem and here are some possible ways to solve it on an official-looking document, but we're not going to tell you that we think any of these solutions are a good idea" crap is really starting to get on my nerves.

I'm also confused about something. bibliographicCitation is a refinement of dc:identifier, and therefore by the DC "dumb-down" rule is a type of identifier. The recommendation says, "dcterms:bibliographicCitation is an element refinement of dc:identifier, recognising that a bibliographic resource is effectively identified by its citation information." But then it goes on to say, "In Dublin Core Abstract Model terms the value of the dcterms:bibliographicCitation property is a value string, encoded according to a KEV ContextObject encoding scheme. It is not intended to be the resource identifier, which for a journal article would probably use an appropriate URI scheme such as DOI." So which is it? Is bibliographicCitation an identifier or not? Is the second quote using "identifier" to mean something different than dc:identifier without telling us? I'm willing to assume for now what I see as a contradiction here comes from my purely surface-level understanding of the DC Abstract model. But maybe not...

A gulf between research and practice

2005-06-13T12:16:00.000-05:00

I've observed, as have others, that there is often a large gap between "digital library research" and "digital library practice" (by some definition of those terms). I got a good taste of this at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries last week. At one session, an audience member asked the presenter if he had read this:

Nov. 2004, PhD dissertation, Marcos André Gonçalves, "Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies (5S): A Formal Digital Library Framework and Its Applications", http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-12052004-135923/

... as it related to the topic at hand. The presenter hadn't heard of it, and neither had I. But why hadn't I heard of it?!? This sort of work should absolutely be on any digital library practicioner's reading list, and any researcher in this area, be it computer science (as this one was) or LIS, should have some familiarity and ongoing discourse with practicioners. Both pure research and pure implementations of digital libraries are necessary, but that doesn't mean there is no middle ground, or that the two can't engage each other in a meaningful way. My work will be better for having read this research, and research will be better for having learned about what departments like mine produce.

I think one reason for this gulf is the differing definition of "library" held by different folks. But that's a post for another day.

Beyond silly...

2005-06-01T09:32:00.000-05:00

Ok. I'm not usually one to dismiss something out of hand as silly. I've definitely become in adulthood a "let's take a minute to look at all sides" kind of person. After that, I'll still tend to develop a strong opinion, but I like to believe I'm always willing to listen. That said, there are some things that I do have an immediate reaction to, consisting of me wanting to yell, "What in the world were you thinking?!?!" I had one of those moments stretched out over the last few days. Feel free to get me off my high horse and engage in real dialogue!

A post on Autocat last Friday asked about what to record in MARC 007 as the playing speed of a CD. The answer:

"Compact digital discs: Speed is measured in meters per second. This
is the distance covered on the disc's surface per second, and not the
number of revolutions.
f 1.4 m. per sec."

WHY, exactly, is this information important to be included in a MARC record? CDs and DVDs only play at one speed. I know that for analog discs (records, remember those?), one needs to know, for example, if it's a 45 or a 33 1/3, but not for the media currently under discussion! (And LP speeds are what they're *supposed* to be, not what they really should be to reproduce at pitch!) It strikes me very strongly as an anachronism, completely unnecessary in a bibliographic record for a CD created in 2005.

The conversation on Autocat then spun into a discussion of why it's not measured in revolutions per second, some technical details about how CD players work, etc. Interesting, certainly. But I'm a bit incredulous that the focus is on the method of measurement rather than the point of including that data in the first place! If and when CD players are historical artifacts, and all information on how they worked is lost, looking in MARC records and interpreting the very complex semantics of 007 is not going to be the revelation reconstructing the speed at which they should play. Even if we should be recording this information for posterity (value for dollar, anyone?), it doesn't have to be in every single bib record for a CD! We record this information at the expense of far more important data, such as analytics for individual musical works on the recording. Please, please, please! Let's step back and think about why we create these records in the first place. AACR3 (oops, RDA!) is trying to do this, but I fear it's not going nearly far enough.

Rant over. I do realize there are lots of practical problems we have with legacy data if we're going to make large-scale practice to cataloging changes. Let's work to solve those problems and not let them scare us off from doing anything. There are lots and lots of folks out there doing just this stepping back I'm pleading for. Good work, all of you! Let's do some more.

UPDATE! I get AUTOCAT in digest mode, and wrote the above based on messages received up to the morning of 6/1. In the digest I received 6/2, there are no less than TWO posters wondering what the heck this stuff is doing in a MARC record anyways. There's also continued endless discussion about linear velocity, how the CD measurements relate to tape media, how they relate to the "48x" speed advertised for CD-ROMs, etc. It's great that folks want to really understand these things, but I'd still argue that preferencing this sort of information over lots of other useful information isn't the right thing to do.

Z39.19 Revision

2005-05-25T16:15:00.000-05:00

Well, today is the deadline for comments to NISO on the new Z39.19 revision, and unfortunately I haven't had a chance to dig in far enough to make any comments useful to them. Blast. I did, however, open the document up today to look for something specific. In the course of that search, I came across this text:

8.3.3.2 Parts of Multiple Wholes
When a whole-part relationship is not exclusive to a pair
wholes, the name of the whole and its part(s) should not
they should be linked associatively rather than hierarchically
Carburetors, for example, are parts of machines other
relationship in this instance is cars RT carburetors.

I'm disappointed in this decision. In order to preserve a pure hierarchy (something cannot be a part of multiple wholes), some semantics are lost. The idea that a carburetor is a part of a car (as well as potentially a part of lots of other stuff) is lost by relegating it to an RT (associative relationship). Whole-part relationships appear in the document as one of three types of hierarchical relationships; therefore, it seems that by categorizing them here the authors were forced to make the decision to move a huge number of things commonly thought of as having a whole-part relationship to an associative relationship. We librarians just love hierarchy, don't we. Too bad the world is polyhierarchical. Looks like our information systems won't be able to catch up yet.

"In Search of the Single Search Box"

2005-05-23T14:59:00.000-05:00

Whew! It sure has been a while since I've posted. When starting this blog, finding the time to post on it was one of my major concerns. I'd been doing pretty well, but I recently hit a stretch where I was traveling more than home for about 6 weeks, and I moved in there as well! But I'm back now, and should be closer to home for a large portion of the summer. Here's to keeping up the blog while sitting on my new patio with a frosty beverage!

I heard an excellent presentation recently at the Digital Library Federation Spring Forum, which has been referenced recently on a library mailing list (WEB4LIB?). Staff at NC State have developed some methods for a single search box on the library's web site actually providing relevant information for all the many types of queries users type in that box no matter how much explanatory information indicating what resources that box searches is present on the page. The presentation was titled "In Search of the Single Search Box: Building a 'First Step' Library Search Tool." (Firefox users beware: the presentation is in HTML-ized Powerpoint and will look really strange in your browser!) Their video demo does an excellent job of illustrating the types of information needs to which the tool can respond. As the presentation suggests, this box doesn't search inside absolutely everything, but is intended to be a first step from which users can see some ideas and choose among them for continuing their journey.

As I recall (this is what I get for waiting this long to post on the topic...), the tool presents results in four major categories:

1) FAQ for the libraries
2) Library web pages
3) Links to perform the same search in some databases (the catalog, Academic Search Premier, list of journal titles, etc.)
4) Related subject categories

The FAQs meet needs where somebody wants to know the library hours or where the closest computer lab is. The library web pages results are Google-driven, so a page excerpt appears that a user might find helpful in selecting a result when they want some contextual information about a resource. The "search the collection" links make catalog or database search results an extra click away if that was the desired search, but that click is simply moved from the beginning of the process (click a catalog link on the home page, or, alternatively, take a few minutes to figure out which box on the front page to type in!) to this stage.

The "Browse Subjects" area, where a list of potentially relevant subjects is displayed, peaks my interest most about this project. The presentation didn't have a ton of information about where these links go and how the logic to develop them is created, and unfortunately I didn't have a chance to ask the NC State folks in person more about it. But from the presentation and the demo video, it looks like these links go to pathfinder-style pages where "selected" resources (selected how and by who would presumably be a local implementation decision) are displayed or linked. The presentation slides state that journal article titles and course descriptions are currently used to provide the connections between search terms and the pre-defined subjects. That's a great place to start! One can imagine a host of other options, including subject authority files, those same library web pages indexed elsewhere, and periodic looks at search logs for this box. Oh, and I see now one of the final slides in the presentation talks about some other sources - I'd forgotten that! I find the huge amount of potential here very exciting.

This tool isn't currently deployed on the NC State Libraries Web site, but I hope to see it soon. I don't recall if they plan to release any of their source code, but it sure would be nice if this was possible. I'll be keeping an eye on developments in this area.

Oh, and by the way. Never. Moving. Again. :-)

Cataloging sound recordings

2005-05-07T14:20:00.000-05:00

There has been a fascinating discussion on the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) email list over the last week on cataloging sound recordings (look for threads starting with "database template" and "cataloging," then continuing here). The ARSC community is wonderfully diverse, including audiophiles, librarians, archivists, and others just interested in learning about sound recordings. The thread started out with an announcement of a database template for recording information about sound recordings; someone solving an immediate problem and wanting to share their solution with others. It's expanded greatly to become somewhat of a religious discussion on the relative merits and problems of MARC/AACR2 cataloging.

I can't help but feel that, like a great many discussions of this sort, the participants are talking past each other. One point that has been mentioned but perhaps not strongly enough, is that the user experience problems with library cataloging is heavily a problem of the use the search system makes of the data and how it's presented to end-users. Ralph Papakhian, one of the premier music catalogers in the country, who I like and respect a great deal, has made the point in this thread that the data elements some respondents mention as wanting to record are in fact recordable in MARC. And if anyone would know and can explain this to others, it's Ralph. But these elements, even though they're there, are often not accessible to users. For example, MARC has fields for date of composition and coded instrumentation of a recording or score. But few if any library systems index or display this data. So catalogers rarely enter them, which provides less incentive for systems to use them, which provides less incentive for catalogers to use them, which provides less incentive for systems to use them...

But I believe systems aren't the only problem. There are lots of little things I think MARC/AACR2 could do better. However, the biggest, and mostly implicit in this discussion, difference in what MARC does and what some of the other participants in this thread look for in sound recording cataloging, is the library focus on the carrier over the content. Catalogers discuss this issue frequently, but it hasn't been brought up explicitly in this thread. Audiophiles absolutely are interested in the recording as a whole--its matrix number, sound engineers, etc. But they are also equally interested in the musical works on the recording, what personnel are connected with which piece, timings of tracks, etc. MARC has places for these things, but they are relegated to second-class status. Catalogers know and tout the benefits of structure and authority control in information retrieval. But when it comes to the contents of a bibliographic item, we apply none of these principles in the MARC environment. Contents notes are largely unstructured (and what structure is possible is rarely used and keeps changing!), don't make use of name or title authority control, and in many cases aren't indexed in library systems.

As pointed out in this thread, creating this content-level information is extremely expensive. But the networked world has the potential to change that. Much of this information has been created in structured form outside of the library environment, by record companies, retailers, and enthusiasts, but we don't make use of it. Right now, it's difficult to make use of it because our systems don't know how to talk to each other. It will take a great many baby steps, but I hope we can start down the road towards changing that.

Matt Snyder of NYPL, who I met at MLA this year and was extrememly impressed with, has made the point in this thread that MARC records (and, by extension, library catalogs) and discographies have different purposes. This is definitely true in today's environment. Library catalogs are primarily for locating things, and discographies have more of a research bent. But I feel strongly, and this email discussion seems to support this view, that the distinction is largely artificial and is becoming less relevant as information retrieval systems continue to evolve. More sharing of data between systems will hopefully result in fewer systems to consult by end-users. That's certainly my goal!

Known-item vs. unknown-item searching

2005-05-05T20:24:00.000-05:00

A series of project assignments and offhand conversations recently have me thinking about how well (or how poorly) our current library-ish systems support users diving in and simply exploring what the system has to offer. On the whole, most of our discovery systems focus on known-item searching, where a user comes to the system with something specific in mind that they want to find: books by a certain author, a movie with a specific title, recordings by a particular artist. These information needs are of course common, and they are in fact the focus of Cutter's first objective of the catalog.

But look more closely at c) in that first objective - we should provide access to an item when the subject of it is known. So what exactly does that mean? Most current systems in a library environment fulfil that by making text in a subject-ish field keyword searchable. When I do a subject search in a system of that sort, I get back records that have subjects containing the word I typed in. But how do users know what the words in those subjects are? Some (certainly not all!) systems provide the user a way to look at a list of subjects used in that system. The user then is expected to locate all subjects of interest in that list, then construct a properly-formulated Boolean query OR-ing those subjects together. I'll be perfectly frank and state that I believe strongly that this is silly to expect of any user in this day and age, even an "expert" user such as a reference librarian. Let's use the computing power we have!

And what about these of Cutter's objectives?

2. To show what the library has

e. On a given and related subjects

f. In a given kind of literature

Mechanisms to achieve these goals, in support of unknown-item searching, fall far short of the sophistication we provide for known-item searching. We don't provide our users with ways to look around, to explore, to just see what we've got. If I read a book that inspires me to read some more on the topic, I go to my public library's catalog, find the book I liked, and click on a subject heading (from a maximum of three!) that seems like it might be promising. And what I find a huge majority of the time is a browse screen of LCSH headings, each with three or fewer hits. The topic of interest to me tends to be the first part, but the browse index is a seemingly endless list of geographic subdivisions of the topic, interspersed with other subdivisions such as "juvenile," and, in particularly poor systems, interspersed with other headings starting with the same word as the term before the first subdivision.

What we need are systems that do an exponentially better job of starting out from an interesting thing and finding more things like it. I personally think postcoordinated subject headings would be a major advance in this area, but they're certainly not enough. Systems that map lead-in terms to authorized terms, and expand search results to include narrower terms than a matched broader term are also necessary. One can also imagine other mechanisms to build that "like" relationship, based on information retrieval research, folksonomies, and transaction logs.

I suppose my point in the end is that it's simple to build a system that searches the text of pre-created metadata fields for an entered query string. It's much more difficult to build systems that allow users to truly explore. We often forget how important that exploration function is. We look at our search logs, and see mostly known-item searches, so we think that's what we need to focus on. Of course we see that - it's what our systems are designed around! But what would happen if we started to provide relevant results to subject and other unknown-item searches? I'd bet a whole lot of money that we'd see a huge increase in unknown-item searching. Sure, for some types of materials, known-item searching may very well be the primary means of access users need. But let's at least look at the alternative, and work with actual users to see how we can provide them with exploratory functions we don't currently supply.

FRBR Workshop

2005-05-03T19:46:00.000-05:00

Wow! Wow, wow, wow, and WOW. I'm at the end of day 2 of a 2.5 day FRBR Workshop at OCLC, and I've been continuously blown away by the activity going on here. The workshop is supposed to be in large part a working session to start thinking about what revisions to the original FRBR report would look like. I was skeptical of that goal coming in, seeing as 75 people are here, but I've been extremely pleasantly surprised. If I've even been in a room with as many bright, engaged, and interesting people before, I didn't appreciate it at the time. Within the discussion, I find just the right balance of theory and practice, of idealism and realism. There's a very clear vision of what a bibliographic future could be, and a great many ideas for ways we can reach there in manageable steps.

The workshop itself is a mixture of presentations on specific topics and time to just talk. Some presentations don't at first glance look to be FRBR related, but every single one really does have a definite impact on how FRBR should develop in the future, either as a conceptual model or as some sort of implementation model based on the conceptual one. Some presentation slides are on the workshop site now, and hopefully all will eventually be. But the presentation slides in no way do the actual presentations and the resulting large- and small-group discussions justice. I feel more confident than at most meetings of this type that the discussions will have real results, in the form of writings and implementations. I sincerely hope so - many people out there are interested in this topic, and the best thing we can do now is share, share, and share some more.

Newsweek article on "tagging"

2005-04-28T19:28:00.000-05:00

In the April 18, 2005, issue of Newsweek, "The Technologist" column is about "tagging," sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, that collect users labels for things. These "things" can be absolutely anything - the great thing about the Internet is that communities can appear almost instantaneously around anything at all. These labels can then be used to generate a folksonomy. There's a lot of buzz out there about folksonomies right now on the Web, and it's well-deserved. It's cool stuff. It provides such a great sense of how REAL PEOPLE (who?) think about things.

I'm enough of a skeptic to think it's not practical for libraries to switch wholesale to folksonomy-type endeavors for subject access, but surely there are ways in which we can capitalize on the wealth of relevant information being generated out there. I've been interested for some time in incorporating user-contributed to a project I work on. My plugs for this to date have used Wikis as examples - I think I'm going to have to add folksonomies to my spiel!

AMeGA Automatic Metadata Generation final report

2005-04-26T19:43:00.000-05:00

I've just finished reading (reading, what's that? haven't done it in a while...) the final report from the AMeGA (Automatic Metadata Generation Applications) Project. I filled out the survey on which part of this report was based, and I have to admit, I wasn't optimistic about the project. The survey referenced that it was meant for text objects primarily, but as someone who works heavily in non-text environments, I found this disappointing. But now that it's out, overall I think the report has done a good job outlining the issues involved.

Of particular interest to me is Section 8, where proposed functionalities are listed for metadata generation applications. There are a number of very good suggestions here, often focusing on streamlining the metadata generation proceess - making use of automation when current technologies perform well, and making the human-generated part of the process easier. I definitely agree with the report that there is a huge disconnect today between research in this area and production systems. There is very interesting research in this area going on, but production systems don't yet make good use of it. Right now, we still need humans in the process. I'm not opposed on principle to changing this, but that's today's reality.

The report characterizes survey respondents as "optimists' and "skeptics," based on their projections of future abilities to automate metadata creation. The report quotes several skeptics as proclaiming it simply not, under any circumstances, to completely automate metadata creation. I'd like to think of myself on the fence with regard to this issue. I don't like to say "never" but I do see that generation of certain types of metadata elements will be easier to automate than others. The more we can automate, great. I also understand the problem with evaluating automatic metadata generation applications. Few people agree on approprate subject headings, etc., so how do we know if a generated heading is appropriate? In my opinion, the more we can expose people to the results of generated metadata, the better we can evaluate it, and the better these systems will eventually get.

ANSI/NISO Z39.19 draft revision

2005-04-20T18:34:00.000-05:00

Whew! I'm finally back from 3 trips in 3 weeks, and have slogged through enough email to think about the blog again. I had lots of interesting developments waiting for me when I returned - new blog fodder!

ANSI/NISO has released a draft revision of Z39.19, now titled "Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies." I haven't had a chance to read the document yet, but it sure looks interesting! From the table of contents, I'm glad to see a small section on synonym rings, as we encountered these not working the way we expected in an implementation of OracleText. At first glance, the scope of the standard seems to have expanded. There are sub-sections of the "principles" section on ambiguity and facet analysis that I don't recall being in the existing standard (but don't quote me on that!). I'm extremely interested in the section on displaying controlled vocabularies. In my opinion this is the biggest barrier to end users of systems using controlled vocabularies today - displays that completely separate the vocabulary from the search interface, requiring users to know of their existence, understand their structure, and take the time to consult them! I look forward to seeing if this draft standard can make them more understandable.

"Authority control in AACR3"

2005-04-10T18:20:00.000-05:00

I recently read a paper by Kierdre Kiorgaard and Ann Huthwaite that I heard about on Catalogablog, entitled "Authority control in AACR3." The paper describes the efforts underway to address the issue of authority control explicitly in AACR3, in a manner more explicit than in AACR2. The statement in this paper I find most interesting is this:

"The definition that is likely to be included in AACR3 is: 'the means by which entries for a specific entity are collocated under a single, unique authorized form of a heading; access is provided to that authorized form from variant forms; and relationships between entities are expressed.'"

Authority control for names certainly fulfils the collocating function described here, and, conversely, a disambiguation function by creating different headings for different people with similar or identical names. But in today's information systems it can and should fulfil another function - helping users to decide if the name heading displayed to them is for the individual they're interested in. But I believe only the first goal is served by a system where the uniqueness of a person is represented only by the form of the heading. Name authority files also don't completely disambiguate names; there are many cases of duplicate names in the authority file when no information other than what appears on a publication is available to the cataloger.

I can't help but wonder if we're missing an opportunity here to move to a structure that can more easily fulfil both goals. Information that would help a user decide if a person is the one they're interested in is frequently added to a name heading, but not always. If all of that information, plus any more that may be of use, is made available to the user in a flexible manner, rather than just the data necessary to disambiguate one name from another, the second goal would be much more easily served. Perhaps this is not the time for this sort of change to be made. I do think we as librarians and system designers should be open to changes of this sort, continuing to focus primarily on the task we want to accomplish, and leaving the mechanics of accomplishing that goal as a later step.

LJ April 1 Retrospective

2005-04-09T08:28:00.000-05:00

The Library Journal April 1 issue has been archived.

April Fools!

2005-04-01T18:32:00.000-05:00

Be sure to check out the April 1 edition of Library Journal. I hope this gets archived somewhere. What a hoot!

Random thoughts on XOBIS

2005-03-27T15:35:00.000-05:00

Kevin Clarke, one of the authors of XOBIS, kindly left a comment on my recent blog post on the topic. It shamed me into returning to the XOBIS general overview document I peeked at briefly when originally writing about it. I've now given the entire document a quick read. I can't claim to have an in-depth understanding of it at this point; it certainly took me several readings of the FRBR report and a decent amount of time thinking about modeling different things in FRBR before I felt I could really say anything intelligent about it. Nevertheless, I have a few initial impressions on XOBIS.

The most obvious difference I see between XOBIS and FRBR is that XOBIS attempts to be a model that can describe all of knowledge, while FRBR limits itself to modelling bibliographic relationships. In a practical sense, for recording bibliographic data (and this certainly isn't the only possible use of XOBIS!) this means that XOBIS explicitly handles entities that represent in a bibliographic environment creators or subjects of bibliographic items (and, in FRBR, other Group 1 entities), currently residing in a relatively unstructured way in name and subject authority files. FRBR, on the other hand considers only briefly its Group 2 ("person" and "corporate body") and Group 3 ("concept," "object," "event," and "place") entities, focusing instead on Group 1 entities.

Relationships between entities is a key feature of XOBIS; they are also a bit confusing to me on my first read. My initial impression is that the relationships as specified focus more on subject-type relationships rather than relationships among bibliographic items. My reading is that the XOBIS definition of work is much closer to what we currently consider a bibliographic item than FRBR's work. The discussion and examples in the overview document talk about versions of works and how they are related, but I saw much less about the "accidental" sort of relationship a FRBR-ish work (as its expressed in a specific manifestation) would have to another expressed work on the same manifestation, for example, two symphonies appearing on the same CD. It would be an interesting excercise to map out how the XOBIS model would handle this sort of situation, where the symphony itself is the entity of primary interest to a majority of end-users rather than the specific performance or the title of the CD on which it appears.

XOBIS comes out of the Medlane project of the Lane Medical Library at Stanford. I wonder what effect medical materials have had on the development of the XOBIS model. I know my focus on musical materials in various projects, most notably Variations2, certainly strongly affects my thinking about FRBR and related efforts. I'm sure that's obvious from my earlier question wondering how XOBIS would handle a situation that the Variations2 model is designed around.

There are also some very interesting items in the report's bibliography, including a project mailing list (renamed since the version listed here, and looks low-traffic). Time for citation chasing!

Postcoordinated subject headings

2005-03-23T15:25:00.000-05:00

There has been an interesting discussion on the Autocat mailing list over the last two weeks (well it's died down now, but I haven't gotten around to writing about it yet...) with the subject "The inadequacies of subject headings." The discussion has centered on a few posters questioning whether the LCSH-style focus on precoordinated headings is really a good idea. Several posters proposed (not all by name) postcoordinated headings as more useful, both for end-users and for catalogers. More than one person mentioned the large amount of training required for catalogers to effectively apply headings from a precoordinated system.

I was struck in the discussion by the widespread lack of big-picture thinking about the issue, and the corresponding lack of awareness of the many initiatives going on in this area. There were certainly some members contributing to the discussion who have spent some time thinking about this issue, but many seemed afraid of the idea. I got the sense that many folks were trained on LCSH, that's what they use, and why in the world would they want to use anything else? When posts mentioned specific postcoordinated schemes (FAST, AAT, etc.) they tended to be mentioned as something the person had heard of but never used and didn't fully understand. I'm generalizing a bit here, but that tone was definitely present.

I don't know that I have anything concrete to say other than that I've noticed a trend of resistance to non-LCSH subject systems, but I do think that as catalogers are increasingly being asked to be metadata experts (and by that I mean metadata in a broad sense, not just traditional cataloging practice!) they'll more and more need to know about what vocabularies are out there. A huge part of my job as a Metadata Librarian is choosing among the various data structure and data content standards available for a given implementation. We're definitely past the days when one size (MARC/AACR/LCSH) fits all. The more all sorts of librarians learn about alternatives and can make good decisions about when they're appropriate to use, the better off our whole profession will be.

"We're not competing with Google"

2005-03-20T10:50:00.000-05:00

I was in a meeting recently that had as an agenda item Google Print and its effect on our current library services. (I seem to be having this meeting a lot lately.) I was by far the youngest in the room and by far the attendee working most frequently in areas outside of "traditional" librianship (whatever that means). I intentionally spent most of the meeting listening rather than talking. One statement in particular made by someone in the room struck me and started me thinking a great deal: "We're not competing with Google."

I didn't respond to it at the time, but the statement has been churning around in my head ever since. Whether or not it's true depends, of course, on what one means by "competing." If we mean, "attempting to do exactly the same thing," then that's pretty much true. While we're both in the information business, the way in which we approach it is fundamentally different. And that's OK. But if we mean "fighting for the attention of users" or "fighting for the perception that we provide valuable services worth funding," then maybe we are competing with Google. The differences between libraries' missions and the way in which we go about achieving them is important to us, but perhaps it's too subtle for a large proportion of the population. Certainly there are lots of folks out there that think Google can and will replace libraries, even if we think they're wrong.

So what does this mean? Well, I think it means that libraries need to continue to promote what we do and why. Not in the preachy Michael Gorman style proclaiming from on high to the masses that libraries are the cornerstone of high civilization and those who disagree aren't worth thinking about, but rather by building and delivering services that meet our users' needs. In the rapidly changing information environment, this means we do need to be rethinking how we do a lot of what we do. Let's remember our core principles of preservation, collocation, and free access, and find new ways to implement these in today's environment and for today's diverse users.

Inquiring Librarian

So I had a dream last night where Lorcan Dempsey had a really good idea that I want to riff on

Visualization of the Metadata Universe

Completely backwards

Thoughts on FRSAD

DLF Aquifer Metadata Working Group "Lessons Learned" report available

Must Watch! Michael Edson: "Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person"

Google vs. Semantic Web

Wow.

This week's revalation

I couldn't resist

LC statement on RDA

A small, interesting, and potentially more powerful than it is now, example of user-contributed metadata

Scholars and practitioners

Woohoo!

Metadata interoperability

Musings on RDA, LC Working Group Report, and various other random things

A bright future for bibliographic control

Google Book Search and... LCSH?

Catalog vs. search engine - or is it?

Can LIS education learn something from CS?

Cutting through the rhetoric about subject headings

Everything I know about librarianship I learned from Star Wars

Re-imagining browsing

Partnership announced between CIC libraries and Google

DC and RDA - the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

ALA Draft Digitization Principles

Weighing in on speaker compensation

Staying out of it, for now

Modular Vocabularies

I *love* this

I *love* this

True confessions

Children's Book Week

More structured metadata

Thinking bigger than fixing typos

Grant proposals

Librarians in the Media

On "authority"

What about dirty OCR?

No more magic bullets

A quest for better metadata

Finding new perspectives

An RDF Revelation

Whither book scanning

On the theoretical and the practical

Thesauri and controlled vocabularies

"Orienteering" as an information seeking strategy

techessence.info launched

Library digitization efforts

On metadata "experts"

What exactly is the "catalog"?

RSS feed gone

More of four

FRBRizing Find in a Library

Back to the Basics

Copyright for Sound Recordings

Next-generation catalogs

User-contributed metadata failure?

Britannica vs. Wikipedia and a parallel in cataloging?

Ways of thinking and ways of representing

Out of the loop

DLF MODS Implementation Guidelines available for public comment and review

Learning cool new things

True folksonomic thesauri?

Hierarchical catalog records

You know you go to too many conferences when...

Separating data entry from data structure

Museums and user-contributed metadata

User-contributed metadata

The more things change...

The next big thing in searching?

Dangers of assumptions

Google Print and Fair Use

Musings on the state of coyright

A billion and one, a billion and two...

Keeping up with technology

To each their own "metadata"

Music subject headings

Structure standards and content standards

I love this

I love this