What exactly is the "catalog"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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...

...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

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

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

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...

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.