A quest for better metadata

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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"?

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.