Metadata Matters

Month: December 2008

  • LCSH.info–gone but not forgotten

    The library blogosphere is reacting with shock [1, 2], anger [3], and disappointment [4, 5, 6, 7] at the news that LC has asked (as in “ordered”) Ed Summers to take down his wonderful experimental LCSH.info service. It’s not entirely clear why they did this, and Ed has been carefully circumspect about the reasons. LCSH.info was a project that Ed had accomplished largely on his own initiative, and despite the fact that he certainly had some important support within the institution for building it, he too readily takes responsibility for not gathering the broad institutional support that appears to be a necessity for sustainability at LC. Still, it’s easy to speculate that others were embarrassed by it (as in “embarrassed that Ed could do it, and yet there’s still no official service”), particularly given the fact that the domain was not “loc.gov.”

    LC has been “planning” (or so they say) to create just such a service since well before the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control but we’ve seen no real evidence of it, except for what Ed has done. I was one of the people who spoke to that group during its fact-finding year, making the point that the vocabularies that LC manages for the library community (LCSH, LCNAF, LCSAF, etc.) should be available as web services for the benefit of the that community (I was assured then that such plans were afoot.) LC could have wisely allowed Ed to maintain the site until such a service was in place and then Ed could have made a simple change that would have redirected lcsh.info URIs to the official service, and all would have been well. Instead, LC has let the world know that its management is technically and politically clueless as it destroys, without even an official announcement, a service that many organizations, regardless of disclaimers of its experimental nature, had welcomed and some had come to depend on. This had roughly the equivalent impact on the confidence of the Linked Data community in LC that letting Lehman Brothers fail had on the investment markets.

    Although LC frequently cites the legal necessity to do cost recovery on the vocabularies, their poorly-supported subscription services are a constant source of annoyance for those who must rely on them, and if they were really expecting to recover significant costs it’s probable that the group that supports that effort would be adequately staffed, which it isn’t. (This same lack of adequate support was the likely reason that the ALCTS continuing education workshops are now freely available, but that’s another story.) In short, we’ve seen little evidence that there are serious efforts to replace these outdated services with the web services that the Working Group and the library community have called for—except, of course, the late LCSH.info service.

    I’ll make the point again that I made to the Working Group in 2007—these are vocabularies that were not created solely by LC—particularly the Name Authority File (LCNAF) which has seen significant investment by the library community through the NACO Project (Name Authority Cooperative, please note), and the Series Authority File (LCSAF) now being built entirely by the community since LC unilaterally withdrew from the creation of series authorities in 2006. It was that decision, clearly made without adequate consultation with anyone outside LC (or many within—I happened to be visiting a colleague there a day or so after the announcement, and most of the staff were surprised, too), which resulted in the furor that led to the creation of the Working Group in the first place. But obviously, lessons were not learned from that debacle, and we’re back at the barricades, frustrated yet again.

    Contrast this with the recent post on the LC blog (posted on 12/11) announcing the report on the Flickr Pilot, one of the most innovative projects LC has done in a very, very long time. The report, ironically entitled “For the Common Good” (summary available) describes the overwhelmingly positive response to the project, and how LC used the information provided by viewers to enhance their information on the photographs. Most telling is this snippet from the report on the project taken from the LC staff newsletter and included in the blog post:

    “The popularity and impact of the pilot have been remarkable,” said Michelle Springer, project manager for digital initiatives in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, who said total views reached 10 million in October. The site is averaging 500,000 views a month, she said, adding that Flickr members have marked 79 percent of the photos as “favorites.”

    “The report recommends that the Library of Congress continue to participate in The Commons and explore other Web 2.0 communities.”

    Clearly by “other Web 2.0 communities” the writer could not mean the library community, which has been stymied for far too long by LC’s reluctant and too often less-than-competent leadership, and are still some distance from being a “Web 2.0 community.”

    What we see here is an institution with no coherent strategy for moving forward, despite a year long study of the issues, and clear recommendations for action. This is an institution where decisions are still being made by one hand that the other hand may not know about or have been consulted about—decisions that are ill-considered and fray LC’s credibility and its relationship with the rest of the library community (not to mention the Semantic Web community). This decision may well draw attention away from the other supposed library leadership institution—OCLC—caught making its own self-serving decisions without reference to its members real needs and interests, though members pay for the records that make the monopoly possible.

    As the New Year fast approaches, perhaps we need a resolution that says: “Stop expecting the 8000 lb. Gorillas to lead us; start leading ourselves.”

    [1] Jenn Riley
    [2] Tim Spalding
    [3] Karen Coyle
    [4] Andy Powell
    [5] David Bigwood [Corrected]
    [6] Richard Wallis
    [7] Dan Chudnov

  • Hearing Voices

    As I mentioned in my first blog post, I’ve been doing a regular column for Technicalities, entitled “View from a Parallel Universe” for the past couple of years. It’s been useful, and I’ve enjoyed it, but clearly the kinds of things I like to talk about need, um, a less leisurely publication schedule (I just received the Sept./Oct. Issue, including a column I wrote over the summer). I’ve generally put my columns up on Cornell’s eCommons IR soon after I submit them, primarily to avoid forgetting that last step. Anyway, once it goes on eCommons it gets indexed and people find it, then sometimes blog about what I’ve said. I’ve tried to wait until the piece comes out in print to say anything about it myself, but as the publisher is again pretty seriously behind, and I’ve sent in my resignation as a columnist, it’s time to roll my eyes and give up the illusion that it’s not “out” yet.

    As Karen Schneider pointed out on Free Range Librarian, my last column (entitled “Getting There”), includes some concerns I have about how OCLC’s new record reuse policy, coupled with their silence about plans to implement RDA, constitute an additional risk for libraries planning to implement RDA. It’s best read after reading the various blog posts about the policy, especially Karen’s, a gold star of a blog post indeed.

    I think we’ve been seriously let down by the institutions that we’ve relied upon to lead us, provide services to enable us to share information and increase the efficiency and usefulness of our individual efforts. I don’t think most of us have fully internalized this yet; we still expect these institutions to live up to their ideals, be exemplary community members, and use the brainpower of their staffs to chart a course that we can understand, respect and rely on. We’ve tended to be far too passive about this, in my opinion, and the chickens are coming home to roost.

    Unlike some others who’ve noticed that the changes in our technology environment have been leading inexorably to serious strains in the cooperative sharing environment built up over the decades, I’m feeling moderately optimistic. The worst thing we could do is cling unthinkingly to the comfort and warmth of the familiar, and not look clear-eyed into the issues emerging from these strains and changes. I don’t think we’ll ever again be as tightly coupled as we were when we only shared information amongst ourselves and we looked for efficiencies in our own workflows to keep us viable within our own institutions.

    Looking ahead, we’ll have to be more actively involved in looking for solutions to our problems instead of sitting back and waiting for someone else to come up with them so we can continue to be followers. We’re seeing some of that happening already, as new players develop open source software, push for open linked data solutions, forge connections with the Semantic Web communities, etc.

    Let your voices be heard on these issues.

  • Show me the data!

    Maybe it’s just me, but I like to be able to look at data “in the raw,” without some developer deciding for me what I’m allowed to see, and how I’m allowed to see it. There was an old story I used to tell about visiting a vendor booth at ALA Exhibits some years ago, where a marketing guy got me extremely irritated by not getting why I wanted to see a naked MARC version of some record he was using to illustrate a point he was trying to make. The punch line of the story was that I would characterize his reaction to the request as making me feel like I’d asked to see child pornography. The line always got a laugh, particularly in highly geeky librarian circles (which meant something quite different 10 or 15 years ago, but never mind).

    The point was, of course, that in order to evaluate what a system was doing with your data, you had to be able to look at the underlying data, and follow it through whatever process was in place to manipulate or use it in some way. Of course, “naked MARC data” really meant “scantily clad MARC data,” because few of us really spent much time with unformatted MARC, in whatever flavor our system used, though I remember on many occasions being shown marked up printouts of NOTIS EBCDIC, and working with a programmer to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it.

    I was reminded of this when hearing a developer (who shall remain nameless) say recently that “of course you’d never show anyone the FRBR structure” in an RDA based system. “Why the hell not?,” I responded (though perhaps the response was in my head and I was actually more polite—reports vary). There was a condescension in that comment that made me bristle, and I remembered the stories of why the early BALLOTS system (which I used for a mercifully short time) didn’t use MARC tags. The icky mnemonics that BALLOTS substituted were there because some genius decided that librarians (mostly women, of course) would never be comfortable with numeric tags. I don’t know whether the story is true, but it sure fits with the sexist attitudes of the time.

    It’s a bit depressing that this sort of thing keeps coming up. Now that I’m older and even crankier than I was when I first encountered this attitude, I have even less patience with the idea that I might want to be protected from angle brackets, namespaces and whatever it is that is the is the special purview of the people who program. Show me the data—I can handle it.

    [Disclaimer–this isn’t about you Jon!]

  • At NELINET on Friday …

    Yesterday I did a long program for NELINET, entitled “Trepidation or Anticipation?: The Future of Cataloging and Catalogers.” This topic has been a theme of mine for some time, and I’d been invited to do this program after doing a similar, though shorter, one at the Massachusetts Library Association in the spring. The response to the initial announcement was gratifyingly strong, and we ended up with an audience of about 55, including one logged in from Missouri.

    I admit to coming into these sessions with an expectation that I’m going to have to win over people to the “anticipation” side of things—I suppose some of that derives from the skepticism I still hear online (a few loud voices predominating, I will admit). The group was quick to reassure me that they weren’t by any means as resistant to the changes washing over us as I had anticipated—they “got it,” were ready to hear what they had to do to make it happen. They were a great audience, asked good questions and listened to the answers, then asked some more questions. But I’m going to have to change my approach somewhat, I can see that.

    I was interested to hear from one participant that it was the reference librarians in her shop who were the most resistant to change. Every time something new was added to the catalog, be it book jackets, tags or reviews, the front desk folks wanted it eliminated—deemed it “confusing.” I’d never heard this, and questioned her after the session—did she think this was an anomaly in her library or more a wide spread phenomenon? She didn’t know, but noted that it was generally those who’d been around the longest who were the most resistant. As someone having a birthday ending in a zero in a few weeks, I wasn’t happy to hear that (though sadly not surprised).

    One of the participants questioned me about Heidi Hoermann’s presentation to the OLAC/MOUG Conference in Cleveland this past September. This presentation, which predicted the death of RDA and the rebirth of AACR2, took the lists and the library blogosphere by storm when it first hit Slideshare. Though I’ve also criticized the JSC publicly myself, and don’t necessarily disagree with many of Heidi’s points, I think she’s way off base concluding that because of the acknowledged flaws, RDA is dead. I find it disturbing that someone who’s teaching the next generation of librarians has so thoroughly missed some of the important work going on around RDA (particularly the work of the DCMI/RDA Task Group, which I’m co-leading), and then focuses primarily on the failings of the JSC process in concluding that RDA is dead. I admit to occasionally getting far too adamant when commenting on this particular point of view, but it disturbs me greatly.

    I’m wondering if this change I’m starting to see—from trepidation to anticipation—has implications for how we think about training catalogers for RDA. I’m quite sure that, before we train, we need to prepare catalogers for the training itself by giving them a more general introduction to what has changed about their mission. I’m finding that as I do these presentations, I’m starting to see what works, and what doesn’t. I’ll try to keep posting on this because I think it’s critically important that we not make too many simple assumptions about how this training ought to proceed, and miss the boat entirely.