Metadata Matters

Category: ALA Conferences

  • What’s this Jane-athon thing?

    Everyone is getting tired of the sage-on-the-stage style of preconferences, so when Deborah Fritz suggested a hackathon (thank you Deborah!) to the RDA Dev Team, we all climbed aboard and started thinking about what that kind of event might look like, particularly in the ALA Midwinter context. We all agreed: there had to be a significant hands-on aspect to really engage those folks who were eager to learn more about how the RDA data model could work in a linked data environment, and, of course, in their own home environment.

    We’re calling it a Jane-athon, which should give you a clue about the model for the event: a hackathon, of course! The Jane Austen corpus is perfect to demonstrate the value of FRBR, and there’s no lack of interesting material to look at– media materials, series, spin-offs of every description–in addition to the well known novels. So the Jane-athon will be partially about creating data, and partially about how that data fits into a larger environment. And did you know there is a Jane Austen bobblehead?

    We think there will be a significant number of people who might be interested in attending, and we figured that getting the world out early would help prospective participants make their travel arrangements with attendance in mind. Sponsored by ALA Publishing, the Jane-athon will be on the Friday before the midwinter conference (the traditional pre-conference day), and though we don’t yet have registration set up, we’ll make sure everyone knows when that’s available. If you think, as we do that this event will be the hit of Midwinter, be sure to watch for that announcement, and register early! If the event is successful, you’ll be seeing others in subsequent ALA conferences.

    So, what’s the plan and what will participants get out of it?

    The first thing to know is that there will be tables and laptops to enable small groups to work together for the ‘making data’ portion of the event. We’ll be asking folks who have laptops they can bring to Chicago to plan on bringing theirs. We’ll be using the latest version of a new bibliographic metadata editor called RIMMF (“RDA In Many Metadata Formats”–not yet publicly available–but soon. Watch for it on the TMQ website). We encourage interested folks to download the current beta version and play with it–it’s a cool tool and really is a good one to learn about.

    In the morning, we’ll form small cataloging groups and use RIMMF to do some FRBRish cataloging, starting from MARC21 and ending up with RDA records exported as RDF Linked Data. In the afternoon we’ll all take a look at what we’ve produced, share our successes and discoveries, and discuss the challenges we faced. In true hackathon tradition we’ll share our conclusions and recommendations with the rest of the library community on a special Jane-athon website set up to support this and subsequent Jane-athons.

    Who should attend?

    We believe that there will be a variety of people who could contribute important skills and ideas to this event. Catalogers, of course, but also every flavor of metadata people, vendors, and IT folks in libraries would be warmly welcomed. But wouldn’t tech services managers find it useful? Oh yes, they’d be welcomed enthusiastically, and I’m sure their participation in the discussion portion of the event in the afternoon will bring out issues of interest to all.

    Keep in mind, this is not cataloging training, nor Toolkit training, by any stretch of the imagination. Neither will it be RIMMF training or have a focus on the RDA Registry, although all those tools are relevant to the discussion. For RIMMF, particularly, we will be looking at ways to ensure that there will be a cadre of folks who’ve had enough experience with it to make the hands-on portion of the day run smoothly. For that reason, we encourage as many as possible to play with it beforehand!

    Our belief is that the small group work and the discussion will be best with a variety of experience informing the effort. We know that we can’t provide the answers to all the questions that will come up, but the issues that we know about (and that come up during the small group work) will be aired and discussed.

  • Wake-up Call for CC:DA

    Presentations on innovative ways to gather data outside the library silo are happening all over ALA–generally hosted by committees and interest groups using speakers already planning to be at the conference. A great example of the kind of presentation I’m talking about was the Sunday presentation sponsored by the ALCTS CaMMS Cataloging & Classification Research Interest Group produced by the ProMusicaDB project, with founder Christy Crowl and metadata librarian Kimmy Szeto. They provided a veritable feast of slides and stories, all of them illustrating the new ways that we’ll all be operating in the very near future. Their slides should be available on the ALCTS Cataloging and Classification Research IG site sometime soon. [Full disclosure: I spoke at that session too–see previous blog post for more details.]

    On the Saturday of Midwinter, I attended 2 parts of the CC:DA meeting (I had to leave to do a presentation to another group in the middle), but I dutifully returned for the last part. It was probably a mistake–my return occurred during the last gasp of a perfectly awful discussion. I had a brief chat with Peter Rolla (the current chair) after the meeting, and continued to think about why I was so appalled during the last part of the meeting. Later, when held hostage in a meeting by a conversation in which I had little interest, I wrote up some of my thoughts.

    I would describe the discussion as one of the endless number of highly detailed conversations on improving the RDA rules that have been a “feature” of CC:DA meetings for the past few years. To be honest, I have a limited tolerance for such discussions, though I usually enjoy some of the ones at a less excruciating level of detail.

    Somehow this discussion struck me as even more circular than most, and seemed to be aimed at “improving” the rules by limiting the choices allowed to catalogers–in a sense by mechanizing the descriptive process to an extreme degree. Now, I’m no foe of using automated means to create descriptive metadata, either as a sole technique or (preferably) for submission to catalogers or editors to complete. I think we ought to know a lot more about what can be done using technology rather than continue to flog any remaining potential for rule changes intended to push catalogers to supply a level of consistency that isn’t really achievable for humans. If you want consistency–particularly in transcription–use machines. Humans are far better utilized for reviewing the product and correcting errors and adding information to improve its usefulness.

    But in cataloging circles, discussing the use of automated methods is generally considered off-topic. When the [technological] revolution comes, catalogers will be the first to go, or so it is too often believed. Copy cataloging and other less ‘professional’ means of cutting costs and increasing productivity is not a happy topic of conversation for this group.

    But, looking ahead, I see no letup in this trajectory without some changes. Catalogers love rules, and rules are endlessly improvable, no? Maybe, maybe not, but just put a tech services administrator in the room for some of these discussions, and you’re likely to get a reaction pretty close to mine. But to my mind, the total focus on rules rather than a more practical approach to address the inevitability of change in the business of cataloging is doing more towards ensuring that the human role in the process will be limited in ways that make little sense, except monetarily.

    What we need here is to change the conversation, and no group is more qualified to do that than CC:DA. To do that it’s absolutely necessary that its membership become more knowledgeable about what is now possible in automating metadata creation. Without that kind of awareness, it’s impossible to start thinking and discussing how to focus less of CC:DA’s efforts on that part of the cataloging process which should be done by machines, and more on what still needs humans to accomplish. There are several ways to do this. One is by dedicating some of CC:DA’s conference time to bringing in those folks who understand the technology issues to demonstrate, discuss, and collaborate.

    Catalogers and their roles have been changing greatly over the past few years, and promises of more change must be taken seriously. Then the ultimate question might be asked: if resistance is futile (and it surely is), how can catalogers learn enough to help frame that change?

  • Talking Points

    Saturday, January 25, 2014, 3:00-4:00 p.m., A Consideration of Holdings in the World Beyond MARC [PCC 203B] Sunday, January 26, 2014, 8:30-10:00 a.m., The Other Side of Linked Data: Managing Metadata Aggregation [PCC 102A] Sunday, January 26, 2014, 10:30-11:30 a.m., Mapmakers [PCC 102A]

    Most ALA watchers have noticed a shift from ‘invited talks’ at Interest Group and Committee meetings to requests for proposals from the chairs, from which pool the speakers are chosen. This is, of course, in parallel with changes going on with other professional conferences, and it’s an interesting shift for a number of reasons.

    There’s a democratization aspect to this change–the chairs are no longer limited in their choice to people they already know about, thereby potentially increasing the possibility that new and different ideas will get an airing. Maybe this Midwinter someone will come up with an absolutely wonderful and unexpected presentation that rockets the speaker from the unknown mob to the smaller roster of interesting known speakers. This is a good thing, I believe, even though the chance of witnessing such a rocket launch are dauntingly small.

    As someone who has been around long enough (and noisily, it must be said) this shift means that I don’t need to wait for invitations to do presentations based on some chair’s idea of what might interest their group (but may no longer interest me), I can go ahead and respond to the calls that are appealing to me. I’d like to think that the result is something fresh enough to be interesting for me to prepare and an audience to listen to, without being totally divorced from prior talks that represent earlier phases. An odd result of this shift in process is that speakers who submit proposals to various committees don’t generally know who else will be speaking at a particular program until after their proposal has been approved, and maybe not even then. This particular aspect has already led to some very interesting lineups at meetings across the conference.

    Because I take seriously the idea of not re-using previous talks to the extent that I could become horribly boring, I tend to apply for things that allow me to explore something that isn’t unrelated to what I’ve done before, but at least requires that I rethink something or try a different approach than I’ve used before to expose what I (and the people I work with) are thinking about. I think that’s pretty much what most audiences are looking for, right?

    So below are my talks for ALA Midwinter. I may be accompanied by one or another of my colleagues on a couple of these, and will surely have their help building the presentations.

    A Consideration of Library Holdings in the World Beyond MARC

    Of all the MARC 21 formats, Holdings was the one most clearly designed for machine manipulation. It is granular, flexible, and intended to be used at either a detailed or summary level. It has sometimes frightened potential users because it looks complex (even where it isn’t), and in its ‘native’ form is not particularly human friendly. Some of the complexity arises because there are both display and prediction aspects in the encoding, and not all library systems have developed predictive serial check-in systems supported by MARC Holdings.

    Some of the bibliographic metadata efforts now going forward ignore the existing MARC Holdings, sometimes in favor of simpler solutions based on the perception of the waning need for predictive check-in for digital subscriptions. Not much effort has been expended to bring the MARC Holdings format forward into the discussions about changing requirements and re-use of existing standards.

    For the ALCTS CRS Committee on Holdings Information, Saturday, January 25, 2014, 3:00-4:00 p.m., PCC 203B.

    Holdings has been an interest of mine since I was a law librarian representing the American Association of Law Libraries on MARBI. In the early computer era in libraries, where digital publication was the exception, law publishers demonstrated a great deal of creativity in their publication of updating services, from loose-leaf services and regular republication of standard tools, and law catalogers always had the best examples of holdings problems. These days, most of those materials have been subsumed by various digital tools, which have their own complexities, particularly in the context of versions, republication and compilation.

    But the question remains–has what we learned from the pre-digital world of holdings functionality have relevance in the digital era?

    The Other Side of Linked Data: Managing Metadata Aggregation

    Most of the current activity in the library LOD world has been on publishing library data out of current silos. But part of the point of linked data for libraries is that it opens up data built by others for use within libraries, and has the potential for greater integration of library data within the larger data world. The sticking point for most librarians is that data building and distribution outside the familiar world of MARC seems like a black box, the key held by others.

    Traditionally, libraries have relied on specialized system vendors to build the functionality they needed to manage their data. But the discussions I’ve heard too often result in librarians wanting vendors to tell them what they’re planning, and vendors asking librarians what they need and want. In the context of this stalemate, it behooves both library system vendors and librarians to explore the issues around management of more fine-grained metadata so that an informed dialogue around requirements can begin.

    For the ALCTS Metadata Interest Group, Sunday, January 26, 2014, 8:30-10:00 a.m., PCC 102A

    Transitioning from a rigidly record-based system to a more flexible environment where statement level information can be aggregated and managed is difficult to envision from the vantage point of our current MARC-based world. This has lead to a gap between what we know, and the wider world of linked open data we’d like to participate in. One of the critical steps is to understand how such a world might look, and what it requires of us and our systems. The goal is to be able to move some of that improved understanding to the point of innovation and development.

    Mapmakers

    It’s very clear that there will be no single answer to moving bibliographic metadata into the world beyond MARC, no direct ‘replacement’ for the simple walled garden we all have lived in for 40+ years. While it’s certainly true that the emerging global universe of bibliographic description has continued to expand and seems more chaotic than ever, there are still commonalities of understanding with the world beyond our garden walls that we’re only beginning to identify. How then can we begin to expose our understanding to that universe and develop some consensus paths forward? Specifically, what are the possibilities for using semantic mapping to provide us with the flexibility and extensibility we need to build our common future.

    For the ALCTS CaMMS Cataloging & Classification Research Interest Group, Sunday, Jan. 26, 10:30-11:30, PCC 102A.

    Librarians too often see ‘mapping’ and think ‘crosswalking’, but the reality is that these are quite different strategies. Crosswalking was a natural fit for the MARC environment, where the ‘one, best’ crosswalk would logically be developed centrally and implemented as part of current application needs. But the limitations of crosswalking make much less sense as we transition into a world where the Semantic Web has begun to take hold (of our heads, if not our systems!).

    In the Semantic Web world, maps can contain a variety of relationships (not just the crosswalk ‘same as’), and central development and control is neither necessary nor very useful. This doesn’t mean that we’re all on our own and that collaboration isn’t still our best strategy.

  • If We Were Asked

    If we were asked (as we sometimes are) what we’d like to see develop as a result of the BibFrame effort, the emphasis in our answer would have both technical and social aspects.

    First, given the technologies developing in several different places and considering what we can do now to bring Linked Open Data into our somewhat closed world, some concrete suggestions: We have the ability to share metadata expressed not just in a single common ‘vocabulary’, but to share it using many different vocabularies, expressed and distributed using RDF, OWL/RDFS, RDFa, Microdata, and other tools; we have methods of specifying the use of these ‘semantic’ building blocks (DC Application Profiles and emerging provenance specifications from W3C and DCMI) that allow machines to use, process and distribute data in ways that do not require a central enabling node; and finally, we have technologies and strategies in place to map between existing and prospective metadata schemas that flatten the fences between communities quite thoroughly.

    This is the post-MARC world of library-related metadata, where the format native to our metadata is no longer its most important characteristic; there’s no lossy crosswalking requirement to transform data to serve different needs; and there are fewer (eventually no) barriers to sharing. The tremendous value that MARC represents–the semantics built over many decades in response to an enormous corpus of use cases (all of which are fully documented on the MARBI site)–continues to be vitally important as we move into a different arena. But the mid-20th century requirements that dictated the MARC syntax, and the constricting consensus model that has been required to maintain it, no longer apply to the current and future requirements of the global library community.

    The usual caveats apply here–some of these technologies aren’t entirely ready for prime time, but in the world we live in, ‘finished’ is more likely to be used for something defunct rather than a goal for standards and tool development. The areas we’re personally most familiar with (no surprises here) are the complementary domains of vocabulary management and mapping. The first of those is up and running (although the ‘continuous improvement’ engine is going full bore) as the Open Metadata Registry; the second, mapping, is an important interest of ours and has generated papers, articles, and presentations (see below for a selection), not to mention the usual plethora of posts to blogs (including this one) and discussion lists. We believe that the OMR and mapping capabilities under development work together to enable legacy data to shift into the open linked data world efficiently, effectively, and with a minimum of loss, in the process enriching the useful data options available for everyone.*

    Often overlooked in the glitter of technology is the possibility of pulling together the communities that were torn asunder as a result of past technical limitations (and other reasons). In our common past, the library community built their data sharing conventions on a platform based on the consensus use of AACR2 and MARC. Some library communities–law and music the most prominent–were willing to compromise in order to work within the larger library community rather than strike out on their own. Others, like the art library and museum community and the archivists, did make the break, and have developed data standards that meet their needs better than the library consensus was able to do. But those specialized standards have resulted in yet more silos, in addition to the huge MARC one.

    If the intent is to ‘replace MARC’ (as it is at some level), it’s about re-placing MARC and its built-in limitations from the center of our world back into the crowd, where it becomes one-among-many. Also a value in that shift is the ability to expand the data sharing environment MARC enabled a half century ago to a broader community of interest that includes museums, publishers, and archives. Meeting the goal of dissolving those silos and making our data easily understandable and reusable in a host of ways will help initiate that ‘Web of Data’ we’ve been anticipating for many years. As Eric Miller explained so well in his Anaheim BibFrame update: by moving towards a linked data world we actually look well beyond the Library/Archives/Museum worlds by definition–it’s a very big world out there. But by collaborating with the LAM community as a whole to get there, we reap a great many benefits, not the least of which are perspectives that are much broader in some significant ways than ours. Limiting our view merely to a ‘MARC Linked Data Model’ might be an important beginning step, but it falls short of where our vision needs to extend.

    And the fact is that MARC will not be going away for a long time, if ever. There will be a lot of variation in how the transition is done by libraries, depending on institutional support, short term and long term needs, and existing partnerships. The process of moving MARC into the linked data world has already started. RDA and its RDF vocabularies was a start, as is the development of a complete RDF version of MARC, located at http://marc21rdf.info. Several years worth of pre-conferences, presentations and discussions, at ALA and beyond, have prepared the soil for these changes. But we need a plan, and some concrete steps to take–steps that include the groups who have been working in the trenches without a great deal of support, but making progress regardless. The BibFrame effort needs to be more than a playground for the technologists, because in most instances, the technology is not what’s holding us back–it’s the institutional inertia and the difficulties of finding ways forward that don’t pit us against one another. The plan we need balances the technical and social, the quick-win with the long-term momentum, and the need for speed with the public discussion that takes time and builds buy-in.

    What we have in our sights is an opportunity to reverse the long term trend towards balkanized metadata communities and to make the future one for which there are fewer fences between, and more data exchanged among these three communities with obviously similar challenges and interests. We think the time has come to use the vastly changed technology environment to do that.

    *It would be too easy for a response to this post to be in the form of “Oh, you’re just tooting your own horn here,” and indeed we are in some measure doing that. But we do this work because we believe it’s important. We don’t believe it’s important merely because it’s what we do. We believe in the value of the work we’ve done and will do, and we see a great deal of relevance for it as part of the BibFrame discussions.

    Selection of papers, and presentations:

    Jon Phipps’ presentation on mapping at ALA Anaheim
    A Reconsideration of Mapping in a Semantic World / Gordon Dunsire, Diane Ileana Hillmann, Jon Phipps, Karen Coyle
    Gordon Dunsire’s presentation at the recent London meeting “RDA, 5 years on”

    Post written by Diane Hillmann and Jon Phipps.

  • Chisels and sledge hammers

    At the Friday ‘Big Heads’ meeting much of the conversation revolved around Incrementalism vs. Revolution, as have so many conversations, about so many things. Someone quoted David Mamet (I can’t find the quote) that what we need is sledge hammers, not chisels, and I thought it was a notion too good to pass up as a jumping off point to discuss that meeting.

    There were a lot of interesting topics discussed at the meetings, but as is my habit I’m going to focus only on the topics of interest to me. As usual there were a number of vendors in the audience, and when a few of the ‘heads’ at the main table voiced the expectation that they would be depending on the vendor community for help as they experienced additional staff reductions and resource constraints in general, the vendors came up to the microphones to respond. A couple of vendors expressed their concern that the library community in general has not been able to articulate what they want from vendors, and this has made it difficult for them to develop business plans. I hear a variation of this line when I stroll the exhibit halls and talk to vendors about what their plans are for RDA implementation. Almost always I hear that they have not heard from their customers about what they want, and they’re waiting for that before making plans. As a result, when I’m presenting to librarians about RDA, I tell them that they should be talking to their vendors, asking when and how they will be implementing, etc., etc. The problem with that approach is that a) most of the time the librarians don’t know what to ask, beyond the when and how; and b) when they get an answer they often don’t know how to interpret it. Maybe I’m slow, but I’m coming to the conclusion that I should stop telling people to talk to their vendors about RDA. I’m not sure it matters.

    I went up to the microphone for one of my usual rants, after hearing quite enough of this dancing around. Here’s the reality, as I see it:

    1. Libraries are unlikely to agree on what they want (this has been true in the past, and will likely be true in the future)
    2. Given the generally low level of understanding of RDA data issues across the library spectrum (and certainly the vendors), it’s unlikely that any articulation of needs to vendors would represent something that vendors could rely on to build a business plan
    3. Vendors are still talking about the provision (e.g. sale) of bibliographic records as a basis for their services to libraries.

    My rant included all three of those points and more. Little over a year ago, the R2 report on the marketplace for MARC records (upon which I blogged) assumed that there is a marketplace for MARC records which will continue and that a direct return on investment is possible (or desirable) for creators of data. I said then, and still believe, that such a viewpoint is both unrealistic and in fact destructive to the task of moving forward into a world where data is not the coin of the realm but freely available (this is the basis for linked open data) and the investment and return on investment is around data services, not data sale. After my rant to Big Heads, one of the vendors came up to talk to me and offered up some useful nuggets to support my view: a) they provide records, but don’t make much money on them; b) the realm of digital metadata is vastly more complicated than that for physical metadata. It’s a huge challenge for vendors to operate in this world, but clearly the usual answers are no longer working, even as the data revolution is not yet fully upon us. The inevitable conclusion is that vendors who wait for their customers to tell them what they want may not survive the coming revolution. This is no time for chisels.

    In this context it’s good to meditate on Henry Ford’s famous statement: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

  • Irresistible apology of the day

    Friday I attended the RDA Update, organized as the “Briefings From RDA Test Participants.” The room was full (overfull, actually), and I ended up sitting in the back on a chair pulled from the main seating area towards the back wall. Beacher Wiggins provided the background and updated the group on the plan and timetable. He suggested that there were three scenarios possible for the decision: one was that the group would agree to adopt RDA, another was that they would decide not to (either for now, or presumably ever), and a third was that they would decide to implement if and when the JSC made some specified changes in the rules. I was a bit taken aback by this last option, since it seemed very heavy handed and somewhat threatening. Of course, there will be options available for any implementing library or group of libraries (national or otherwise), but it seems a bit much to believe that among those options there might not be ways for LC/NLM/NAL to meet their specific or collective needs without holding the US RDA implementation hostage to their desires. If I were representing a non-US constituency (which in a small way I am, as the DCMI liaison to CC:DA) I would certainly take this possibility seriously, if nothing else as a gesture of US-centrism that should be repudiated by the rest of the US and international cataloging and metadata community. By all means, LC/NLM/NAL triumvirate, do what you think best, but don’t throw your considerable weight and credibility around in aid of getting what you think you want, or, just to prove you can. We look bad enough to the international community as it is, please don’t make that worse!

    The presentations started out well, with Chris Cronin (U. Chicago) giving a useful summary of his group’s experience. He was followed by Penny Baker (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute) who had a very flashy set of slides that did not work well in a room with too much light, and too many people. While various people played with the lights, she tried to get through her slides, but was having trouble seeing the laptop when the lights were down (and her slides were visible), and lost her place a few times. Her main point (as far as I could tell)—that her group was able to show that the RDA relationships worked well in providing ways to link together the very interesting materials they chose to catalog—got lost in the shuffle. Towards the end, someone figured out how to dim the lights sufficient to see the slides without plunging the room into darkness, and the room burst into cheers. The speaker, misinterpreting the audience response, thought she was being cued to finish up, and did so, apologizing as she left, by saying: “Sorry it took so long and was so messy.” The group in the back with me agreed that this was basically the story of RDA, though we should probably not expect a similar apology from JSC.

    The remainder of the speakers plodded on with little to say that interested me: they did their testing work, gave their feedback, and determined internally whether they would continue doing ‘RDA Cataloging’ until the big decision comes down from the LC/NLM/NAL triumvirate, presumably on stone tablets for which some poor schlumpf will have to create a preservation strategy.

    I have been dubious since the beginning about the usefulness of this testing regime, lately going so far as to compare it with the ‘Security Theater’ we are subjected to at airports these days (I have metal knees, so am always treated to a full, and now even more intrusive ‘pat down’, something that makes me long for a naked scanner at my local airport). The analogy here is that ‘Security Theater’ is to real security as ‘RDA Testing Theater’ is to real testing, one that includes the FRBR part of RDA and not just a smattering of rules changes and some token relationships. I still think that it’s hard to justify the time and expense of the testing that has just concluded, which tests RDA only as used in a MARC environment, not RDA itself. The result of this from the point of the community has been useful insofar as it has provided an avenue for some initial training and participation, but not so useful from the point of view of really providing any understanding of RDA implementation. Far too many catalogers think (hope?) that RDA can be implemented without much change in what they do, which qualifies in my opinion as a very poor result indeed.

  • Tectonic shifts

    One of the things that always happens for me after ALA is a compiling of notes and some reflection on what I saw and learned while in the whirlwind of meetings and activities. This year is no different. There were few real surprises—after all, like most of you I keep in pretty good touch with what others are talking about and thinking about all through the year. But in those areas where I play the closest attention, I’ve seen some important shifts in thinking, and it’s at the meetings at ALA that I see those shifts playing out. Another thing I like to do after conferences is to look and see what other people are saying about the meetings. Sometimes this helps me catch up with meetings I couldn’t attend, sometimes it gives me different perspectives on ones I did. One such post was Eric Hellman’s post about the linked data meetings at Annual on his blog, ‘Go to Hellman.’

    “I’ve been at the American Library Association’s Annual Meeting this weekend. Given the common purpose of libraries and Linked Data, you would think that Linked Data would be a hot topic of discussion. The weather here has been much hotter than Linked Data, which I would describe as “globally warming”. I’ve attended two sessions covering Linked Data, each attended by between 50 and 100 delegates. These followed a day long, sold-out preconference. John Phipps, one of the leaders in the effort to make library metadata compatible with the semantic web, remarked to me that these meeting would not have been possible even a year ago. Still, this attendance reflects only a tiny fraction of metadata workers at the conference; Linked Data has quite a ways to come. It’s only a few months ago that the W3C formed a Library Linked Data Incubator Group.”

    In the same conversation where Jon made his point about the the increase in interest in linked data over the previous year, I tried to convince Eric that the work we’d done on the RDA Vocabularies was a step in the ‘warmer’ direction, but I clearly didn’t make my point, to him, at least.** I think, though, that the ‘tiny’-but-growing fraction of metadata workers (both at the conference and not), are starting to get the point. It’s not an easy point to get, if you’ve been traditionally trained as a cataloger or not exposed to much of this work. I hope that the formation of the Library Linked Data Incubator Group will be very useful towards this end—ironically one of the arguments against a part of our work on the RDA Vocabularies, primarily from the more conservative members of the library world, is that as librarians, we’re not in a position to know what the Semantic Web wants and needs. If nothing else, the LLDIG will make those needs known, and we hope, do that as clearly as possible.

    Eric went on to talk about the follow up to the preconference:

    “On Friday morning, there was an “un-conference” organized by Corey Harper from NYU and Karen Coyle, a well-known consultant. I participated in a subgroup looking at use cases for library Linked Data. It took a while for us to get around to use cases though, as participants described that usage was occurring, but they weren’t sure what for. Reports from OCLC (VIAF) and Library of Congress (id.loc.gov) both indicated significant usage but little feedback.”

    I was at the ‘unconference’ as well and participated in different breakout sessions than Eric did, but found them very useful to my own thinking (summaries are posted). Plans are in place to do additional follow up to those conversations at the Dublin Core Conference this fall, and then at Midwinter in San Diego. In particular I participated in a session led by CC:DA chair John Myers about increasing the understanding of the library community generally in regards to the ideas and technologies of linked data. As someone who frequently speaks at conferences and workshops, I believe this is a particularly important issue as the abstract ideas become understood and the implementation questions become more compelling. As a result of that discussion, I’ve been thinking seriously about developing a new workshop that I would attempt to take ‘on the road’ to groups and institutions. Given that my previous experience with doing this kind of thing in collaboration with institutions has been mixed (my discouraging experience with my Metadata Standards and Applications workshops comes to mind), it seems to me that it’s time to try doing it on my own, and, ensuring as well that I’m getting adequate compensation for the time spent providing it.

    I’m hoping that I’ll be able to rely on interested members of the community for feedback as I think through the process of developing this kind of workshop. Watch this space for more …

    ** More about the building of the vocabularies can be found in our article in the January issue of DLib Magazine.

  • Non-sequiturs

    Corey Harper seems to have started a collection of statements taken out of context, some of which I’ll share here:

    “If it’s not fish it has to be linked data” –Jennifer Bowen

    “I’m too far underground to know where I am” –Jon Phipps

  • The curmudgeon’s table

    Today I participated in a Linked Data Unconference at ALA 2010 in Washington DC, which was remarkably successful. Organized by Corey Harper from NYU and ably moderated by Karen Coyle, about 50 of us held two sets of three hour-long, highly engaging breakout discussions with reports back to the larger group. I participated in a discussion of some of the practical difficulties encountered trying to implement Application Profiles in a far from perfect Linked Data environment (I strongly recommended creating a local mirror of inadequately expressed in RDFS/OWL, but otherwise useful, data models) and a discussion of scholarly Linked Data use cases and data reuse (we looked hard at VIVO and VIAF and discussed metering data usage). It was fun! I was surprised.

    Afterwards a few of us had a fine lunch together, discussing the nuts and bolts of RDA and the future of cataloging, a lively and fascinating discussion in the best possible sense of ‘lively’ and ‘fascinating’. It strikes me in retrospect that we formed a kind of curmudgeon’s table — Diane Hillmann, Corey Harper, Eric Hellman, Ed Summers, Karen Coyle, and me. All of us sharing strong opinions, agreeing and disagreeing whole-heartedly and with considerable good humor and affection. A table of warm and engaged people, knowing that it’s too late to save the world, maybe too late to save cataloging, but it would still be really interesting to try. It was great fun. I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

  • Mulling Midwinter

    One of the things I often do in the weeks following ALA conferences is check out the blog posts about sessions I missed attending. One such was the session on “Recent Trends in Catalog Architecture: ALCTS Catalog Form and Function Interest Group.” I don’t recall what we were doing instead of going to this session, but it looks like we missed a very interesting conversation. That happens far too often at the jam-packed Midwinter and Annual conferences—but thankfully these days the bloggers are keeping us all better informed. Laura Akerman has posted an interesting report of the IG’s session. Slides for this session are also available.

    One of the inescapable conclusions to draw from reading the reports is that the separation of metadata from display considerations seems to be well underway, at least if you consider those folks in the innovation corner. This is very welcome news, particularly for one who has had too many frustrating conversations over the past few years with folks whose heads are so deep into MARC that the revolutionary idea that display decisions are not inextricably tied to metadata fields is completely foreign. Also, it seems clear from the report that the notion of strict MARC-ish boundaries around what kinds of metadata libraries might be interested in providing in a discovery interface is no longer quite so impervious.

    I was struck by the blogger’s quote from the chair: “These presentations were varied but all concerned the architecture and functionality of multiple layers – “what happens (or needs to happen) in between” to transform, combine, and synchronize metadata.” It seems that everyone is traveling down this path these days, which is very good news indeed. In the search for appropriate metaphor that we’ve all done, Frances McNamara from the University of Chicago, the first presenter, called their aggregation of resources ‘stone soup’–a nice metaphor on the whole, though it does imply very hard lumps and not a lot of flavor. The second group of presenters, Joshua P. Barton & Lucas Wing Kau Mak from Michigan State University entitled their presentation “To Fix A Leaky Sink: Envisioning The Potential of Discovery Layers,” although this seems an oddly juicy metaphor for what blogger Laura Akerman described as primarily a “think piece.”

    The third presentation was by Jennifer Bowen, of the eXtensible Catalog Project (full disclosure: Jon and I worked with XC as consultants early on in their development and at various points since). XC’s view of metadata management borrows a great deal from the work we did (and published about) during the days when the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) was young and doing interesting things (before it became a development shop for the Fedora CMS). [Links to the original papers can be found at our website.) From the point of view of libraries looking at the management of metadata as something that happens outside of an ILS, their service architecture is by far their best stuff. In addition to Jennifer’s slides, anyone interested in what XC is doing should take a look at their recently released screencasts, particularly the first and the third, which includes a detailed description of what the MST (Metadata Services Toolkit) really does. Our metaphor for this functionality has always been “The Metadata Washing Machine,” so we’ve really no business complaining about anyone else’s choices!

    The last presentation was by Aaron Wood, of the University of Calgary, and the placement of this particular presentation is important, because it clearly points out that once you’ve created your soup and/or washed your dirty metadata, you still need to figure out how to present results to users in ways that are far different than what we’re used to in the typical ILS interface. Calgary uses the new Summon product from Serials Solutions (which, by the way, also builds on the notion of aggregated metadata services we pioneered in NSDL). The question that turns up in the blog post “how to prevent the local institution’s collections (print and digital) from becoming marginalized in search results when combined with a much larger number of full text resources (licensed journal articles etc.)” is right to the point, because it assumes, as we all should, that the usual alphabetic display that most of our ILS systems produce, that must be scrolled or paged through, is no longer good enough. The presentation points out something we found in NSDL several years ago, that when metadata records and full text are trolled for keywords, the full text always tends to rise to the top, and that’s not necessarily always a good thing from a user point of view. Metadata in general is a poor performer when simply treated as text by full-text indexers, not just because there’s not enough text, but also because full-text indexing generally perceives no additional value in controlled vocabularies and their relationship to well-defined properties (and the richness of the relationships that lie behind the vocabularies as well).

    But I’m sorry I missed this session, and thanks to Laura Akerman and the Metadata Blog for providing such a good summary of the session.