Metadata Matters

Category: RDA

  • What is the Change that is RDA?

    I’m supposed to be writing a paper (as part of a team and as designated herder) but like most people I have strategies for avoiding such tasks, not necessarily in ways that are entirely useless, just useless in the context of a particular deadline. In this instance, I’ve been listening to an interview of Janet Swan Hill done last summer at ALA Annual and now available on a website called “Gathering our Stories: Developing a National Oral History Program of Retiring/Retired Librarians”.

    It’s definitely worth listening to the interview—Janet has been present for many of the important moments in the collective past of most catalogers in this country, and her viewpoint is always worth listening to. This is not to say that I always agree with her—I don’t always, and in particular I don’t agree with her position on RDA. Some of that disagreement arises from the fact that she, like most catalogers (and far too many library administrators), thinks of RDA as the successor to AACR2, the cataloging ‘rules’. I, on the other hand don’t care at all about the rules (there, I’ve said it, are you all happy now?) Instead I see the potential of RDA elsewhere: in the vocabularies specifically, and not incidentally in the revolution they represent in the way we envision our future in metadata. Put more succinctly, it’s not what we say, but how we say it, that makes RDA a big leap forward.

    But Houston, we have a problem. Janet defines it very well (quotes from the transcript accompanying the video interview above):

    “I suspect that we will go ahead and implement RDA, uh, after I retire. (Laughter) I suspect that many libraries will not implement it because one of the things that proponents of RDA are most eager to say is “Oh, it won’t make that much difference. Your old records will be compatible with the new ones.” So a lot of libraries are going to listen to that and say so why should I implement the thing.”

    People, this is a huge problem for us. It’s a REVOLUTION we’re talking about with RDA, not just shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic, and it has little or nothing to do with the rules. And yes, it will cost us something to implement, but the ridiculous testing regime initiated in part because Janet (yes, this Janet) convinced the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control to include a recommendation that work on RDA be suspended, will not help us determine whether or how we should implement RDA.

    If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am. For most of the past few years, as the RDA Vocabularies have been developed, the marketing effort for RDA mounted by the JSC and ALA Publishing has been wholly focused on the guidance text and the RDA Toolkit. Only very recently have the vocabularies and their value been included in the educational efforts that have been mounted nationally and internationally around RDA. [See the ALA Webinars coming up for evidence of change.]. The small, cranky group that developed the vocabularies has gotten even crankier as a result, but there are days when I worry that without better understanding of what RDA represents, our efforts will be too little, too late. As we all wait for the result of the Testing Theater effort (see this previous post for my opinion on that) it seems less and less likely that a clear message will emerge from that confused process, and we definitely need a clear message from those most librarians still consider the leaders of the US library community.

    The most recent cause for concern has been the draft ‘PoCo Discussion Paper on RDA Implementation alternatives‘. The beginning portion ended with literally the only sentence in the problem statement portion of the report that I could easily agree with: “In any scenario PCC must adapt to a hybrid environment.” But the question is, will that hybrid environment be facing backward or forward? And the question not asked in the report, but definitely assumed: in that inevitable hybrid environment, what would be the role of an organization such as PCC? The current value of the PCC is built almost entirely on the consensus-based environment of the past, where agreements on basic functionality of cataloging records emerged from a common necessity to provide a standard ‘floor’ below which efforts to rein in costs should not sink. But is that value the same in the future environment? Based on this report, it seems clear that the thinking of the writers of the discussion paper is still deeply embedded in the past, and they see the future as an entirely problematic extension with few opportunities for libraries or users in the change that RDA represents. “Perpetuating the hybrid environment long term will have a negative (and costly) impact on our catalogs and on all areas of bibliographic control.”

    It seems very clear from the issues presented in the discussion paper that the negative view of the future stems from the lack of understanding of what will actually need to change to enable libraries to fully implement RDA, and what that change offers us at this critical time for libraries. A real RDA implementation, with the benefits already under extensive discussion in the library community, cannot, CANNOT, actually happen in a MARC environment with the inwardly focused assumptions in evidence in the discussion paper. This is not to say that documentation, training, protecting our legacy in terms of our MARC records and authority files are not rightfully topics that we ought to be discussing, but those discussions need to happen with fuller understanding of the environment we will be working in as we move our focus to the web, and away from our current catalogs. [See Karen Coyle’s TechSource reports here and here for a great start in understanding what we need to do.]

    At the end of its paper, the Task Group proposes the following:

    “Recognizing that there is a cost associated with choosing a direction that is different from the US national libraries, recognizing that PCC institutions will face a hybrid environment, and recognizing that there is a value to the PCC in member contributions from either rule set, the PCC should formally adopt RDA, regardless of the outcome of the US RDA Test, and the decision of the US national libraries, but it should set no time limit on implementation of RDA by PCC institutions.”

    I heartily agree with this conclusion, and I say to the Task Group—tell us how we can help you consider some options that don’t stop with the unsustainable assumption of cramming RDA into MARC. Persuade us that moving to RDA is something we should embrace. Because the route you seem to outline can’t result in success, and libraries need successful paths, as well as correct decisions.

  • 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.

  • What DCMI Should Be Doing

    One continuing theme of the recently concluded DC-2010 is that of the perpetual search for consensus on what the hell DCMI should be doing. I know this continual search for identity is a common phenomenon with this sort of organization, as it is for the human adolescent hovering around the age of 15 years. Like with the teenager, it should be seen as a healthy thing, and as most of us older than 15 know, it pretty much goes on for the remainder of life.

    For me the conference was preceded by a half day DCMI Advisory Board meeting, where one topic was the revision of the DCMI mission statement as well as the perennial topic of the conferences and how the conference series can be optimally funded and continued, and what exactly is its value for the organization. As usual, there was not much consensus, either at the beginning or the end of the discussion, though it must be said that the conference itself probably shifted some opinions about the value proposition. Generally the AB meeting has been scheduled after the conference, with the idea that this shift in perspective is a good thing for sparking discussion, but for logistical reasons the meeting was held prior to the conference this year.

    As it turned out, this change in placement of the AB meeting was unfortunate, given that Mike Bergman’s keynote on Friday morning contributed some important outside opinion to that basic question of mission. (Mike’s post about the keynote is here.) The fact that Mike arrived in time to sample a good chunk of the conference and to talk to a variety of participants gave his opinion the credibility that only exposure to the culture of the organization and the personalities that affect that culture can bring to a keynote. It was clear to me, in talking to him during the conference, that his view of DCMI was not the insider view of a contentious, financially strapped and sometimes dysfunctional organization, but instead one that included recognition of the experience, knowledge and potential there as well. In a nutshell, Mike Bergman was telling us that DCMI’s role in the emerging linked data world was critical, and should be focused primarily on expanding the presence of useful semantics available to the the web world, closing the ‘semantic gap’ he sees limiting the growth of linked open data.

    Later in the day, my task was to lead a discussion of the work of the DCMI/RDA Task Group, of which I’m co-chair with Gordon Dunsire. Gordon and I had both prepared slides for that meeting—mine covering the history and work of the task group, what we’d learned, and what remained, and Gordon’s covering the related important work he’d been doing in parallel with IFLA. I’ve been frustrated for some time with the lack of attention and traction we’ve received for this important work, both from DCMI and the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA (JSC). We have found ourselves at the stage where DCMI is waiting for JSC to make some statement about the work done (in the form of approval), and the JSC is waiting for DCMI to endorse the Task Group’s assertions made about the work done and its usefulness for the Semantic Web—or at least this is the way it seems from the point of view of the co-chairs. It’s as if both groups are standing opposite one another in a middle school gym, the ‘boys’ and the ‘girls’ waiting for someone to move towards the middle. Nobody seems to want to make that first move, and though in the case of the TG, each conversation with representatives of both parties seems to be positive, resolution of the concrete issues moves at a frustratingly glacial pace.

    But as I spoke about this work to various people, continuing to think about the ongoing conversation about what the role of DCMI should be, particularly in the context of Mike’s keynote, it struck me that the DCMI/RDA Task Group was in some sense a model for what DCMI could do to fulfill the role Mike saw for us in the world. In essence, the TG came into being because Don Chatham at ALA Publishing took the initiative to bring DCMI and the JSC together, where the DCMI message was “How can we help?” The rest is history, but we seem not to have learned from that how powerful that simple question is, and where it could lead. DC-2010 brought a number of new communities to the conference, representing a variety of groups interested in moving into the wider web world of information, but lacking in-house knowledge and skills necessary to make progress. Helping them move forward requires much more than attracting them to the conference and talking to them in the hall or after tutorials. We need to offer more concrete help, like we did for the JSC, and move the knowledge and experience that the DCMI Community has assembled into the broader world of information.

  • Coming Up–Another RDA Webinar (a series, actually)

    Starting the end of the month, ALA TechSource is sponsoring a new webinar series about RDA, this one not entirely about the guidelines. It’s called Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future and ‘stars’ Karen Coyle, Chris Oliver and moi (in that order), talking about the fullness of the potential that RDA represents for libraries.

    Those of you who have seen or listened to a variety of ‘What is RDA And Why Should We Care’ presentations over the past few years may find this different and refreshing. Those of you who’ve paid attention to me and Karen (and our non-mainstream approach to RDA) over the years may still find it interesting, because we keep adding stuff to our usual talks as we struggle through the issues that continue to bedevil us. Do take a look at the announcement here and see if the series might be of use to you and your colleagues.

    And certainly, if you’ve got some great ideas for future webinars, let me know!

  • 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.

  • Teaching RDA, the Sequel

    I had hoped to write more about my teaching experience while it was happening, but as go so many good intentions, I couldn’t quite manage it. Part of this is because I forget, in between my ‘normal’ 5 year cycles of teaching, how much time it takes to do at all, much less do well. As a result, I really haven’t blogged at all since the end of March, when I started on my latest teaching adventure, and I’m sure a lot of people thought I’d dropped off a cliff. Well, I did, sort of, but it wasn’t really a bad experience.

    As I mentioned in my previous post, I was very happy about the support supplied by the UW iSchool—a group very experienced in helping virtual teachers and students have the best experience possible. This, and the high caliber of the students, made the experience overall the best one I’ve had. There were parts of it I really enjoyed, primarily the discussions with the students, their willingness to start new discussions and read widely about the topics at hand, and their ability to think about issues that they’d not really encountered before. Their interest, curiosity and enthusiasm kept me willing to work through my screencast software problems (“Oh yes, this is a known bug, we expect it to be fixed in subsequent releases.”). There were the inevitable problems keeping up the grading on their assignments—my weekends evaporated in the face of piles of writing I needed to read then supply feedback about.

    But, I realized again that I’m a sprinter, not a marathon runner (odd as that analogy may seem to anyone who knows me or has seen me in front of a room). I still think I’m better at the one shot workshop than the semester or quarter course of 10-15 weeks. Not that I’d never do it again (never say never), but it’s hard work, and not well paid, so I’d have to give it some thought before jumping in again. And I’m thinking about a new workshop I’d like to develop, and when I do, I might see who’d be interested in hosting it.

  • The more things change …

    … the more they stay the same.” How many times has each of us taken comfort in that phrase (and no, I’m not going to cite the French version or the source—it will just distract me from my main purpose!) I found the phrase ringing like a large bell right next to my head as I listened to the speeches from the 2010 ALISE Conference. The three presentations were largely about the last big transition for library cataloging: the AACR2 implementation, which dominated libraryland for many years prior to (and after) the January 1981 switchover. I remember those days well, as I was a newly minted librarian at the time, who had learned cataloging not via cataloging courses (I never took any in library school), but instead via instruction by a number of supervisors/trainers, some very good, others absolutely awful. I remember particularly when I was still a paraprofessional (and library student) showing my supervisor (the head of cataloging in the library I was working in) the place in the “red books” where free-floating subdivisions were described. She knew nothing about them …

    But back to the speeches. Most interesting to me was the speech by Michael Gorman, editor of AACR2 and definitely the man who knows where the bodies are (still) buried. I don’t always agree with Gorman, but he is one of the most interesting people you could listen to on this subject, and he outdoes himself in this presentation. As one who’s been more seriously involved in the current transition (at least we hope that’s what it will be), I was interested (and somewhat depressed, to be honest) to hear that some of the same things that were wrong with AACR2 (according to Gorman, and me) are still wrong with the RDA rules.

    But even if you don’t care anything about that, listen to it for the history of cataloging rules, from the point of view of the ultimate insider. A flavor of Gorman’s speech below (from a lightly edited transcript available from the same page as the speeches):

    “And what happened was the 1949 rules were just completely disregarded in outside North America. The 1950 Library of Congress rules for descriptive cataloging, similarly, were, basically instructions on how to construct a Library of Congress card. Which is what cataloging aimed at in this country for many years. And there was [by] the early 60s, there was clearly a need for a new code. The British needed something that was‐ that actually didn’t just post‐date the invention of flight. (laughter) And the Americans needed a kind of coherent standard. At the same time, things like MARC were brewing. OCLC was brewing. … And there was a real pressure for standardization, both internally within the countries involved, but, I think even more importantly, externally. Those of you as old as I am might remember that there were, for example, floods of books coming from South Asia into American libraries by virtue of various arrangements and treaties. And what was needed was some kind of standard cataloging data for these things. The Library of Congress was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the cataloging output required by the libraries of the United States. So there is automation, there is pressure for standardization, and so on.”

    So how familiar is that? Change in cataloging rules driven by changes in technology? [Ding]

    Gorman goes on to describe the three most “grievous errors” made in the run up to AACR2:

    “One was that, not to involve Seymour Lubetzky, who was still at that time perfectly active. In fact he lived for many more years after that. And I can tell you I attended his hundredth birthday celebration and I’ve had far less incisive conversations with people who are fifty. So, he could’ve easily participated in it and would’ve brought, I think, an air of authority to it because by that time everyone recognized that Lubetzky was right. You needed a code that embodied principles. And you could work out the details in the cases if you could deduce from those principles.

    “The second thing‐ the second grievous error, was pretending that this new code was a revision of the 1967 code. It was nothing of the sort. It was completely new code on new principles, organized in a completely new way. Had they had the‐ and I say ‘they’ because I was just a humble editor, you know the policies were taken‐ you might think they were taken by the Joint Steering Committee‐ they were not. They were taken in the National Libraries. The National Libraries determined that the profession would not stomach an entirely new code a decade after they’d already adapted to the previous one. So you had to pretend that this was a revision of it. Had they had the nerve to say‐ had they had the wisdom to foresee there was going to be a fuss anyway, so you might as well have a big fuss about something worth fussing about‐ they would have called it the New Anglo‐American Cataloging Rules, or something of that nature. … But, we probably wouldn’t be here because what we’d be discussing would be something like the third edition or the fourth edition of the New Anglo‐American Cataloging Rules, or the New Descriptive Cataloging Rules. Call it whatever you want. Call it George. (laughter) So we’d be discussing George IV, there wouldn’t be anything like the fuss, there wouldn’t be anything like the need by the people who are currently doing the RDA to come up with new contrivances. To come up with something quote “completely different.”

    “And the third big mistake was to allow conservative, I mean, small c, interests to dictate that new code would contain substantial chunks of the old practice. What would be much better would be to have a completely stripped down code that just gave principles. How you arrived at access points, what the description is, and so on. And then people interested in that kind of thing could produce manuals on how to catalog treaties using that, how to catalog liturgical works. And I think that that substantially weakened what AACR2 could have been because it sort of delegitimized the enterprise. So here we’ve got a structure that’s based on principle from the other hand we’re going into page after page after page of how to catalog the Bible, how to do all kinds of esoteric things. And so there we were. It came out in 1978. There was huge pressure from the Association of Research Libraries who’d heard that this was the downfall of Western civilization as we know it, was going to cost them fortunes, was going to blow up everything. I remember Lucia Rather giving a talk that brought tears to everyone in the room about how difficult it was to change a single heading in the Library of Congress card catalog, it involved, you know, boatloads of Egyptian slaves carrying cards from one building to another, and so on. (laughter) But anyway, so there was this terrible panic in the air‐ what are we going to do, how are we going to accommodate this dreadful thing? Not recognizing that the reason why it was going to be a big change was because their catalogs didn’t really work very well and weren’t user friendly, weren’t anything, you know. They were just a mess. Particularly in the card form. And particularly, if you worked as I did shortly after at a place like the University of Illinois that had a nine million card catalog in, you know, the ark of the catalog in the center of the library, this ecclesiastical surroundings with these nine million cards, where a misfiled card was lost for eternity. (laughter) You would never see it again. So, there was this huge fuss.”

    [Ding, ding, DING]

    And there’s more: about LC and ARL determining to postpone implementation for a year, while the Brits and others around the world started using the new code right away. [Ding]

    Janet Swan Hill, the second speaker, wandered around a bit but had some interesting points about training:

    “Something that we did right with the implementation of AACR2 was to mount a tremendous training effort. There were very large regional training institutes and a lot of people traveled to them and they spent a couple days in a hotel, and a couple of days in seminars learning and learning about the new rules. There were also hundreds and hundreds of lesser, smaller institutes scattered all around the country. And I know that today a lot of people are very likely to think that we don’t need the same extent of regional institutes that online training, and webinars, and self‐directed training of various kinds will do just as well. And that administrators and other people who are really worried about money are likely to balk at the expense of sending a lot of people off to regional institutes and seminars and they will be very eager to prefer computer‐based training on the grounds of money alone. And while online instruction and computer‐based training has improved a very great deal in the last decade, I would like to point out a few things in favor of face‐to‐face encounters. Of the shared experience and the camaraderie that arises from attendance at those training institutes and attendance at the bar afterwards. And to express, therefore, some concern about relying too heavily on remote, one‐by‐one personally isolated training methods that you get when you rely too heavily on computer‐based instruction.”

    In fact I attended one of those institutes, and was there exposed for the first time to cataloging history and theory, filling in all those empty spaces from a library education that lacked those subjects. I gained a good bit of confidence from those, and enjoyed them thoroughly, for some of the reasons Janet cites. But in this day and age, the likelihood of repeating that huge effort, particularly since there will be no generally agreed date of implementation, is infinitesimal. Not with library budgets in the state they’re in at the moment.

    And I would say that I think what we need more than training is decent tools, not necessarily for the rules themselves (I think RDA Online will do that fairly well, for a price), but to create the data, and start sharing it.

    Arlene Taylor was the last speaker, and towards the end of her presentation she quoted from her mentor Kathryn Henderson:

    “It was a valuable experience to have been present in the last four years of code revision in the 1960s. I learned much about the politics of code revision. I can well remember revision members from large institutions like Yale standing up and saying, “We will not change our catalogs to the new forms.” Of course, that was in the days of card catalogs. But I don’t know if it’s really any easier to change them today. Change always comes hard. From what I hear, politics is still the driving force.”

    [DING, DING, DING]

  • Teaching RDA

    During my professional life, I’ve agreed to teach graduate courses just about every five years. I joke that it takes that long for the memories to fade sufficiently for me to agree to try again. Mostly I’ve taught cataloging courses at Syracuse (my alma mater and the closest program to where I live), though my last effort was a team thing with my Cornell colleague Marty Kurth, where we substituted for Dave Lankes (who was on sabbatic leave) and taught his Information Architecture course. This was about five years ago, so as per my usual schedule I agreed to accept an invitation to develop and teach an online “Intro to RDA” course for the University of Washington iSchool.

    I have a few theories about why I’ve never really gotten comfortable teaching “regular” courses. It’s not that I don’t like teaching (I do)—I just seem to like it better when it’s not quite so extended, a bit more in sync with my increasingly short attention span. I particularly like doing half-day or even full-day workshops for groups of practicing librarians—these are my “peeps” and I think I understand them well enough to do a good job getting them enthusiastic about some of the stuff coming down the pike for all of us. I also do a fair number of conference presentations, which tend to be much shorter, sometimes too short for me to get more than a few points across.

    Frankly, there hasn’t always been a good fit between me and the grad students I’ve ended up teaching over the years as an adjunct faculty member. I’m not quite sure whether it’s age, style, or exactly what dynamic or chemistry thing is going on there, particularly because with those five year intervals, each class has been so totally different that I’ve found it impossible to come to any firm conclusions. I remember in particular one class I taught about 10 or 15 years ago, where I had a group that was fairly evenly mixed between normal grad student age folks and older, second career students. This was an advanced cataloging class that I was doing for the first time, and I freely admit that in my impatience with normal pedagogical methods (not to mention my general ignorance of same) I managed to annoy the grad-student-agers in the class and they returned the favor by complaining to the school about me and how I was conducting the class. (They particularly didn’t like the fact that I gave them readings and assignments THEN lectured on the topic, rather than the other way around.) The older students, on the other hand, really seemed to like the course and were far more open to trying things out that were totally new to them. The class evaluations were absolutely split down the middle—half were extremely negative and the rest were very positive, no middle ground whatsoever. I got the impression that the school didn’t quite know what the heck was going on, and interestingly, never asked me about it.

    So here I go again, this time teaching students about a new cataloging standard that is not only uncooked at present, but has divided opinion in the library community to an extent that reminds me of the current war on health care reform. My approach to RDA emphasizes the data aspects of the effort, and I’m pretty sure that nobody else is doing anything like this. Most sensible people, including most teachers, like to wait until things settle down before trying to set up a course to teach actual paying students about it. As usual I’ve decided to live a little more dangerously, and I certainly hope the students can sign on for the class recognizing the adventure, rather than focusing on the chaotic quality of the world of RDA at present. Just to keep things interesting, this is an online course, and I’ve never done one of those before, though I’m fairly comfortable in the online world generally.

    The nice thing about the experience so far is that the UW iSchool has been really supportive as I’ve been attempting to develop this course, and are making a big effort to make sure that the course will be successful for the students, and for me. They’ve got a nice infrastructure (with tools!) set up for adjunct faculty and special help for those of us teaching virtually. There are grad students to help us set up our web presence and templates to make it easy and reasonably complete for the students deciding where to spend their time and bucks. So far I’m impressed, and optimistic that this will be a different experience to add to all those quinquennial teaching gigs of the past.

    Part of the adventure, from my point of view, will be delving into what’s flying by at the moment, and putting it in context, given the long and winding road of RDA development. Of course, I have a dog in this fight, and will be clear about disclosing that (and my many other biases) to the students. The data is my thing, not the guidance text, and that’s part of the course description—those students who want a walk through the “new rules” would be wise to pass this course by. I’ve asked to set up a blog for this course, and will be encouraging students to post there. I’ll post there, and here, about the experience, as I can, and as there’s something to offer the wider conversation—including those who think they’d like to try going out on this limb themselves.

    The final student projects will ask the class to envision themselves as a librarian with a director who’s just come back from a meeting where someone has convinced him/her that RDA will bankrupt the library’s cataloging operation, and s/he wants a briefing on this scary standard. Now, how many of you have been in that kind of situation? All of you? Amazing!

    The class starts at the end of this month and lasts for 10 weeks, so stay tuned …

  • The RDA Vocabularies, Continued

    One of my favorite aphorisms is “Time flies, whether you’re having fun or not.” I’m not sure where I heard it, but for sure I’m not creative enough to make it up on my own. The truth of it has been reinforced by the realization that here it is the end of January, post-Boston Midwinter, and I’ve done so little blogging for the past six months that it’s a stretch to call myself a blogger. Time to reclaim the turf. So this post is an attempt to summarize what I’ve been doing all that time, some of which has come to a sort of fruition, but some still ripening.

    Last fall I participated as a speaker in a NISO Webinar “Bibliographic Control Alphabet Soup.” I decided for my topic to talk about some of the issues around building the RDA vocabularies from spreadsheets and ERDs (Entity Relationship Diagrams), which is what I had to work with on that task. (You can see the ERDs on the RDAOnline website). Part of my reason for trying to tackle those issues in the webinar is that the vocabularies had become a major focus of my working life for quite a while (does the word ‘obsessive’ sound too dramatic?) At the time, we (Jon Phipps, Karen Coyle, Gordon Dunsire and I) were also trying to write an article about what we’d done with the RDA elements and vocabularies, and that article came out last week in DLib Magazine. Starting the article last fall prompted me to create some diagrams in an attempt to try and convey the structure of these vocabularies, and to provide examples for folks to look at while they puzzle through the ideas. I used a subset of the diagrams in the webinar as well, but most of them are used to better purpose in the article. I’m not at all sure that the several hundred folks listening in to the webinar got much of what I was trying to convey—it’s pretty new stuff for most people, and I was trying to fit too much into my limit of 20 minutes (not nearly enough time). I hope that for those who might have been overwhelmed or confused by the webinar, the article will help to make the work we’ve done a bit clearer.

    The writers of the article had a number of purposes in mind, not least to document the decisions and rationale for the strategies taken by the DCMI/RDA Task Group charged with the work of building the vocabularies. Given that the library community generally has little experience with RDF and RDF vocabularies, it seemed particularly important to attempt to provide explanations that we hoped would be accessible to most librarians, and I hope we’ll have sufficient feedback to determine how close we came to that goal. Given that we expected the article to come out just after Midwinter, we did most of our presentations in Boston on the implications of the vocabularies rather than the mechanics. I talked about these at the Technical Services ‘Big Heads’ meeting (slides) and Jon, Karen and I included some of these expectations in our introduction to application profiles at CC:DA on Monday (slides).

    Just before Midwinter we started a dialogue with the JSC about next steps, and I hope that some of the issues that have come up will be open to public discussion, just as the vocabulary building was done in public. We’re all in a fairly intense learning space at the moment (at least it seems so to me), and keeping the process open and visible for all seems in support of that learning. We’re also continuing to update the vocabularies as errors are brought to our attention, and to complete portions where we need to add information. One such point in the property/subproperty hierarchies in the element sets—at the time the work was done there was a limitation in the Registry software that prevented us from including the proper hierarchies in both the general and FRBR-bounded portions of the vocabularies. That limitation is now removed, and the missing relationships will be added.

    Interestingly, we’re getting lots of help in finding errors from our friends in Germany, who are doing nifty things with the vocabularies. They’ve been particularly helpful with things like inadvertent spaces introduced in URIs and other things difficult for a human proofreader to find. Because we don’t have good ways (yet) to visualize the relationships, their help has been invaluable. We urge anyone else who spots an error or who has a question to use our feedback button in the Registry to communicate with us about their concern.

  • Bugs in Amber

    A few weeks ago I attended the opening of an amber exhibition at our wonderful Museum of the Earth which is only about 6 miles from my house. The exhibit had a little of everything: science, history, geography … and jewelry. I have to admit (and this will surprise no one who knows me) that the jewelry was a big draw, and I went laden (literally), with a varied selection of my own collection of amber. Hey, laugh if you will, but these days I work at home, and have very few opportunities to wear jewelry of any kind—so this opening was irresistible.

    But, enough about jewelry, I want to talk about bugs and bibs! As you might expect in a science museum, there was far more emphasis on amber as a carrier (so to speak) of bits and pieces of the past, particularly the biological past. As a preservation medium, amber is hard to beat, though, of course, there are limitations in terms of the size of the biological specimen. I didn’t realize it, but apparently fake amber is everywhere, and one way to recognize the bio fakes is that they include specimens too big to be slowed down by sticky tree sap. The exhibit had some nice fakes, including a small snake in plastic colored to look like amber.

    The interest of the scientist in amber is that it stops the process of decay for those creatures lucky (or unlucky) enough to be captured in its grasp. The amber captures a moment in a bug’s short life in a way that allows us to examine it closely and in detail in our own time, millions of years later. In much the same way, the Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace by R2 Consulting captures a moment in time, very likely too late to have much of an effect on the future, but just in time to capture the state of the cataloging world before the tsunami arrives.

    But the R2 report is as fascinating to a metadata maven as a bug in amber is to a biologist. It describes in detail the current world of cataloging distribution, focusing on the “dysfunctional market” that has grown like Topsy around distribution of MARC records. It gets exactly right the disconnect between the librarian sense that “records want to be free” and the business approach that production costs must be recouped and profit margins maintained for there to be any point in participation at all, and comes down predictably in support for the latter view.

    It’s a fascinating read, particularly if the fact that LC commissioned the report is kept in mind—because this is hardly a context-free analysis. I was particularly interested in the description of the businesses outside of libraries supplying MARC records either as contractors or as part of a materials supply chain. As a former denizen of one of the large academics that R2 identifies as part of the “green tier” (more about that later), I was aware of the fact of that portion of the MARC marketplace, but had little contact with it.

    The gist of the report is that the MARC distribution network is a dysfunctional hybrid, partly librarianishly “free” and part commercial marketplace. The authors feel that it should be possible to increase the supply of MARC records from “the community” without relying on poor beleaguered LC to supply them, and they give us a multitude of statistics to support that assertion. They believe that there’s enough time to accomplish this and save everybody money before the promised changes come to pass, and all must be re-thought.

    My comments on this report, informed by my well-known biases, fall into a few convenient categories:

    Dysfunctional? Probably …

    Much of the first portion of the report is devoted to a description of the current “marketplace” and a discussion of the survey results that illuminate and inform the description. It’s here that R2 makes the case that LC is subsidizing the whole shebang, to the benefit of everyone else.

    “Both libraries and vendors (at least the good ones) rely on “service” to their respective clienteles to distinguish themselves, but there are important distinctions in their respective definitions of the term. In the commercial world, service must exist within a context of profitability, in which all costs are covered and some additional increment is contributed to the company’s continued growth and as a return on the capital initially invested. The library service ethic is much more open‐ended and less directly constrained by costs.”

    The report contains much interesting description of what the authors perceive as the bifurcated market, one which, in their view, inhibits the growth of useful marketplace incentives to increase output:

    “This tension ‐‐ between community values and commercial values, between idealism and pragmatism, between social responsibility and private benefit – has deeply affected some aspects of the library market. Cataloging, regarded by many as the heart of librarianship, is one of those areas.”

    It’s pretty clear where the authors come down in this conflict between “community” and “commercial” values:

    “The impulse to share records for which the costs have not been fully recovered may make sense as a form of community good, but is not sustainable without some form of subsidy or exchange. From the commercial viewpoint, it’s simply bad business.”

    And, perhaps more to the point:

    “It should not go unnoticed that LC itself provides open access to its MARC records via multiple channels. The prevalence of open databases is a key factor in the economic confusion that plagues the MARC Record Market … “

    The report goes on to a rather interesting and revealing categorization of the complex MARC marketplace into three tiers. The “Green Tier” includes the “ … oldest, most traditional segment of the market, in which nearly all MARC records originate.” This tier includes both libraries and businesses, as well as OCLC, and is, as such, a mix of the “community” and “commercial” as described earlier. The big thing is that they’re contributors to the marketplace, even if also consumers. According to R2’s statistics, this tier includes 97% of academic libraries, 63% of public libraries and a similar proportion of school libraries.

    The next tier down (and it’s clearly down, in this categorization) is called the “Blue” or “opportunistic” tier, including by the author’s definition “ … non-OCLC libraries and underfunded libraries without adequate cataloging capacity.” More interestingly, this tier “ … is also home to open database providers, and the pervasive (did they mean to say “pernicious”?) Z39.50 protocols used to locate and obtain MARC records free of charge.” But R2 makes note of the shifting borders between tiers: “Both in Canada and in the US, historically ‘green libraries’ are adopting ‘blue tier’ practices and expectation, as library budgets are cut and as Z39.50 targets proliferate. Nearly all libraries, regardless of size or type are strategically patient, periodically re-searching the ‘blue tier’ for certain records to become ‘available’; but for ‘blue tier’ libraries, this is the primary approach to cataloging … Open Access and Open Archives Initiatives reside in the blue tier, strongly supported by the basic philosophical stance that access to information should be free.”

    The “bottom” tier is the non-library “purple” tier, and this description clearly defines the real threat to the current MARC world, not just the fuzzy-wuzzy library community notion of sharing: “The non-library (purple) tier operates to a large extent without appreciation for or experience with MARC records, and without much regard for the library market in general. It is important to remain aware of activity in this segment, of course, because developments here pose the most significant competitive threats to the traditional values and economic structures of the ‘traditional green tier,’ and even the ‘opportunistic blue tier.’ This is the place where newer technologies and non-MARC data formats are used and developed.”

    Obviously, we have met the enemy of libraries, and according to R2 it happens to be us. But wait, there are some unexpected companions in the nasty “purple” tier. In addition to the usual suspects, like Google and Amazon, we find … “OCLC pro-actively operates within the “traditional green tier” and within the “purple non-library” tier. OCLC member libraries, however, are also very active in the “opportunistic blue tier,” sharing records in ways that may conflict with OCLC’s proprietary intent.”

    The battle lines seem clearly drawn here, with the “information wants to be free” crowd clearly the enemy, whether in sheep’s clothing as traditional librarians or explicitly displaying wolfish teeth as a member of that unappreciative crowd that cares little about the current MARC marketplace and would like to see the library data silo dismantled brick by brick. No matter that we seek these changes for the benefit of libraries struggling to live within their budgets and to innovate to serve their users as well–shame, shame!

    The R2 Solution

    The report’s authors actually manage to ask THE most relevant question that should be (and often is) on our minds, but only to dismiss it as out of scope:

    “The practice of cataloging has never before faced the level of scrutiny it now enjoys … or endures. Two types of question predominate. First, are traditional cataloging and the MARC record—even after modernization by RDA and FRBR—still necessary in an era of full‐text indexing, OpenURL linking, and other discovery options? While this is a worthy question, it is fortunately not within the purview of this report.”

    Leaving aside the odd assumption that RDA and FRBR represent the “modernization” of the traditional MARC record, they couch the issue only in the context of a limited number of technologies, never mentioning the gorilla in the room, the data being built by others outside our comfy and bounded silo. Then they go on to pose the questions they would rather address:

    “How do we as a profession understand and explain the costs and benefits of producing and distributing cataloging records? Where and by whom are most original records produced? What incentives exist to stimulate production? What are the barriers that discourage production? How does the library market assign value to the work of cataloging? What is the return on any organization’s investment in producing original catalog records? How does shared cataloging and free or low‐cost distribution of records affect the market? To what degree is market activity subsidized by LC and by the work of individual libraries?”

    The problem is, that without an answer to question #1, the other questions seem hardly relevant.

    “As noted there, the market is in need of adjustment, if it is to create an incentive for producers while retaining the community ethic of free sharing of data. The ethic of the cooperative can only be sustained if the full costs of production are borne by the community.”

    It seems to me that the market will be adjusted, and the recognition of the full costs of traditional cataloging and the plunging ROI as we address Question #1 will hasten that readjustment, but probably not in the direction R2 predicts or that those seeking compensation for their MARC record production might want.

    The authors provide some telling glimpses into their world view in their discussion about crosswalks:

    “ONIX to MARC record translations and fully operable MARC to non‐MARC metadata crosswalks could dramatically alter this three‐tiered landscape. To date, major players in the blue and purple tiers have failed to buy into the concept of shared bibliographic and authority data. While some efforts to encourage cross‐market cooperation are underway (notably the OCLC/NISO forum), fierce competition flourishes within and between each tier of the market. Even more problematic, each tier has distinctly different needs and incentives, making it difficult to establish an adequate degree of shared urgency and/or investment in new solutions.” [RIN]

    Clearly, in a world where the only relevant data one can see “out there” is ONIX, crosswalks seem a no-brainer, but to call this view “limited” seems far too kind.

    Ultimately, R2 thinks we still have time to tweak the marketplace and flog out more MARC records by identifying and marshaling unused capacity (e.g., hidden catalogers) and providing economic incentives. In my view, this is a flawed argument, and takes away from the need to plan for the transition to a much different future. I agree that MARC will indeed be used by libraries for some time, but as a lossy exchange format, not the lynchpin of the library data world. R2’s strategy prolongs the old world, jeopardizing the possibilities of moving forward in a timely manner.

    The Sacred Cow Effect

    Sadly, the whole report, interesting though it is as a biological specimen, fails utterly to examine the data activity outside libraries except to demonize it and its proponents. In making the Library of Congress into Poor Nell, they also deny the innovations in creating and reusing data that LC itself has accomplished, for instance, the American Memory Project, the LC Flickr Project, and many other digital initiatives that have proactively (and openly) pushed the metadata envelope in ways that inspire and engage us. The report fails also to understand that the changes they fear, the ones that they rightly expect to undermine the current marketplace completely, are already nibbling ravenously around the edges of MARC and its traditional marketplace in ways that will hardly take the 5-10 years to make change become real that R2 predicts.

    Last summer at ALA in Chicago, a small group of us pulled together a linked data program, hearteningly well attended, where Eric Miller persuasively predicted that the return on investment for integrating “free” metadata from “the cloud” will trump traditional concerns about quality. [Miller] Mainstream entitles like the New York Times are moving aggressively into the linked data space, seeking to merge their data with the likes of DBpedia and FreeBase. [Sandhaus]

    Consider this from MMA partner Jon Phipps: “The future cataloging marketplace will have to compete with ‘free and more than good enough’. Like the people who initially sneered at Google for being too simplistic and ignoring metadata when it came to searching, the professional cataloging community ignores (or tries to fend off) the enormous future output of Linked-Data-enabled systems at its peril. By opening up a clear relationship between the semantic web and library data sets, the RDA vocabularies represent a threat to the hegemony of catalogers. The RDA vocabularies are a a disruptive, game-changing technology.” [Phipps]

    The reality is that it’s not just the marketplace that’s changing, it’s also the profession. As part of the analysis of why the numbers of catalogers reported in their survey doesn’t lead to the expected output levels, R2 speculates that “These data lead us to ask what catalogers are doing. Bob Wolven and others suggest that catalogers are being called upon to apply their knowledge of cataloging principles to new initiatives; and specifically to creating metadata for digital and archival collections.” [Wolven] R2 seems to imply that this is a bad thing, taking away resources from the business of actually churning out MARC records, but certainly these newer roles are critical to the survival and renewal of libraries, far more than shoring up current MARC record production.

    The solutions the R2 report poses, from paying more attention to recouping cataloging costs and re-centralizing creation of cataloging records, if taken up, would actively undermine a transition to participation in a more open, linked data world. They represent a step backward, in a community that has already internalized the values of sharing and decentralized data critical to seeing value in the world of openly accessible data lying on our doorstep.

    Oddly enough, the report ends with a quote from my old friend Sherman Clarke (unattributed, so most likely as a comment to the survey):

    “We collectively need to have a model that allows us to do some of the building of BIBCO records mechanically or through accretion of metadata from institutional records or other record loads. OCLC already does considerable building of the master record from incoming records; what we need is something more like the metadata that is becoming usual in NewGen environments. If someone adds a tag or review or picture, that becomes available in the master cluster. Not a BIBCO record, but a BIBCO cloud of metadata for a particular manifestation of a work/expression.”

    Yup, you got it, Sherman. The change we need is not really about records, or catalogers; it’s a new way to think about information and added value.

    [Miller] Miller, Eric. “Linked Data and Libraries: Grassroots Program: From Legacy Data to Linked Data, Preparing Libraries for Web 3.0. Available at: http://zepheira.com/talks/ala-em-lod.pdf

    [R2] Study (for the Library of Congress) of the North American MARC Records Marketplace, October 2009, R2 Consulting LLC, Ruth Fischer, Rick Lugg. Available at: http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/MARC_Record_Marketplace_2009-10.pdf

    [RIN] Research Information Network. (2009). Creating catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world. Available at: http://www.rin.ac.uk/files/creating_catalogues_REPORT_June09.pdf

    [Sandhaus] Sandhaus, Evan. “150 Years of Semantic Technology.” Presentation at the Cornell University Libraries Metadata Working Group Forum, Nov. 13, 2009. Slides will be available from: http://metadata-wg.mannlib.cornell.edu/forum/index.php?date=2009-11-13

    [Wolven] Wolven, Robert. (2008). In search of a new model: Columbia University Libraries: Robert Wolven reflects on what’s next for cooperative cataloging. netConnect, 1/15/2008. Available at: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6514925.htm