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  • 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 …

  • Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll

    As one who entered college in 1966 and experienced the sixties from the front lines, I sometimes wonder how I got to be so old and stodgy. I particularly think of this when I pass plate glass windows while walking on the street and glimpse my reflection in them. Who is that gray-haired old broad in the window? It’s always a shock, despite the fact that I’ve been gray-haired for a very long time, and demonstrably growing old at the same rate as everyone else.

    I’m sure some people reading this are laughing at the self-characterization “stodgy,” given that in some quarters I know I’m thought of as a very radical library ex-cataloger with unfortunate tendencies to disparage the status quo and suggest outlandish changes to how things are done in libraries. I suppose I use the “stodgy” bit to suggest that it isn’t necessarily the case that I believe we have to throw out everything we’ve done in the past in pursuit of new approaches. I do a lot of evangelizing on this point, both because I think it makes change less frightening, and because I believe we know a lot more than we think we do about what needs to change, we just have trouble separating that knowledge from the familiar and comforting packages we know so well. We’ve been distributing our knowledge in those packages for a long time, and it’s human nature to stick with what we know when we’re challenged. After all, in our early days as a species, we learned to eat the familiar stuff because we knew it wouldn’t kill us. Those who preferred the new and unfamiliar invariably ran into trouble, and often failed to pass on their genes. Our genes come from the people who knew that the new stuff could kill you.

    My own experience with change has been a mixed bag, certainly. When I was in college I worked for the campus radio station (I was a TV-Radio major). Because I had radio experience in high school, I got a “job” immediately in my freshman year, doing a program called “Dinner Date” which utilized only a certain narrow set of recordings (then on vinyl only, of course). I was supposed to play only instrumentals in the genre that we now refer to as “elevator music.” I tried, in vain, to shift the playlist a bit over to slightly jazzier stuff, bossa nova, and suchlike, but that didn’t go over very well with the then powers-that-were. (I should point out that in those days women weren’t allowed to read news because our voices didn’t have the proper authority—but that’s another story). The mission of the show was to provide quiet background music for people who might be eating their dinner, the music also interspersed (and this was not explicit, but we all got it) with a sexy female voice to keep people coming back. This was an interesting time to be doing educational radio–which was what we were supposed to be doing–before NPR and public radio, when there was a distinct boundary being maintained between commercial and non-commercial radio which didn’t have anything to do with the presence or lack of advertising. Rock and roll, which was what we all wanted to play instead of the classical music leavened with a bit of folk, jazz and elevator music on the side, was not allowed.

    Our Music Director at that stage, in charge of our quite extensive library of recordings, was a fellow who rather blindly followed the practices of the past, and as part of his job he reviewed all new records that flowed in on the gravy train of freebies provided by record companies. As he reviewed, with the use of a sharp tool, he rendered unplayable all those tracks unsuitable for the mission of the station at that time. After his tenure, a real musician became the Music Director, and he put a stop to that practice, but in the meantime, the station and its music collection was permanently disabled. When the station began to change (it’s now an NPR station specializing in Jazz) their collection of recordings was almost unusable. (Now that I think of it, this strategy reminds me of the practices I railed against in my early days at Cornell, where catalogers were told to delete MARC fields that the library then had no use for, which subsequently had to be laboriously re-done when fashions changed.)

    I’ve been reading Karen Coyle’s “Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata,” (Library Technology Reports, Jan. 2010) both because I want to comment on it more fully in this space and because I’m preparing for a class I’m teaching in the Spring quarter at the University of Washington (more about that later). Since I loaned my paper copy to Jon and won’t get it back until Friday, I’ve been limited so far to reading the first chapter, “Library Data in a Modern Context,” which is available online, and includes in its closing paragraph the following:

    “The need to change does not mean that what you are doing is wrong. Instead, it often means that something in your environment has changed, something that you cannot control.”

    This strikes me as a critically important point. Looking back I can see that much of our conversation about what is happening in our environment, and what needs to be part of our change strategy, is being heard as blame: “You’re doing this all wrong.” And that’s simply not true—if you don’t believe me that where we are makes perfect sense if you understand the ‘why’ of it, read that first chapter. Karen has a wonderful way of explaining things (one that I envy, I have to say), and she does a great job in taking the reader from the nineteenth century and Panizzi to the present day, and it all hangs together. It’s clear that we’ve been responding appropriately to the change in user needs and technology, and I for one think we can do it again, once we move beyond the blame game.

    I get a lot of questions about how and when this change will happen—nobody really wants to be on the bleeding edge of some of this, nor to they want to be left behind, but the effect of all the strategic planning seems to be that we are all teetering on the verge of some tipping point we can’t quite see clearly. “What’s it going to take?” they ask, and I have to be honest, I don’t know. Maybe the smartest thing would be to just declare that we’ve passed that tipping point and stop waiting for somebody else to take the first plunge. Maybe if we could get everyone to read Karen’s report (the printed version can be ordered from ALA directly), as well as to look for the February issue, which will also be Karen’s work, we’ll have the courage to make a move in the right direction. Hope springs eternal (and perhaps that’s the ‘drug’ referred to in the title!).

  • 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.

  • 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

  • We don’t need no stinking Access Points

    …in the RDA Ontologies. Do we? After all, they’re a big part of the ‘Access’ in Resource Description and Access (RDA). But they’re not particularly semantically meaningful, especially if you have the component parts available. An Access Point is just a structured string. For instance a ‘Publication Statement’ Access Point for “The Daytona daily news” might look like:

    “Daytona Beach, Florida : Geo. F. Crouch, 1903-1926”

    It has a formal syntactic structure, and semantics derived from adherence to that structure when the string is created:

    “Place of Publication” : “Publisher’s Name”, “Date of Publication”

    Note that the punctuation is part of the formal grammar that helps parse a grammatically correct statement into its semantically meaningful constituent parts.

    And this is the way we’ve been doing things forever (well it seems like forever) — semantics is derived from proper use of a syntax that everybody who is creating and using shared data has agreed upon in advance. And as long as everybody uses precisely the same syntax this works great. It works really, really well with structured syntaxes like MARC21:

    260 $a Daytona Beach, Florida
260 $b Geo. F. Crouch
260 $c 1903-1926

    …and hierarchical syntaxes like XML:

    <publicationStatement>
  <placeOfPublication>Daytona Beach, Florida</placeOfPublication>
  <publisherName>Geo. F. Crouch</publisherNam>
  <dateOfPublication>1903-1926</dateOfPublication>
</publicationStatementt>

    The RDA documents go so far as to call an Access Point an Element and its constituent parts Sub-Elements, again clearly thinking of this nice syntacticly-defined semantics.

    But what if your data says, semantically, that “Place of Publication” isn’t the Name of the place or the Label for the place, but a URI that identifies the Place itself; a resource rather than a string. The Access Point rules don’t let you stick a URI in the Publication Statement where a string is supposed to be.

    What about “Publisher’s Name”? That’s clearly going to be a string no matter what — names tend not to be resources. But there’s probably a Publisher resource out there, somewhere, with a URI that identifies the Publisher and probably has a Name or a Label property that provides a string that you can stick in the Publication Statement.

    We’ll just ignore “Publication Date” for the now, since that’s a very different can of worms: slimy, smelly worms.

    At the moment, RDA doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the resources supplying the strings for an Access Point, and it lets substantial ambiguity sneak in with property names like “Place of Publication” rather than “Place of Publication Name” like they resolved with “Publisher’s Name”. But that ambiguity didn’t exist when all the data was strings — strings you used for indexing, and displayed to the user, and didn’t have to go fetch from somewhere because they were right there in that 260 field.

    I listened to a radio program that referred to all of the money that everyone in the world has available to invest as “The Global Pool of Money” and I think that applies quite nicely to the Linked-Data notion of the Semantic Web — “The Global Pool of Data”.

    The open world model of the Semantic Web assumes that you will never have all of the available data that describes a resource, and the RDF data model supports this. Resources often exist, outside of traditional library data, available from the Global Pool of Data, that can supply the necessary labels.

    But of course we usually just have the labels. This is library data made for cards that need to be put in the correct order and read by a person. And the Global Pool of Data usually just has a bunch of resources. This is linked data, in no particular order at all, meant to be read by a machine.

    So, specifying Access Points as pre-coordinated strings actually provides us with a major opportunity when defining the ontologies; several opportunities actually:

    • We can formalize each Access Point specification into what Dublin Core calls a Syntax Encoding Scheme (SES) and say that each Access Point has a datatype.
    • We can clarify the semantics of using a label rather than a resource for properties (sub-elements) like “Publisher’s Name”
    • We can clarify the semantics of using a resource for “Place of Publication” and say that the label used in an Access Point must be the Name of the Place and this is distinctly different.

    So, refined to use properties that are a bit more semantically clear, we have a slightly modified Publication Statement:

    “Place of Publication Name” : “Publisher’s Name”, “Date of Publication”

    …we tie these properties specifically to a FRBR Manifestation that RDA says must be what they describe, and in RDF the supporting ontology looks like:

    rda:placeOfPublicationManifestation a owl:ObjectProperty
rda:PlaceOfPublicationName a owl:DatatypeProperty
rda:publisherManifestation a owl:ObjectProperty
rda:PublisherName a owl:DatatypeProperty

    Here’s our sample instance again (by the way, this data is from a real linked data resource):

    “Daytona Beach, Florida : Geo. F. Crouch, 1903-1926”

    <http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn93063916>
  rda:publisherManifestation <http://???> (blank, but we know one must exist)
    rda:PublisherName "Geo. F. Crouch"
  rda:placeOfPublicationManifestation <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Daytona_Beach%2C_Florida>
    rda:PlaceOfPublicationName "Daytona Beach, Florida"
    rdfs:label "Daytona Beach, Florida"

    This tiny chunk of data was gathered by hand and mapped (by me) from the existing resources and the labels supplied by those resources.

    Someday there will be services that comb through linked data looking for missing data like that Publisher resource, and will perform a search on the Global Pool of Data looking for resources with labels matching that library data, expressed in RDA/RDF, fill in the missing pieces and present the lucky cataloger, and ultimately the user, with all that rich linked data.

    The eXtensible Catalog project is working on services that do just that kind of thing, so someday may not be too far off.


  • Rachel Heery, in memoriam

    Last week I was in the UK, primarily to attend a DCMI Registry Community Workshop organized by UKOLN, scheduled for Friday, July 24th. Early the following week we found out that as we were gathered in York discussing distributed registries, Rachel Heery passed away after a long battle with breast cancer. Rachel was one of the founders of the Community (then called a working group), and was involved in building a number of registries, including the DCMI Registry and the IEMSR Registry at UKOLN.

    There have been a lot of postings about Rachel this week from colleagues and friends, and I wanted to add my voice to that chorus of tributes to an exceptional person. I didn’t know Rachel as well as I would have liked—we worked on different continents and generally crossed paths primarily at DC conferences. But we were both members of two distinct minorities within DCMI: women, and implementers. Neither of us trained as technologists, and came to the sometimes dauntingly technical discussions at DCMI from the point of view of those trying to use DC for real projects, too often frustrated with the 50,000 foot viewpoints expressed by the more technically astute.

    Stu Weibel, who knew Rachel, as I did, in the context of Dublin Core, brought her back for me the most strongly by reminding me of one of Rachel’s characteristic interjections:

    “We emulate those we admire, and I have often found myself over the years using a phrase that signaled, from Rachel, an objection worthy of discussion… a sort of lilting “Hang on…!” Those who have worked with her will hear echoes of the tone and inflection that made the phrase hers, and commanded respectful attention, a flag that something was not quite right. I always think of her when I say it, and will always try to use it in the service of the honest brokerage of common goals that characterized Rachel’s efforts.”

    Stu also reminds us that Rachel’s two most important contributions to the DC efforts (aside from her considerable intellect and personal presence) were in the areas of registries and application profiles–both have been a particular focus for me and Jon over the past four years or so. It gives me some solace to think that she would be pleased that implementers are still working hard in the areas she pioneered, though sad beyond measure that she will not see those efforts bear their promised fruit.

    Others who comment on Rachel’s influence and career:
    Lorna Campbell
    Andy Powell
    Lorcan Dempsey
    Her UKOLN colleagues

  • Linked Data at ALA Annual

    One of the most interesting programs at ALA Annual that I was involved with was the Linked Data grassroots program. Here’s the blurb:

    From Legacy Data to Linked Data: Preparing Libraries for Web 3.0. “How can library cataloging data be transformed to function within ‘Web 3.0’ and be understood by non-library web applications? Speakers from both the library and Semantic Web communities will explore the situation in a non-technical manner and describe current work underway to transform legacy library data into linked data.“

    The speakers were: Eric Miller (President, Zepheira, Inc.), me, Jennifer Bowen (Co-Principal Investigator, eXtensible Catalog Project, University of Rochester), Rebecca Guenther (Senior Networking and Standards Specialist, Network Development & MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress). Corey Harper of NYU introduced the speakers and fielded questions at the end. Because this was a Grassroots program, attempting to make a place for emerging trends in what is often a program consisting primarily of the hot issues of a year or two ago, all the approved programs got small rooms. The one we ended up in seated about 75, and we filled the floors, the aisles and much of the hallway outside the room. The room was in the Hilton, not easy to find, so it was gratifying how many people made the effort.

    American Libraries reported on the program, and from the comments I’ve received it was a successful session and has generated interest in further programming on the subject for next year (and we are actually talking about doing that). In my presentation, I made the case for the readiness of libraries for the challenges of linked data, citing the work done with the RDA vocabularies as foundational to that claim. I admit that although there was a part of that claim that was, if not actually wishful thinking, at least a rhetorical device, clearly we are at some kind of tipping point (or approaching it pretty quickly). Every six months when I talk to people at ALA extensively about this stuff, or when I’m out “on the road” talking to colleagues, there is more excitement and more interest on the part of librarians, who are definitely “getting it.”

    Presentations are available on the ALA Wiki.