Metadata Matters

Blog

  • Onward!

    One of the things Jon and I still talk about (despite our putative retirement), is how to pass on to the newer generation what we’ve learned over our years working in the vocabulary, data maintenance and data aggregation spaces. Of course, we’ve written or co–written quite a few papers and articles, and most continue to be read and cited (or so ResearchGate tells me), and as well we have significant numbers of presentations and slides available freely.

    Jon sometimes tries to convince me that in the age of AI and waning interest in metadata and vocabularies, particularly in non-library research venues, our time of relevance has passed. He may be right in some respects, but I’m not convinced that’s true in libraries. And the Open Metadata Registry, still alive and quietly kicking, is still being used by an interesting variety of vocabulary nerds. I checked today and noted that there’s a NASA Name Authority vocabulary still in active development as of last week (I haven’t checked to see whether the developers have been active during the partial government shutdown or not).

    Recently, I worked on the NISO effort to describe the state of the vocabulary world and one of our main discoveries was how few of the tools developed over the past few years are still functioning. Most were developed using research funding, notoriously time limited (one or two years is common). What’s left is an array of commercial products (difficult to determine how effective they are, though they’re certainly costly), and the OMR, which we’ve been supporting since our NSF funding dried up in 2008. We had funding from ALA Publishing for some of that time, and we’re still working on a beta version of the OMR.

    We’d like to find out whether there’s any interest out there in figuring out what can be done, in the non-commercial realm, to determine what the needs are–in libraries particularly, but also in other institutions–for continuing a service like the OMR, and what might be strategies to continue it (or something similar) into the next decade or so.

    Ultimately an important question is whether formal RDF vocabulary management matters in a data world dominated by Machine Learning, fragmented by the low bar set for publishing ‘Linked Data’ and the ongoing ‘format wars’ in the library community. Vocabularies matter when definitions are clearly expressed and mechanisms are provided to align heterogeneous metadata across divergent datasets. Definitions and alignments have to be maintained over time — all data has a lifespan of utility. Too often data is released into the wild of the internet without any thought to how it will be consumed and how it will be maintained. Ongoing vocabulary maintenance is crucial to future-proofing public datasets. Or is it all just too hard, given the pressures of funding and the more immediate worry of whether you’ll still have a job next week?

    Given the burgeoning of podcasts on anything and everything, we’ve considered whether that might be a way to get some interesting conversations going (maybe even interviews, which are my favorite kind to listen to). Or we might just up the effort to continue blogging (thus cementing our reputation for persistence!) Do mention some topics that interest you, whether for the blog or (possibly) a podcast. Comments welcome in the comment section of this blog, or on Twitter, at @Metadata_Maven or @jonphipps.

    Discuss!

  • Moving Right Along

    My last birthday (tail end of 2018) was one of those with the zero at the end, which always inspires a look at those Big Life Questions: Where am I at this point in my life? Where do I want to go from here? How do I feel about my past, present and future? I’ve not been blogging lately, and part of that has been my necessary engagement with those questions. I know many of you will be in Seattle in a few days and might expect me to be there, but I won’t be. I’d like to reassure those of you who know me that I’m just fine, not dead or ill, nor totally disinterested in the issues that have interested me lo these many years (decades? Oy!).

    But I’ve always been aware that I don’t want to overstay my welcome—I’ve seen it happen, and am not interested in becoming someone who can’t let go of a career that has met a natural end, lacking the excitement of new ideas and the determination to share them in papers, blog posts, or rants in various venues. There’s also the frustration of discovering that there are far too many folks who look at the age of our vocabulary services and figure that they’re too old to pay attention to. It’s hard not to take that personally on occasion. But, take a gander at the “Latest Activity” feed on that geriatric home page, and you’ll see that the services behind it are far from dead.

    And much as I love the travel and connecting with friends I’ve made over the years, I just don’t have the bucks to keep attending ALA and other meetings without actual financial support. We still work, doing the things we’re good at, keeping our services up for those who have the sense to see that they still work (and are still free). We’re determined to keep that going for as long as we can (at this point it’s the ‘too cheap to fail’ strategy), but how long depends on Jon more than me. [I still enjoy doing workshops, so get in touch if that interests you or your group.]

    So what will I be doing instead of following the ALA herds from city to city? I’d like to get back to writing short stories, which I did several years ago and am drawn to continue. I’d like to find a place to set up my hammered dulcimer (someplace where the cats can’t perch on it!) and continue learning how to play it. I plan to continue with yoga (coming up on 18 years with the same teacher), and riding my bike along the rural roads where I live.

    And if you ever find yourself near centrally isolated Ithaca, do get in touch and I’m happy to show you around, or take some time for a drink or a meal, and a good conversation.

    So for those of you still on the path, do enjoy Seattle and it’s buzz and attractions, and have a great conference.

  • Remembering Christine Frodl

    I can’t remember when I first met Christine, but I certainly knew her well enough to make an informal (and more than a bit subversive) proposal to her at DC-2008 in Berlin. Jon & I had been discussing how RDA might develop translations — this was about the time when we had added the Properties and subProperties, based on the RDA relationships originally published in the Appendices, into the OMR. Many of the readers of this blog may remember that the 2008-2013 versions of the RDA Vocabularies were never formally published by the JSC, but that changed in 2014 when the RDA Registry was unveiled.

    In Berlin we decided to approach Christine about working with us to demonstrate how the translations might work. We knew the German librarians were very interested in participating in RDA and had been pushing at the JSC’s door for some time. We thought she would at least hear us out, but we were in no way convinced that she’d be very interested. We knew that catalog librarians in particular were very imprinted on rules, and we suspected that those from Germany might be even more so. How wrong we were!

    We made sure that Christine knew that we hadn’t asked permission, and there might be repercussions from this subversive activity, even if it were only a demonstration. To our surprise, she said yes, with a visible twinkle in her eye at the thought of such an outrageous project. The repercussions I was worried about stemmed from some discomfort JSC had about us at that point. They didn’t understand what we were trying to do, and someone accused us of stealing their work (I couldn’t make that up).

    So Christine didn’t just say yes, she followed through, appointing Veronika Leibrecht from her shop, who spoke both German and English. Veronika did a fantastic job, and after that we rarely missed a chance to show folks looking at the OMR that there was a German translation. RDA now has (or is working on) translations in the RDA Registry that include Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

    This story came to mind immediately when I heard that Christine had died last week. It was clear to us that in addition to the many professional and personal qualities mentioned by those who knew her, she had a vision of a multi-lingual future for RDA that she had the courage to help get moving. That’s a legacy to be celebrated.

  • Whither CC:DA?

    Back in the old days (Feb. 2014, to be exact), I published a blog post entitled: “Wake Up Call for CC:DA”, written during an excruciating conversation at the tail end of a CC:DA meeting at Midwinter 2014. As part of that I recommended that CC:DA change its focus:

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

    There were no comments to that post (not much of a surprise), but in the years since, change has been forced on CC:DA as a result of the RSC’s push to change RDA from the Anglo-American focus of the past to one more international and multilingual. This has changed CC:DA’s status from the 800 lb. gorilla whose discussions went directly into the ears of the RSC (then the JSC) to a cranky corner of the RDA peanut gallery. The Europeans, many of whom are actually using RDA, have taken center stage, leaving the Americans to cope (or not) with BibFrame (characterized by some across the pond as just another remnant of America’s colonial aspirations).

    Like most change, that’s the bad news and the good news, depending on your point of view. Mine (again no surprise) is that this shift is the good news, or will be when the CC:DA community decides to make it so. IMO, the usual CC:DA conversation, most often focused on the ‘rules’, has resulted in keeping back the American discussions of what the future looks like for the metadata community. Europe is far ahead of us, having been relatively powerless to change the guidelines, and has instead been focused on learning more about the data models they need to know about to evaluate what they do now and how that needs to change. There has been far more experimentation and implementation in Europe than we’ve managed in the U.S. (the BF distraction is part of that) and as they have developed much more sophistication in their thinking.

    So what should we do to change that? Some possibilities:

    1. Start talking about what metadata should or could be for our present and future, whether creation, evaluation, distribution or improvement. Figure out what we know and don’t know and how we can learn what’s going on in the metadata world outside libraries and how we can apply that knowledge in libraries.

    2. Set up a working group or committee to take that discussion and develop a curriculum for CC:DA with the intention of building up skills and understanding to spread around, within and beyond CC:DA, as well as throughout the cataloging community (which desperately needs leadership in this area).

    3.Determine who within ALA and allied organizations can participate and assist, by preparing reading lists, developing and/or linking to existing materials, and leading discussions (both f2f and online). Eventually we’ll need to set up a variety of strategies for supporting and expanding these opportunities.

    This is clearly not part of the current remit of CC:DA, and the budget does not yet exist for this kind of effort. Clearly there will need to be partnerships and allies for an effort like this, but we’re already behind, so let’s get started.

    [I plan to make a proposal to CC:DA to start talking about this, so watch this space.]

  • Vocabulary Instability, or, Junk in Space

    I hope many of you have delved into the NISO Technical Report on Issues in Vocabulary Management, released this past summer. In my opinion, one of the most important insights contained in that report came about as the group reviewed vocabulary management tools and development projects over the past few years, most of them still cited as if they were alive and kicking. But for the most part, they weren’t.

    “Finally, there is the issue of sustainability of the vocabularies selected for use in data. A sustainable vocabulary is protected by organizational or institutional commitments, policies that make clear who makes those commitments and what they mean, as well as a record of responsible maintenance and growth. A vocabulary without those commitments may not be sustainable over time and may be a questionable investment for organizations seeking to use the vocabulary in their data.”

    Why is this important? A key concept in the notion of sustainability of vocabularies is expressed in the use of use of the term ‘investment’. A data provider who chooses to use a particular vocabulary for their data has (whether they recognize it or not) an investment in that vocabulary, thus an important interest in its sustainability. Consider the challenge of keeping those data instances relevant over time in an open world (which librarians have been doing for decades in a very closed world). Doing so requires a combination of sustainably managed vocabularies, and tools to provide change notification and other services to the maintainers of data containing those vocabularies. Inexplicably, there has been very little discussion of this, despite the fact that just about every model for future metadata development presumes the increased use of public vocabularies.

    The NISO group spent some time on these issues:

    “In some respects, the problem of vocabulary discovery and availability for general use is not easily separated from issues around the loss of funding for projects building vocabulary development or management tools, almost all of which were initially developed in time limited circumstances. This report cites several projects that were initially funded in whole or part to address issues around vocabulary provision in particular research or practice communities, but that have not received funding to extend or maintain their tools or their vocabularies. This is a significant problem, as without the ability to support the structural or conceptual vocabularies required to describe resources being aggregated or distributed, there is no such thing as useful distribution or maintenance of any data instances using those vocabularies. The many projects now being funded to consider the problems of ‘big data,’ particularly scientific research data, all depend on stable metadata vocabularies.

    This concern is not that different from what we hear regularly about the crumbling physical infrastructure supporting our transportation systems (although without the scary safety implications). Many on the academic side of these questions take it for granted that funding comes and goes, and may not consider the longer-term implications of these ebbs and flows. But the reason to talk about vocabulary sustainability is that there are long-term implications of depending on funded projects to build and maintain the infrastructure around vocabularies used for linked open data, not to mention the vocabularies themselves.”

    So what’s the solution for this set of problems? Is it to convince funding agencies to include sustainability plans as a requirement for receiving support (and if they’re not going to fund projects for more than two years how effective would that be)? Should we cede the development of vocabularies to institutional entities who can afford to maintain them over time (ex., the Getty)? Would a more stable funding model cover tools as well?

    The current funding models have left a legacy of junk in space–many projects on the net and cited through the literature but no longer functioning, which cannot provide an infrastructure for vocabulary management we can all build upon. I wonder whether the discussion of these issues will become urgent–I hope before I retire from the scene!

  • Hey BibFramers, what’s it all about?

    One of the ongoing myths about RDA is that it’s just a set of instructions and rules for the creation and maintenance of bibliographic metadata, regardless of data model. This has never been entirely accurate, since the RDA instructions explicitly reference RDA’s FRBR-based metadata model, which was significantly modified by BibFrame. But the notion of RDA-as-rules divorced from its data and infrastructure seems still to be part of the promotion of Bibframe. This is not helpful, and when the misinformation is stated over and over it begins to look like an Alternative Fact.

    For example, as part of the Bibframe Update presentations at ALA in Chicago, it was stated that the Bibframe editor will have the “RDA rules hot linked to element labels” (presumably from the Toolkit) to assist catalogers using BF to create bib data. I find this difficult to get my head around — BF and RDA use different reference models, name things differently, etc. And the RDA 3R project to reorganize and rewrite the instructions to align RDA with the IFLA LRM (which is both more extensive than, and less aligned with the Bibframe model) is well underway, and will likely confuse the issue even more.

    The contention that RDA guidance can be used to build BF data is certainly not new. What is new was the momentum of change in process with RDA, from the R3 project, to the internationalization of RDA governance, to the growing list of translations. When the 3R Project is complete (early next year), the RDA instructions in the Toolkit and the data in the RDA Registry will be far more integrated than AACR and MARC ever were. Whether that integration will leave room for BibFrame to use the new instructions is unclear.

    There was an impressive list of RDA information sessions at Annual, and an increasing numbers of folks attending them. This suggests that the RDA message seems to be gaining momentum, and there’s mounting evidence that this is so. A few presentations from the “RDA towards Linked Data sessions, held in conjunction with the European RDA Interest Group (EURIG) annual meeting in Fiesole, Italy this May illustrate that point:

    In his presentation, Philip Schreur pointed out that RDA “is a natural representation of our data on the Web” because of its extensible and flexible framework, its rich treatment of relationships, and its focus on resource discovery.

    Gordon Dunsire’s presentation showed how the wider implementation of the “4-fold path” in RDA for data capture and storage is intended to support a full range of data representation from catalogue cards, flat file schema, and RDBMS, to linked data.

    Most people who attended the RDA sessions in Chicago seemed to be very interested in RDA’s approach, in particular how the data is handled, the growth of translations, and the strong desire to extend RDA to meet the needs of specialized cataloging communities. A meeting to explore the needs of those communities was exceptionally well attended, with lots of good suggestions. And the RDA Linked Data Forum (where people actually got a chance to ask questions!!) was standing room only. (My slides are here).

    There are definite challenges for the North American cataloging community moving forward if they want to avoid isolating themselves from the rest of the bibliographic world, by and large unenthusiastic about BibFrame. The Anglo-American cataloging rules are fading into the distance as the rest of the world embraces the reality of a truly multinational, multilingual, multicultural metadata environment, exemplified by the RDA/LRM bibliographic model. The North American bibliographic community has never been explicitly “America First” and now is not the time to start.

    Stay tuned.

  • NISO report on Vocabulary Management

    I’d hoped to get a post out before ALA Annual but here it is Monday in Chicago and it’s not done yet. But I need to note that the draft report is out for comment as of this past Monday (June 19th) and comments are due by July 19th. To access the report, go to the NISO website (NISO.org) and look for recent announcements or press releases.

    There’s a lot in this report: starting with a description of the current environment for vocabulary development, the difficulties of sustainability, how funding affects the growth of tools and new vocabularies, and much more. There are a substantial number of case studies, illustrating points made in the report.

    There’s more work to be done–real best practices, for instance–but that should really be the responsibility of a new group with more experience with vocabularies. As yet NISO has not determined whether to sponsor such a group, but certainly commenters of the report could suggest an opinion.

  • “Understanding Metadata”: a sort of review

    While checking email during a moment of inattention at the recent ALA Midwinter meeting in Atlanta, I spotted an announcement of the new NISO publication “Understanding Metadata”, by Jenn Riley. It was a surprise, I’d not known that it was in preparation, but I hoped that such a primer would be helpful in raising the level of understanding around metadata in the general library community.

    So I downloaded the publication, and as is my wont, started with the Table of Contents to get a sense of what was being covered. To my absolute astonishment, neither the list of Notable Metadata Languages: Examples in Broad Use nor the one of Notable Metadata Languages: Examples from the Cultural Heritage Sector included RDA: Resource Description and Access. In disbelief, I searched the document for “RDA” and found only a footnote describing RDA as the successor to AACR2 and categorized as a ‘content standard’. I then tried searching for “FRBR”, and there was nothing at all to be found.

    Full disclosure: I’m part of the RDA Development Team and have worked on the RDA Vocabularies since late 2007, after the RDA group and DCMI got together to build them. Granted, it took until January 2014 to publish them formally and bring up the RDA Registry, but we were not hiding under a rock for those years.

    There’s a long trail of articles and blog posts documenting the trajectory of RDA (only some of them with my name on them), so it’s inexplicable to me how the author of this primer, the estimable Jenn Riley, could still subscribe to the notion that RDA is all about instructions for populating element sets. That was certainly true before 2008, but I know Jenn has not been hiding under a rock, either. Particularly when efforts outside North America are considered, RDA is a force to be reckoned with in the metadata space, and interest in Europe and other places outside of North America is enthusiastic and growing.

    None of the IFLA standards show up in this publication either, which suggests a somewhat US-centric view–inexplicable to me given the increasing internationalization of metadata efforts overall. Several of those missing IFLA standards, including FRBR, are being republished after extensive reviews, and at least in RDA-land, the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM) is a significant topic of conversation where library metadata people hang out.

    Then I checked out Jenn’s wonderful image categorizing metadata standards “Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe”, and noted that it also included RDA as a content standard and successor to AACR2. Then I saw that the image was copyrighted 2009-2010, and the most obvious answer for the gap became clearer. [I should note that I have a large poster sized version of the image, which I had printed up so I could study the image better, back when I was doing more teaching]. I was pretty relieved by this realization, to be honest, but it occurred to me that the revolutionary change represented by the RDA Vocabularies seems to have been overlooked by Jenn (and probably others) who think they know what RDA is, but haven’t looked at it lately (or at least since 2008, when the vocabularies began to appear in the Open Metadata Registry). I guess as one involved in metadata standards for well over 3 decades, it’s been my experience that with few exceptions, metadata standards change continually, and the assumption that they are fixed in time and space is a dangerous one.

    That said, there is much to be applauded in this primer. The explanation of storage and sharing is an excellent overview, clear and well illustrated. It was good to see a section covering standardization issues, but I would argue with this statement in the ‘Standardization’ section: “Formal standardization is not the norm for most RDF vocabularies; instead, communities tend to build vocabularies that are useful to them, then promote their use through a combination of documentation and open sharing of data that uses these vocabularies.” This statement absolutely does not apply to RDA, nor to the majority of the examples listed in Notable Metadata Languages: Examples in Broad Use. But in a sense it explains the emphasis on XML that seemed a bit out of date as I first read through the document

    I would also argue with the following statement in the Controlled Vocabularies section: “Those developed and maintained by the cultural heritage community, such as LCSH, tend to be among the most robust controlled vocabularies in common use.” I’m not sure what definition of ‘robust’ is being used here, but I posted on Metadata Matters in 2013 about the significant problems with LCSH in http://id.loc.gov, which i think makes a strong argument against the ‘robustness’ of the LCSH services. (https://managemetadata.com/blog/2013/07/23/versions-and-services-pt-2/). Not much has changed since that post, sadly.

    I guess, on the whole, I’d have to say I’m disappointed with this primer, despite some strong sections. Although I’m no fan of peer review, it strikes me that this is one situation where it might have been useful.

  • The RDA Toolkit == The RDA Data Model

    Sitting in the CC:DA meeting at ALA last week, listening to the RDA report and the questions it generated, I was struck yet again by the disconnect between the understanding by the audience of RDA as a content model — the Instructions as embodied in the Toolkit — and the presentation by the speakers of the changes to both the RDA Toolkit and the RDA Registry in terms of the changes to the RDA data model.

    In the case of the Toolkit, a significant part of the reorganization is intended to better align the Toolkit with the Registry, the data model. In the case of the Registry, a significant portion of the changes are intended to continue the current data model’s status as an implementation of FRBR, and to adjust the model to accommodate the consolidation of the various FRBR models into the IFLA LRM.

    From its inception, the Toolkit has reflected the RDA instructions, an upgraded and internationalized version of AACR2, originally intended to provide content instructions for populating the MARC21 carrier, while conceptually describing the data in terms of the FRBR-oriented RDA carrier. The changes to the Toolkit are a necessary evolution away from the slowly devolving MARC21 data model toward the RDA data model. But the audience doesn’t, can’t, easily see that distinction, and the ‘questions’ swirl around expressions of discomfort with the changes that reflect a lack of understanding of the broadening disconnect between the Toolkit and the Registry, and between RDA and MARC21.

    This cognitive dissonance must be addressed by the RSC and its representatives at every future opportunity when discussing the rationale for both the alignment of the RDA data model with IFLA LRM, and the alignment of the RDA content model in the Toolkit with the RDA data model. In that context, the global bibliographic community needs definitive guidance in understanding the relationship between the entities and elements of the RDA data model and the MARC21 data model in which they currently create and maintain their metadata.

  • Breaking the silence: Atlanta

    Still here in Atlanta, enjoying the weather (today is something of an exception: thunderstorms and rain). My first meeting of the conference was on Friday–the FRBR Interest Group discussion–and although I rarely attend, it seemed to have a lot of potential. I was especially interested in finding out what other folks were thinking and asking about the IFLA Library Reference Model, the successor to FRBR, now being widely discussed.

    There were probably 25 people there, actively chatting with colleagues and friends, waiting for the session to begin. But it didn’t. There was a table set up with microphones and bottled water, a podium, a projection screen in the corner and the usual aging Dell laptop for presenters next to the podium. Nobody behind the table, nobody putting a stop to the conversations to start the meeting.

    Although there was a past leader of the IG present, she wasn’t interested in taking over. It will surprise none of you that I ended up leading the meeting. We went around the group and everyone introduced themselves and spoke about why there were there. As part of that we discovered that there were at least three people in the group for whom Atlanta was their first ALA conference, and not only that: the FRBR IG meeting was their first ever ALA meeting. The old hands apologized to them, told them it wasn’t usually like this, and suggested some other meetings where they could learn about the subject.

    But this situation was appalling, and though none of us had any idea who should have been there or why they weren’t, there was a meeting on the schedule and somebody paid for the microphones, room and A/V setup. We all know about the things that can go wrong on the way to a presentation: travel/weather hassles, illness, etc., none of which can be avoided entirely. But why wasn’t a substitute in place? There are certainly others from the IG who could have stepped in, and we all know how to send slides through the ether for a substitute to present.

    This IG is an ALCTS group (http://www.ala.org/alcts/mgrps/ig/ats-dgfrbr) and I’d suggest that ALCTS needS to look into this and perhaps add something to their instructions for IG chairs. #ALAMW17