Metadata Matters

Category: Presentations

  • 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.

  • Late to the party?

    In my post last week, I mentioned a paper that Gordon Dunsire, Jon Phipps and I had written for the IFLA Satellite Meeting in Paris last month “Linked Data in Libraries: Let’s make it happen!” (note the videos!). I wanted to talk about the paper and why we wrote it, but I’m not just going to summarize it–I wouldn’t want to spoil the paper for anyone!

    The paper, “Versioning Vocabularies in a Linked Data World”, was written in part because we’d seen far too many examples of vocabulary management and distribution that paid little or no attention to the necessity to maintain vocabularies over time and to make them available (over and over again, of course) to the data providers using them. It goes without saying that the vocabularies were expected to change over time, but in too many cases, vocabulary owners distributed changes in document form, or as files with new data embedded but no indication of what had changed, or worse: nothing.

    We have been thinking about this problem for a long time. Even the earliest instance of the NSDL Registry (precursor of the current Open Metadata Registry, or OMR, as we like to call it) incorporated a ‘history’ view of the data, basically the ‘who, what, when’ of every change made in every vocabulary. Later on, we added the ability to declare ‘versions’ of the vocabularies themselves, taking advantage of that granular history data, for those trying to manage the updating of their ‘product’ in a rational manner. Sadly enough, not very many of our users took advantage of that feature, and we’re not entirely sure why not, but there it was. Jon has always been frustrated with our first passes at this problem, and after Gordon and I discussed the problem with others at DC-2013 last year, and my rant about the lack of version control on http://id.loc.gov came out, it seemed time to think about the issue again.

    At that point we were also planning our own big time versioning event: the unpublished first version of the RDA Element Sets were about to make their re-debut in ‘published’ form, reorganized, and with new URIs. Jon was also working on the GitHub connection with the OMR underlying the new RDA Registry site, working in a more automated mode as planned. He and Gordon and I had been discussing a new approach for some time, based on the way software is versioned and distributed, which is well-supported in Git and GitHub. So, as we drove back from ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia in January of last year, Jon and I blocked out the paper we’d agreed to do with Gordon on how we thought versioning should work in the semantic vocabulary world.

    Consider: how do all of us computer nerds update our applications? Do we have to go to all sorts of websites (sometimes, but not always, prompted by an email) to determine which applications have changed and invoke an update? Well, sure, sometimes we do (particularly when they want more money!), but since the advent of the App Store and Google Play, we can do our updates much more easily, and for the most part those updates are ‘pushed’ to us for decisions on whether we want to update or not, we are told in a general way what has changed, and we click … and it’s done.

    This is the way updates should happen in the Semantic Web data world, increasingly dependent on element sets and value vocabularies to provide descriptions of products of all kinds in order to provide access, drive sales or eyeballs, or support effective connections between resources. Now that we’re all reconciled to using URIs instead of text (even if our data hasn’t yet made that transition), shouldn’t we consider an important upside of that change, a simpler and more useful way to update our data?

    So, I’ll quit there–go read the paper and let us know what you think. Don’t miss Gordon’s slides from Paris, available on his website. Note especially the last question on his final slide: “Is it time to get serious about linked data management?” We think it’s past time. After all, ‘management’ is our middle name.

    Note: As of this week the video of Gordon’s presentation in Paris is now available.

  • Talking Points

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A Consideration of Library Holdings in the World Beyond MARC

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

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

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

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

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

    The Other Side of Linked Data: Managing Metadata Aggregation

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

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

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

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

    Mapmakers

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

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

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

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

  • Not Letting “Who Pays” be the Killing Question

    A couple of weeks ago I made a short presentation at a linked data session at the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL). Many of the audience members were people I’ve known since I was a baby librarian (this is the group where I started my career as a presenter, and they invite me back every couple of years to talk about this kind of stuff.) One of the questions from the audience was one I hear fairly often: “Who’s paying for this?” I always assume, perhaps wrongly, that the questioner is responding to pressure from an administrator, but in fact anyone with with administrative and budget responsibilities–particularly in Technical Services, which has been under budget siege for decades–does and should think about costs.

    What I said to her was that we were all going to pay for it, and it seems to me that this isn’t just a platitude–given that the culture of collaboration we have developed assures us that many (though certainly not all) of the costs associated with the change we contemplate will be shared, as in the effort noted in my previous post. But the costs are difficult to assess at this stage, because we don’t know how long the transition will be nor exactly what the ‘end result’ will look like. If indeed we have three options for change—metamorphosis, evolution, and revolution—it seems we’ve not yet made the decision on what it’s going to be. If there are still some hoping for metamorphosis—where everything happens inside the pupa and the result is much more attractive (but the DNA hasn’t changed), well, it may be too late for that option.

    Evolution–defined as creative destruction and adaptation leading to a stronger result, with similar (but not identical) DNA–is much more what I’d like to see, and particularly if we look carefully at what we have–the MARC semantics, the SemWeb friendly RDA vocabularies, and the strong community culture in particular–and build on those assets, we have a fighting chance for a good result. The trick is that we don’t have millenia to accomplish this, we have a couple of years at best, if we work really quickly and keep our wits about us. The interesting thing about evolution is that when the environment changes and the affected species either adapt or disappear, it’s never entirely clear what that adaptation will look like prior to the point-of-no-return.

    As for revolution–perhaps that’s the possible result where Google and its partners take over the things we used to do in libraries when we brought users and resources together. They’re doing metadata now (not as well as we do, I’m thinking) but if we keep trying to make our ‘catalogs’ work better instead of getting ourselves out there on the Web, I don’t think the result will be pretty.

  • Thank you, Code4Lib!

    Some of you have already seen the live feed or the recordings for last week’s Code4Lib conference. If you have, you might already know that I was the keynote speaker for that conference. (The archive page is here, my part is about 90 minutes into session 1; slides are available too). The whole story of how I got there is interesting, and beyond that I’d like to talk about what I took away from it. I attended all of Tuesday and Wednesday, and left Thursday morning (after my return from ALA Midwinter in January, I’ve developed a strong disincentive to book the last flights into Ithaca from anywhere), thus missing the Thursday morning events. I’ve since caught up with those recordings.

    The invitation came from conference host Robert McDonald, and was totally out of the blue. Code4Lib has an admirable process for choosing keynoters–they have a wiki and backchannel list (that anyone can join), which keeps the voting off the main discussion list. I’ve never attended Code4Lib before, though I’ve been a lurker and an occasional participant in the discussions on the list for some years, and I know many of the regulars. As someone who hadn’t attended the conference before, it never dawned on me to participate in the voting. I didn’t get the most votes, but when the high vote getter turned them down, I was asked. At first I was pretty intimidated by the whole idea, but that passed fairly quickly, and I started to get excited by the challenge it represented, both for me personally, and as a representative of a whole host of librarians who never get a chance to talk to a room full of library programmers. It was clearly not an opportunity to be wasted.

    I gave a lot of thought to what I wanted to talk about, and started and abandoned several topics before settling on one. It clicked for me when I participated in a discussion at ALA Midwinter amongst attendees at the organizing meeting for the Linked Library Data IG. The discussion was about the discouraging fact that programmers and librarians (particularly catalogers) don’t seem to be connecting on the important issues of our libraries, instead we talk past one another. I think the general assumption is that this is a cultural divide, and it is on a superficial level, but a much more important reason is that we almost never gather together to discuss where we’re going. We all work for institutions that we believe are critically important in today’s society, but we’re not working together to solve the problems we can see in front of us.

    So my talk for C4L covered a number of areas, including advice to programmers on how to find and connect with librarians/catalogers in their institutions who might be ready to work with them more closely, and what the priorities should be for that work. Despite a fairly rough start to the talk (the IU laptop I was using had a new version of PowerPoint that behaved quite oddly in presenter mode), it went fairly well and the response was wonderful. During the rest of that day and the following one, I had some great conversations with other attendees about the issues I brought up, and there will be some follow through on several of those. I was very pleased in particular that my plea for building demonstration projects that would show how the RDA Vocabularies can be used was taken very seriously, and I will be following up on that one.

    One question I threw out to the audience was whether anyone had read our article in DLib, ‘RDA Vocabularies: Process, Outcome, Use’. About a half dozen had, but probably twice that many tweeted the URL, so perhaps some more have read it subsequently. I’m not sure why such a disappointing number have seen the article, but I hope that some who are interested in moving away from the frustrating parsing of MARC data will see the light.

    I also talked a bit about how the library world had been ill-served by the narrow marketing of RDA as primarily the guidance text (it’s still happening, unfortunately), as well as the whole RDA testing regime. Because the tests crammed RDA data into MARC, it really doesn’t operate as a test of RDA itself, or of the usefulness of FRBR. What we’ve ended up with is a vast amount of misunderstanding: many traditionalists still believe that RDA is not that different from AACR2, while those who believe that RDA isn’t enough change (or the change we need, to coin a phrase) believe the same thing but come to a different conclusion. As I said to the C4L group: “I get why catalogers like MARC, but I don’t get why you guys aren’t all over the RDA Vocabs.”

    After my own time in the spotlight, I became just another participant (the difference was that everybody knew who I was and I had to squint at their badges to see who they were). Thankfully nobody got freaked out that I was knitting socks while listening to other people’s presentations (and at least one pulled out her half-knitted sock to show me). With a laptop in front of me (not to mention IRC and Twitter), I wouldn’t have heard a thing. But, listening to the wide variety of presentations, I was very impressed by the amount of creativity, and the diversity of projects presented. I understood most of it, at least at a general level (though not perhaps on an operational one), and took some notes about a few insights I wanted to think about as I work on various projects. It was really a great conference, and the organizers did a fabulous job with everything. Do take a look at the video, and think about how you might make some connections with the catalogers or programmers in your life. We are all in this together, and we need to find better ways to converse and collaborate to make our ideas real.

    Oh, and lest I forget, thanks to all the folks who shared their wonderful and special beer with me during the after hours social time in the hospitality suite. You just may have turned me from an always-wine to a sometimes-beer broad. (And don’t worry, Declan, the beer washed out of my jacket just fine!)

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • FRBR vs. FRBR-ization

    ALA Annual in Chicago has been a blur—I did three presentations (which I hope to talk about and link to slides as time permits). But one issue has been rolling over in my mind ever since I blurted something about it at my first presentation on Friday of Annual, when I was last up on a panel about “The Future of MARC.” Rebecca Guenther of LC spoke about the efforts to keep MARC relevant and Ted Fons of OCLC covered similar topics from the viewpoint of “The Big O” (thanks to Karen Schneider for that wonderful appellation!) A feature of both talks was the idea that reorganizing MARC records into “FRBR-ized” views was really all that was needed to take advantage of FRBR. I argued at that time that this was not the case, and as I think more about it I’m more convinced it’s true: FRBR-ization is not the same as using FRBR in native RDA.

    Part of my view is based on the differences between RDA and MARC semantics (not syntax, which is where the conversation usually goes). One of the most overlooked aspects of RDA in general is the rich vocabulary of relationships that it brings to the table for use in bibliographic description. Most people who’ve focused on RDA as a textual guidance or set of rules have overlooked this, because the relationship vocabulary appears in appendices, and most of us don’t consider appendices the most important part of anything. But consider this: in the RDA Vocabularies, each of these relationships has an identifier, is part of a hierarchy that allows expression of bibliographic relationships at several levels, and gives us the ability to use these relationships to navigate the bibliographic landscape without having to delve into records and interpret the text notes we’ve used for the same purpose in MARC. For instance, using RDA you can say that ‘Resource X’ is an abridgment of ‘Resource Y’ (and that ‘Resource Y’ has an abridged version in ‘Resource X’) in a way that a system can expose to the user with no muss or fuss. The relationship is specific, identified and explicitly defined if anybody needs that to apply or interpret it.

    In contrast, FRBR-ization only exposes what we can assert based on a mapping from MARC to FRBR (or RDA), which is at best the relationships between the FRBR Group 1 entities: the Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item. With the RDA array of identified relationships, we have a whole lot more. I suppose one could say that these are not necessarily part of the FRBR panoply, but if you consider them the “horizontal” relationships that fill in between the “vertical” relationships that Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item provide, then it’s possible to see how these relationships are enabled by the way the FRBR model has allowed us to rethink our world.

    This is one of the issues that makes my head hurt when I think about the RDA “testing” regime that we keep hearing about. Are we wedded to the notion that if it can’t be crammed into MARC we aren’t going to use it? Can’t we start to think about MARC as a fairly lossy output format and move on to something that expresses the relationships we know will help us maintain some important functionality and credibility in the broader data world? As Jennifer Bowen and the eXtensible Catalog folks have discovered as they build the services to transform MARC into RDA (see my post on Jennifer’s paper for more about that) transforming MARC to RDA represents a fundamentally different set of problems and trade-offs than going the other way. [By the way, the XC Project was everywhere at Annual–go Jennifer!]

    And as more vendors step up to the RDA plate and begin to build applications that start with RDA rather than try and transform MARC into something that could be mistaken for RDA only in dim light, we’re going to have to accept the fact that like any other metadata mapping, there is no such thing as a free lunch or a round trip.

    The Registry has some of these relationships registered already (see “RDA Roles” for the relationships between FRBR Group 1 and Group 2 and “RDA Relationships for Works, Expressions, Manifestations, Items” for the relationships between Group 1 entities), but be aware that these are not yet the final versions. I haven’t gotten the information yet about the final changes to allow me to make those updates, but when I do I’ll make an announcement to that effect.

  • Letting go

    Some of you may know that a few years ago (2005 actually, as I look at my files) I worked with the ALCTS Continuing Education group to set up a “Metadata Standards and Applications” workshop, as part of the series of workshops they were developing with LC funding. At the time, I was intrigued by the set of course series objectives I was given by the committee:

    • To equip catalogers to deal with new types of resources and to recognize their unique characteristics
    • To equip catalogers to evaluate competing approaches to and standards for providing access to resources
    • To equip catalogers to think creatively and work collaboratively with others inside and outside their home institutions
    • To ensure that catalogers have a broad enough understanding of the current environment to be able to make their local efforts compatible and interoperable with other efforts
    • To prepare catalogers to be comfortable with ambiguity and being less than perfect
    • To enable practicing catalogers to put themselves into the emerging digital information environment and to continue to play a significant role in shaping library services

    All these seemed really important to me, and I was eager to try and set up something to meet those objectives. At the time, the notion was that LC would hold rights to the work, and I would contract to deliver the workshop materials. It wasn’t a lot of money, but I was sensible both of the honor of it and the challenge. After a great deal of back and forth with the committee and others, the first workshop was held in July of 2006, as a “train the trainers session.” The idea, as in most of the other successful ALCTS efforts, was that a group of trainers would be able to spread the effort around, and provide a variety of face-to-face efforts for both general groups of catalogers and specialized groups. At the time, workshop organizers needed to work with LC CDS to arrange for materials to be printed for trainers and participants—but last year LC got out of the business of printing materials (and attempting cost recovery from the workshops) and made the materials available for free.

    I think I presented the workshop somewhere between 6-8 times, usually with another trainer (two full days is a long haul for one person, even one who knows the materials as well as I do). I’ve no real idea how many times it was presented by all the folks who were in the trainers group, but it was my understanding that it was one of the most popular workshops in the series. In fall of 2007 I did a full revision of the slides, and sent them to CDS, but I found out later that the updates I did were never integrated with the workshop materials. In April of last year I was contacted by one of the participants in an earlier workshop, who wanted me to present it to a group of Canadians in the fall. We agreed on dates and a co-trainer and everything was going along as usual when I got an email from someone I knew slightly at LC who’d taken over the management of their training efforts.

    At that point I was told that the materials had been entirely revised by two LC staffers (both of whom I knew) and that the version they’d created was now the “approved” version. I’d had no idea this was in the works, hadn’t been consulted or even informed, so needless to say I was pretty unhappy about this news. I was reassured that this was inadvertent, that everyone thought that someone else had “informed” me of this, but it seemed to me that if there had been a good faith effort to consult with me about suggested changes, the question of “being informed” would never have arisen.

    When I was able to view the slides, I was even more unhappy about the situation. Not only did they now have LC slide themes, but the whole thrust of the workshop had changed. There were many more slides about MODS, MADS and METS (accompanied by more LC examples), and a new emphasis on PREMIS (including what I felt was an unrealistically complex exercise). There were also errors introduced about OAI-PMH (that section was cut drastically), and misstatements about Dublin Core, and a number of other worrying changes. I told my contact at LC that I would not present the Canadian workshop with the “approved” slides but would update the slides I had to reflect some of the changes in those slides that I thought were improvements. Thankfully I had help from Rhonda Marker, who’d presented with me before and was booked for the Canadian adventure, and we finished a new improved version of the slides in time for the Canadian workshop. We tweaked them a bit more, and shipped them to LC.

    There were a few more interchanges, but it became increasingly clear that what was at issue was not the examples, or the specific content of slides, but a very basic difference of approach. My approach was not necessarily to provide solutions for librarians, but to survey the landscape with them and try to affect how they thought about their choices and how they make decisions. When I presented the workshop I spoke frankly about the advantages and disadvantages of the available metadata formats, and particularly how I thought they might hold up in the future. I tried to provide perspectives that were not just library perspectives on the world, recognizing that they were probably working with technical people with whom they had no shared language or frame of reference. It seemed to me that they needed to understand what was going on outside libraryland, and to think differently about how technologies being discussed in that world might affect their work.

    I didn’t see that in the LC slides. I was told that the changes made were in response to comments by other trainers and participants, but yet, the evaluations from the workshops I gave were quite positive, and this sense was confirmed by several other trainers I knew, who did the workshop frequently and had made their own modifications in the slides and exercises to suit their styles and experience (this was always fine with me, by the way). One statement in the back-and-forth between me and LC stands out—the LC revisers of the slides felt that the workshop should be more “practical,” which their version indeed was, if one bought into the notion that what librarians really needed was more about MODS, METS, MADS and PREMIS.

    As I pointed out to my contact at LC, I disagree pretty strongly with that approach. Librarians need to look beyond standards (whatever your definition of standards) created within the library community, based on the ways we’ve always done things in libraries. New standards are coming down the pike: RDA, FRAD, etc. Unlike MODS and MADS, these are based on the FRBR model, not the MARC model (if there is indeed such a thing) and have formal structures that can be used easily by libraries and by others outside libraries. We do our colleagues no favors by promoting solutions based primarily on how comfortable and familiar they seem, and what institution is responsible for maintaining them. Will MODS and MADS survive the transition to RDA, FRAD and FRBR-aware data? I don’t think so, and I can’t therefore recommend those solutions to librarians looking for answers to their digital project questions. As I said to my contact at LC:

    “[Librarians] need to be able to THINK about these standards in a broader context, ‘get’ the issues they present in an implementation environment, and understand how they can make decisions today that will still seem sensible five or ten years down the road.”

    If that’s impractical, so be it.

    So, the upshot is that I’ve asked that my name be taken off LC’s version of the slides, and I’ve made it very clear that they should take me off the trainers list too, because I won’t present their version of “Metadata Standards and Applications.” I’ve also told them that they are welcome to use any of the slides I’ve sent them for any version of the workshop. My slides will continue to be available on my website at http://managemetadata.org/msa_r2/ and I’m hoping to continue to develop them to include RDA and other new standards as they become available. So, for those of you planning to present the workshop, expect to be asked to agree to give the workshop as LC has revised it (I hear that the LC slide themes will be removed, but the content will remain the same) or you won’t be able to advertise it as a Cat21 workshop.

    I’ll be doing my workshop, or nothing; but that’s okay. I’ve got places to go, many interesting things to do, and I’m done arguing about this one.

  • At NELINET on Friday …

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

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

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

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

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