Metadata Matters

Tag: rda

  • Babies, Bathwater, and Old Broads

    A few years ago, I wrote an article for a collection of writings in honor of Tom Turner, a talented metadata librarian at Cornell who sadly died too young. That article, “Looking back—looking forward: reflections of a transitional librarian” (Metadata and Digital Collections: Festschrift in honor of Tom Turner), although it meanders around a bit (she said after reading it over for the first time in a couple of years) is a pretty good view of where my head has been these past couple of decades. A lot has happened, and I’ve been lucky enough to have been in the thick of a lot of it.

    One question that occasionally comes up is about what was in that kool-aid I drank that caused me to jump ship from many of the traditional library ways of thinking to something quite different. There’s not a simple answer to that. It was a combination of things, certainly, but perhaps best expressed towards the end of the article:

    “In October of 2004, I attended a panel presentation where three experts were asked to inform library practitioners by providing “evaluation” information about a large Dublin Core-based metadata repository. It was, in a small way, yet another version of the blind men and the elephant. The first presenter provided large numbers of tables giving simple numeric tallies of elements used in the repository, with no more analysis than a relational database might reveal in ten minutes. The second provided results of a research project where users were carefully observed and questioned about what information they used when making decisions about what they were given in search results—i.e. useful data, and a good start on determining the usefulness of metadata, but with no attention paid to the metadata that was used behind the scenes, well before any user display was generated. The third presenter, a young computer scientist, relied almost entirely on tools developed for textual indexing, and, concluding that the diversity of the metadata was a problem, suggested that the leaders of the project should insist that all data providers follow stricter standards.

    These presentations seemed sadly reflective of most attempts to approach the problems of creating and sharing metadata in the world beyond MARC. Traditional libraries built a strong culture of metadata sharing and an enormous shared investment in training and documentation around the MARC standard. The MARC development process codified the body of knowledge and practice that supported this culture of sharing and collaboration, building, in the process, a community of metadata experts who took their expertise into a number of specialized domains. We clearly are now at a critical juncture. Moving forward in both realms, traditional and “new” metadata requires that we understand clearly where we have been and what has been the basis for our past success. To do that we need much better research and evaluation of our legacy and current models, a clearer articulation of short term and long term goals, and a strategy for attaining those goals that is openly endorsed and supported by stakeholders in the library community.”

    Looking back, I’m not sure I can exactly pinpoint the moment when we stopped thinking clearly about the road ahead, but until very recently, it sure looked like we had. It was probably somewhere around the time when it seemed like RDA would never be finished in our lifetimes, and that even if finished, would be too much like AACR2 to even consider implementing. Somewhere around that time, CC:DA drafted a ‘no-confidence’ memo to the JSC, and I showed Don Chatham (ALA Publishing) a late draft of it while he was at the DC-2006 conference in Mexico. At that meeting, a few of us suggested to Don that it might be a good idea to have the JSC get together with DCMI and see what could be done, which ended up being the ‘London Meeting’ of five years ago that changed the conversation significantly. This spring a five year anniversary celebration was held in London, where a big part of the discussion was about just how big that impact was, in terms of where the library community is today. As usual, nothing like a good crisis to get things moving.

    It will be no surprise to readers of this blog, but I spend a fair bit of time thinking and talking about what comes next, and some of the focus of that question, particularly lately, has to do with MARC. A big part of the problem of answering that “what’s next?” question is that we tend to use ‘MARC’ to refer not just to the specification but as a stand-in for traditional practices and library standards as a whole, and this muddies the conversation considerably. What too often happens is that the ‘good stuff’ of MARC, the semantics that represent years of debate about use cases and descriptive issues, doesn’t get separately, or properly, discussed. Those semantics ought really to be seen as a distillation of all those things we know about bibliographic description, tested by time and generations of catalogers, and very much worth retaining. How we express those semantics needs to be updated, for sure (many are already expressed in the RDA vocabularies), but differentiating between baby and bathwater is clearly a necessary part of moving ahead.

    One of the things about the library community that few outsiders understand is the extent to which “the library community” has developed a culture of collaboration–to the extent I’ve never seen anywhere else. Librarians collectively build and contribute bibliographic and name authority records, subject and classification proposals, participate (passionately) in endless debates about interpretation of rules and policies, and most remarkably–write this stuff up and share it extensively, asking for comments (and most often getting them). Participating in other communities after having been part of the one built by librarians is very often a frustrating thing–my expectations of participation are clearly too high.

    A great example of how this works is NACO (Name Authority Cooperative Project), for those who participate in building and maintaining good authority records. In my days as Authorities Librarian at Cornell, I helped increase Cornell’s participation in the program by a significant amount, an accomplishment of which I’m still quite proud. Recently I noted a new post to the RDA-L list about some PCC (Program on Cooperative Cataloging) committee work around authority records:

    “The PCC Acceptable Headings Implementation Task Group (PCCAHITG) has successfully tested the programming code for Phase 1 in preparation for the LC/PCC Phased Implementation of RDA as described in the document entitled “The phased conversion of the LC/NACO Authority File to RDA” found at the Task Group’s page …

    The activities of this group display some of the important characteristics of successful community activity: the goals are clearly stated, and timelines spelled out; assumptions are tested and results analysed; conclusions and recommendations are written, explained and exposed for comment. This particular activity is noteworthy because it is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and a group of PCC member institutions, and is Phase 1 of a set of planned activities designed to move cooperatively built and maintained authority data into compliance with RDA.

    As for the old broads? I was recently reminded of this wonderful quote from Bette Davis: “If you want a thing well done, get a couple of old broads to do it.” So true, so true …

  • If We Were Asked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Selection of papers, and presentations:

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

    Post written by Diane Hillmann and Jon Phipps.