LC has been “planning” (or so they say) to create just such a service since well before the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control but we’ve seen no real evidence of it, except for what Ed has done. I was one of the people who spoke to that group during its fact-finding year, making the point that the vocabularies that LC manages for the library community (LCSH, LCNAF, LCSAF, etc.) should be available as web services for the benefit of the that community (I was assured then that such plans were afoot.) LC could have wisely allowed Ed to maintain the site until such a service was in place and then Ed could have made a simple change that would have redirected lcsh.info URIs to the official service, and all would have been well. Instead, LC has let the world know that its management is technically and politically clueless as it destroys, without even an official announcement, a service that many organizations, regardless of disclaimers of its experimental nature, had welcomed and some had come to depend on. This had roughly the equivalent impact on the confidence of the Linked Data community in LC that letting Lehman Brothers fail had on the investment markets.

Although LC frequently cites the legal necessity to do cost recovery on the vocabularies, their poorly-supported subscription services are a constant source of annoyance for those who must rely on them, and if they were really expecting to recover significant costs it’s probable that the group that supports that effort would be adequately staffed, which it isn’t. (This same lack of adequate support was the likely reason that the ALCTS continuing education workshops are now freely available, but that’s another story.) In short, we’ve seen little evidence that there are serious efforts to replace these outdated services with the web services that the Working Group and the library community have called for—except, of course, the late LCSH.info service.

I’ll make the point again that I made to the Working Group in 2007—these are vocabularies that were not created solely by LC—particularly the Name Authority File (LCNAF) which has seen significant investment by the library community through the NACO Project (Name Authority Cooperative, please note), and the Series Authority File (LCSAF) now being built entirely by the community since LC unilaterally withdrew from the creation of series authorities in 2006. It was that decision, clearly made without adequate consultation with anyone outside LC (or many within—I happened to be visiting a colleague there a day or so after the announcement, and most of the staff were surprised, too), which resulted in the furor that led to the creation of the Working Group in the first place. But obviously, lessons were not learned from that debacle, and we’re back at the barricades, frustrated yet again.

Contrast this with the recent post on the LC blog (posted on 12/11) announcing the report on the Flickr Pilot, one of the most innovative projects LC has done in a very, very long time. The report, ironically entitled “For the Common Good” (summary available) describes the overwhelmingly positive response to the project, and how LC used the information provided by viewers to enhance their information on the photographs. Most telling is this snippet from the report on the project taken from the LC staff newsletter and included in the blog post:

“The popularity and impact of the pilot have been remarkable,” said Michelle Springer, project manager for digital initiatives in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, who said total views reached 10 million in October. The site is averaging 500,000 views a month, she said, adding that Flickr members have marked 79 percent of the photos as “favorites.”

“The report recommends that the Library of Congress continue to participate in The Commons and explore other Web 2.0 communities.”

Clearly by “other Web 2.0 communities” the writer could not mean the library community, which has been stymied for far too long by LC’s reluctant and too often less-than-competent leadership, and are still some distance from being a “Web 2.0 community.”

What we see here is an institution with no coherent strategy for moving forward, despite a year long study of the issues, and clear recommendations for action. This is an institution where decisions are still being made by one hand that the other hand may not know about or have been consulted about—decisions that are ill-considered and fray LC’s credibility and its relationship with the rest of the library community (not to mention the Semantic Web community). This decision may well draw attention away from the other supposed library leadership institution—OCLC—caught making its own self-serving decisions without reference to its members real needs and interests, though members pay for the records that make the monopoly possible.

As the New Year fast approaches, perhaps we need a resolution that says: “Stop expecting the 8000 lb. Gorillas to lead us; start leading ourselves.”

[1] Jenn Riley
[2] Tim Spalding
[3] Karen Coyle
[4] Andy Powell
[5] David Bigwood [Corrected]
[6] Richard Wallis
[7] Dan Chudnov

As Karen Schneider pointed out on Free Range Librarian, my last column (entitled “Getting There”), includes some concerns I have about how OCLC’s new record reuse policy, coupled with their silence about plans to implement RDA, constitute an additional risk for libraries planning to implement RDA. It’s best read after reading the various blog posts about the policy, especially Karen’s, a gold star of a blog post indeed.

I think we’ve been seriously let down by the institutions that we’ve relied upon to lead us, provide services to enable us to share information and increase the efficiency and usefulness of our individual efforts. I don’t think most of us have fully internalized this yet; we still expect these institutions to live up to their ideals, be exemplary community members, and use the brainpower of their staffs to chart a course that we can understand, respect and rely on. We’ve tended to be far too passive about this, in my opinion, and the chickens are coming home to roost.

Unlike some others who’ve noticed that the changes in our technology environment have been leading inexorably to serious strains in the cooperative sharing environment built up over the decades, I’m feeling moderately optimistic. The worst thing we could do is cling unthinkingly to the comfort and warmth of the familiar, and not look clear-eyed into the issues emerging from these strains and changes. I don’t think we’ll ever again be as tightly coupled as we were when we only shared information amongst ourselves and we looked for efficiencies in our own workflows to keep us viable within our own institutions.

Looking ahead, we’ll have to be more actively involved in looking for solutions to our problems instead of sitting back and waiting for someone else to come up with them so we can continue to be followers. We’re seeing some of that happening already, as new players develop open source software, push for open linked data solutions, forge connections with the Semantic Web communities, etc.

Let your voices be heard on these issues.

The point was, of course, that in order to evaluate what a system was doing with your data, you had to be able to look at the underlying data, and follow it through whatever process was in place to manipulate or use it in some way. Of course, “naked MARC data” really meant “scantily clad MARC data,” because few of us really spent much time with unformatted MARC, in whatever flavor our system used, though I remember on many occasions being shown marked up printouts of NOTIS EBCDIC, and working with a programmer to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it.

I was reminded of this when hearing a developer (who shall remain nameless) say recently that “of course you’d never show anyone the FRBR structure” in an RDA based system. “Why the hell not?,” I responded (though perhaps the response was in my head and I was actually more polite—reports vary). There was a condescension in that comment that made me bristle, and I remembered the stories of why the early BALLOTS system (which I used for a mercifully short time) didn’t use MARC tags. The icky mnemonics that BALLOTS substituted were there because some genius decided that librarians (mostly women, of course) would never be comfortable with numeric tags. I don’t know whether the story is true, but it sure fits with the sexist attitudes of the time.

It’s a bit depressing that this sort of thing keeps coming up. Now that I’m older and even crankier than I was when I first encountered this attitude, I have even less patience with the idea that I might want to be protected from angle brackets, namespaces and whatever it is that is the is the special purview of the people who program. Show me the data—I can handle it.

[Disclaimer–this isn’t about you Jon!]

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.

This month the speaker was Daniel Pitti, Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. I’ve known Daniel since the first Dublin Core meeting in 1995 (when he was working at Berkeley), so was not going to miss the opportunity to hear him talking about where archival description was headed.

As advertised, Daniel gave some background about the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) as well as the EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context - corporate bodies, persons, and families). EAD is based on the the traditional archival finding aid, and focuses on the provenance-based description of archival resources where all records by a single created are treated as one unit. After setting the stage, Daniel spoke about the design of “post- finding aid” archival description systems, describing both the environment within which archival description is created and maintained and the possible published forms of the description that can be searched, rendered, and enhanced by users. I was interested, and pleased, to note that work on this post- finding aid world is based very much on a future I recognize, with a vision based both on what’s happening in libraries as well as what’s going on in the archival community. In a world where tectonic shifts are occurring in both areas, and the focus of library missions are shifting visibly towards the primary materials living in archival collections, this is a VERY GOOD THING.

One of the interesting themes of Daniel’s presentation was “re-imagining description and access.” Librarians may notice the similarity to RDA: Resource Description and Access, and I suspect this is not an accidental echo. The analysis that he described, and the direction that archival description seems to be headed, bodes well for both archivists and librarians—I came away with hope that the trajectory of both efforts will result in the ability for descriptions created by either to be available to users without the necessity of the kind of mediation now required. Not without blood and angst, but perhaps within our lifetimes!

Daniel also described the EAC-CPF, intended to provide a formal method for recording the description of record creators. I asked how this work correlated with similar efforts going on in libraries—FRAD, for instance. Daniel suggested that the inter-community dialog ought to start happening at this level, with the description of people. The first step in this has already happened, of course, with the inclusion of “Families” in RDA—a direct steal from archival description–but there are many steps yet to be taken.

With RDA and the wonderful possibilities for bringing the archival and library communities closer together swirling in my mind, I was struck by one of Daniel’s final points, where he noted that the community was now thinking of a two-pronged approach to the post- finding aid world: permissive on the whole but with less permissive possibilities, which would tend over time to move things forward. This is surely an approach that has been discussed in the RDA world, but not yet well articulated, in my view.

Daniel’s presentation is available on the CUL Metadata Working Group space on Cornell’s eCommons.

But for the last few years I’ve been writing columns for “Technicalities,” which has, to a certain extent pushed me in a blogging direction. Most of my columns were primarily opinion, in the “thought piece” mode, and I’m pretty comfortable with that. But with all apologies to the estimable Peggy Johnson (who’s been editing it for some time and who talked me into the column), it’s just not much of a soap box. I’ve been depositing all the columns in Cornell’s eCommons IR —yeah, I know, I’m not working there anymore but as a retiree I can still use my IR account, and it’s convenient. But rarely did I get any indication that the columns got read, either in print or online. I’m an extrovert, and I need an audience—a theoretical audience doesn’t do it for me.

I’ve often talked about my retirement from Cornell this past March being a “practice” retirement. Lord knows that my retirement accounts have tanked like everyone else’s, but even if they hadn’t I wouldn’t be able to actually retire. I have too much still to do, too much that interests me greatly about what’s going on in the world of libraries I’ve been immersed in for something like 40 years, and hell, I’m enjoying this independence. So, the challenge is to continue to be independent, AND keep food on the table, etc., without raiding my bleeding retirement accounts. I suppose I should be more worried about that than I am, but aside from the bad luck of being so close to “real” retirement age when the economy slides into the dumpster, my house and car are paid off, and I’ve no debts, so I’m doing fine, thank you very much. Now, if the consulting and workshops keep coming along, I should be able to keep traveling and pay bills … fingers crossed.

But there’s a plan, and this blog is part of it. It’s not just “my blog” though, which is a good thing, since that takes off me a bit of that pressure to keep the conversation going. You’ll note that this blog is part of a website for an outfit called Metadata Management Associates—that’s a partnership between me and Jon Phipps, my partner in crime since my NSDL days, and whoever we decide to pull in for various projects and conspiracies. As we get this show moving, make the website a bit more functional, etc., we’ll be adding names to the list of associates we like to work with. Jon and I also post on the Registry Blog and as you might have noticed if you read that, we tend to make some of our arguments in public (those who see us at conferences also might have noticed a certain resemblance to the “Bickersons”). It’s creative argumentation, actually—it keeps us moving forward as new stuff keeps popping up to challenge our favorite assumptions.

So what can you expect to read about on this blog? We have some projects we can talk about, and some we can’t, so we’ll talk about some of our current “talkable” projects like the NSDL Registry (we’re working on some ideas to expand that development effort—watch this space), the RDA formal representations (see the DCMI/RDA Task Group page for more info on this), digital libraries in general, changes and new developments in the library environment, etc. Jon will talk more about the technology side than I will, but that’s the good news about this blog—it’ll be a little of everything.

So, I’ve finally made it to the party—where’s the champagne?