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!

When I was teaching my RDA course this past Spring, with my virtual students so very present in my thoughts for that time period, I found myself trying to explain to them why I still go to Dublin Core conferences, after all these years. I am one of those people who was around at the birth of DC, back in the dark ages of 1995, and aside from the conferences added retrospectively to the series and the one in Seoul last year, I’ve been to every one. This year, I’m co-chair of the program, something I’ve not done before, and more involved in the internal workings of the conference than ever. I’m sure that I didn’t make much sense to those students, who likely ascribed my long tenure to habit, loyalty, or some other factor.

This year the conference is finally back in the US after many years absence, and the program is looking pretty good, if I do say so myself. As usual there’s a mix of tutorials, papers, and working meetings, and this year the conference is a bit shorter than usual, in an attempt to keep costs down in these hard financial times. It’s also being held in conjunction with ASIS&T, which is being held in the same hotel right after DC-2010.

So why do I keep going? The other conferences I go to as a participant (as differentiated from the ones where I’m an invited speaker) are really down now to two: ALA Annual and ALA Midwinter. They’re big, sprawling, every-librarian-for-her/himself, with thousands and thousands of librarians taking over some hapless city, every restaurant in town, and just about every hotel. DC is a very different kind of thing—it’s small (usually no more than 200 people), generally not more than 50% librarians, if that, and the rest a mix of researchers, implementers and software folks. Quite a few people straddle more than one category, and the group provides an experience that I’ve never found anyplace else. The conference is very international in flavor, and the focus is metadata, and more metadata, unlike, say, JCDL or other conferences with a computer science or web focus, where metadata is a very small part of the program. It’s a place where the metadata geeks at the edges of other communities can feel at home, even when they feel marginalized in their own home communities. I remember one year when a guy I know who had never attended a DC conference before buttonholed me in a corridor to tell me this was the best metadata conference he’d ever attended. It still is.

I always learn new things at the DC conference, always meet a least one new and interesting person (and usually more than one), and there’s more good talk in the hallways and bars than can possibly be taken in. I’m an extrovert, so conferences jazz me up—I relish the intensity, the ongoing conversations from year to year, and the real sense of community, no matter the strong differences of opinion and approach.

I’ll be in Pittsburgh this year, and am hoping to blog a few times while I’m there, if I can manage to find time for it. I hope I’ll see a few of you there too.

Ten days or so ago I took some time out to listen to a webcast by Jenn Riley, ‘RDF for Librarians’, which was well worth the effort. Jenn has been worth watching for a long time, and she’s done us all a service by putting out her slides and a bibliography as part of this effort. All these, plus a recording of the presentation, can be found at: www.dlib.indiana.edu/education/brownbags/ [I should note here that I’ve had trouble accessing the recording, and Jenn and her IT folks are trying to figure out why, but you may not have the same difficulty I had.]

The topic Jenn chose for this presentation is one that has challenged many of us who have been trying to talk about standards developing outside of libraries, like RDF, to traditional librarians. Jenn keeps her eye on the prize throughout, building on what librarians know in order to bring them across the great divide to an understanding of RDF, without getting bogged down in the technical language of the standard itself. She manages to cover a great deal of territory in the presentation, including such difficult topics as blank nodes, graphs, literals, the differences between XML and RDF, and the differences in terminology between the library world and the RDF world. Anyone who is interested in this topic, or has attempted to teach it, should take a look at this presentation and Jenn’s slides.

I was especially appreciative of Jenn’s message about all of us being ‘part of the process’ of the library transition to these new standards—and the fact that she included our RDA work as an example. It’s sometimes difficult to feel recognized as ‘at the table’, representing the interests of libraries, while being largely ignored by the big kahunas of libraryland. Jenn reminds us that each of us a responsibility to lead, and not to wait around for the usual parties to do that for us, and she doesn’t just talk the talk, she’s walking the walk.

Thanks Jenn, and I’m looking forward to seeing you at DC-2010 and talking with you about those thorny issues that still challenge us!

Note: this is being posted simultaneously on two blogs: Metadata Matters and Coyle’s InFormation

“Why don’t libraries just use FOAF for their Person metadata? Why do they insist on creating their own?”

We don’t know how many times we have heard this on various lists. It often is not really posed as a question; in other words, it isn’t asking for an explanation of why libraries do not choose to use FOAF. It’s more rhetorical, along the lines of “Why can’t we all just get along?” But it is worthy of being asked as a real question, and of getting a real answer.

[Note first that the question of FOAF comes up not so much as we consider the current library standards, but in discussions of upcoming standards that will hopefully be based on the FR** family of standards (FRBR, FRAD, FRSAR). ]

A comparison of FOAF Person and the library Person entity (either in MARC authority files, or RDA, or FRAD) shows that there is not one defined element (or “property” as it is called in Semantic Web-ese) that the two have in common. This is not a coincidence; the two vocabularies serve significantly different communities and purposes. This does not mean that they are irreconcilable; the question therefore becomes: What keeps them apart? and can that be overcome?

The key is in the nature of the two communities.

FOAF stands for ‘Friend of a Friend’, which is a clue to its context: the schema is primarily for use in social networking situations. Its focus is on people who are alive and online, and it includes online contact information like email addresses, web sites, work web sites, Facebook IDs, Skype IDs, etc. The name of the person in FOAF is not an identifier, but presumes that the name of the person plus one or more of the contact IDs is enough to distinguish most humans from one another.

Library name data (which is a form of controlled vocabulary, called “name authority data” in library terms) is focused on creating a unique identifier that brings together the different forms of a name used in published materials under one form. Library users, therefore, can expect to find all of the works by or about a named person under a single entry regardless of the various forms of the name that exist in real data. Uniqueness of names is enforced by adding information to a non-unique name, usually the year of birth, but when that isn’t known (especially for persons of antiquity) titles or even areas of endeavor (“poet”) can be added.

To accommodate both the FOAF (social) function and the libraries’ identification function, at the very least the libraries would need to define a sub-property of FOAF Person, one that has a more strict definition and usage. However, for the library “Person” to be designated as more specific than FOAF:Person does not require that these two be in the same vocabulary. That is one of the important features of Semantic Web properties: like any other resource, they can be linked and related to any other resources on the Web.

Why not combine the library and FOAF properties into a single metadata vocabulary? The answer has little to do with technology, but instead relates to the functioning of communities. Metadata standards need to be developed by (and for) actual communities. The FOAF and library communities clearly have different needs, different goals, and are working with fundamentally different use cases. They also are significantly different as communities.

FOAF is being developed by an informal group of developers, and is quite recent in origin. The group is small: the FOAF development email list has about 350 members. Another 350 individuals are listed on the FOAF wiki pages as having a FOAF profile available on the Web. This is obviously not the full extent of FOAF usage, but these numbers reflect the recent development of this kind of metadata.

The library community has hundreds of years of investment in the creation of metadata (even though it was not called that when libraries began to create it). There are at least tens of thousands of libraries in the world, many of which have been in existence for centuries. Library data has its origins in early 19th century book catalogs but has been created in a machine-readable format since the late 1960’s. Library data is created following formal rules governed in part by international agreements, and there are many hundreds of millions of machine-readable bibliographic records in existence that were created based on these library cataloging principles.

Libraries have engaged in wide-spread data sharing for centuries, and with the global networking capabilities of today libraries are actually able to exchange and re-use data on a huge scale. Libraries do not each create metadata for the same book or item, but instead share the metadata created by one library in cooperative efforts oriented towards resource sharing and efficiency.

This sharing is built into the very core of library data management. The ability to use data created by others is supported by standards and those standards form the basis for the library systems. While most users see only the library catalog available to the public, that is only one function of a system that supports purchasing, fund accounting, inventory control, circulation and patron management, and collection analysis. In the Western world these systems are not created and maintained by libraries but by a small number of specialized commercial vendors whose products are specifically created for the library customers using agreed library standards. Thus the very same system can be sold to hundreds or thousands of libraries, creating a viable market base for system development.

A number of the 70,000 libraries contributing to OCLC are using a single standard, MARC21, and others are following international standards such as ISBD that produces standardized bibliographic description. The development of these standards is based on a large scale community process with international participation. It is not a perfect process by any means, and clearly must be updated to meet modern needs and new technologies that have changed the way we work, but the degree of data sharing libraries depend on requires that a formal process be in place to support the standards of this community.

Sharing of data on a large scale is necessitated by the economic reality of the library sector. Libraries face increasingly shrinking budgets while coping with an upswing in demand for their services. Realistically, this means that changes to library data must be carefully coordinated in order to minimize disruption to the complex network of data sharing that makes cost-effective library services management, based on this data, possible. Libraries may appear to be mistrustful of change agents, and in some cases they certainly are, but there is a real need to minimize risk for the community as a whole in order to assure the health of these often financially fragile institutions.

So we come back to the question of libraries and FOAF. In the final analysis, we’re not at all sure that there’s much gain in trying to combine these two approaches, with the differences in their communities and functions. It could be like trying to combine oil and water, requiring compromises that in the end would be less than satisfactory for both communities. One could argue that the difference between the vocabularies and their contexts is a positive, allowing more than one view of the Person entity. As two separately maintained metadata vocabularies, anyone creating metadata can choose from either as needed without sacrificing precision. One can also imagine other views that will arise, such as Persons in medical data or financial data, which would each carry data elements that are neither in FOAF nor library data, from blood type to bank balance. The important thing is to make sure that these vocabularies are properly described and related to each other where possible. That way, each community can manage its own process based on its needs for standards integration, but data can be shared where appropriate.

We could begin with a more detailed discussion between the FOAF and the library communities about their metadata needs. With hundreds of years of experience in representing names in library catalogs, we feel confident that the library community’s knowledge could contribute in general to the use of personal names in the Semantic Web.

Among the ongoing efforts with potential to change the range of options available to libraries, I would count the evolving Lyrasis organization among the most interesting, if not, certainly, the most visible. In the past few months, the organization has launched some interesting initiatives, among them a ‘partnership’ with OCLC, in the form of an “ … agreement that will provide increased consulting, education and engagement programs for WorldCat and new cooperative Web-scale library management services” and another with SkyRiver to provide cataloging services (press release available as pdf from the Lyrasis front page). Among other things, these strategic partnerships put Lyrasis in a challenging position regarding the SkyRiver/III lawsuit against OCLC, but I’m sure they’ll manage to navigate those dangerous shoals, given the careful path they’ve chosen so far.

I recently became aware of the report of their Library Director Summit on the Future of Cataloging, held on May 26, 2010, with a summary made available recently. I’m of two minds about the summary–on the one hand it’s hard to argue with the notion that if you’re in any kind of business, and have customers, it’s good to ask them about what you ought to be doing. On the other hand, I keep remembering Henry Ford’s statement that if he had asked his early customers what they wanted, they would have told him: “faster horses”. Providing some balance between what libraries tell them about their needs, and building in the leadership to provide for needs that are not yet expressed by their customers, will be key to their survival in the volatile environment of change we live in now.

Peppered in the summary report are some statements that give one hope that Lyrasis might be asking some of the right questions as they look for a business plan that will take them where they need to go, and to avoid being an organization operating primarily in the foamy wake of the big players. For example, the first bullet under “What Still Needs to be Cataloged?” says:

“Cataloging records for basic English-language monographs are commodity items. Many libraries already outsource much of this work through vendor-supplied, shelf-ready cataloging (e.g., PromptCat, YBP). As records have become commodities, libraries question why they are still paying premium prices, especially when many records are available and shared freely on the web via Z39.50.”

Much as I agree that the current record sharing market does treat catalog records as commodities, that way of thinking doesn’t get us anywhere we really want to go, witness the Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace by R2 Consulting to the Library of Congress this past fall (for my take on it, see this post). That report argued for more remuneration for LC, and put everyone else, particularly those using Z39.50, in categories with labels like ‘opportunistic.’

More on cataloging costs comes later in the summary, where the lack of transparency about costs and pricing is aired (familiar to those reading the conversations on the SkyRiver suit playing out on various library lists) and an interesting correlation is made between the current subscription pricing model used by (presumably) OCLC and the pricing model for high-cost ejournal subscriptions. I say presumably because like the gorilla in the kitchen, the entity looming over the discussion is named only in one recommendation at the end.

Further along in the summary, the diminishing role of the catalog as a discovery tool is acknowledged, as well as the continuing need for the catalog as an inventory management tool. Interestingly, the decreasing value of the “global union catalog” is also acknowledged:

“While the union catalog function was important in a print-based environment, it is no longer the key resource it once was in the book-dominated world. Once the metadata is available and harvestable, it does not necessarily have to be housed in and served from one central repository to make the content accessible.”

Resource sharing is addressed again later in the report, along with the unfortunate fact that resource sharing and catalog record acquisition are often intertwined. That said, the section on resource sharing seems a bit obscure to me, partially because that’s one of the few library arenas in which I was never involved during my checkered career in libraries.

Reading this summary, it’s necessary to read between the lines to glean much about the tenor of the conversations. The rewards for that effort are the glimpses of movement on the part of the organization and its customers on these important issues. That they’re only glimpses is unfortunate. While I can certainly recognize the need for Lyrasis to be circumspect–their survival depends to some extent on not making powerful enemies–I’d love to see these issues aired more publicly, with less dancing.

Shifting the Conversation

After the emphasis above on the good news, there are a few places where the conversation has clearly not yet shifted sufficiently from the old thinking. One of these areas is the perennial question of ‘record enhancement’ which is here discussed in the old context of ‘record perfection’ rather than the newer context around the improvement of data to provide greater value to users. This is unfortunate, particularly since the comment on ‘harvestable’ data earlier in the discussion might have led one to hope that some of the library linked data efforts had percolated up to the director level.

Another area in the report where discussion clearly needs to shift is in the notion of what’s to be done with the cataloging staff when we’ve changed how we look at cataloging? What are we to make of this?:

“A whole generation of catalogers is at retirement age. Some describe themselves as “depressed” because they believe they will never be replaced, that this is “the end of our profession,” and libraries are “undoing their life’s work.” Nonetheless, one library reported that recently it had intentionally hired two new catalogers because its believes it is still valuable to have a cataloging-articulate perspective and voice within the library. The new librarians hired to fill this role are described as being more tuned into how to bring the users in to interact with the catalog and have a more external (user-centered) viewpoint than previous generations.”

Well, now I’m depressed. As someone who’s been speaking (and writing) on this topic for years to anyone who will listen, let me say that any library who is not now engaged in exploring what their catalogers need to know to make an effective transition to a new environment is not just missing the boat, but leading the way down the deep, dark path that will be where libraries who think change is not inevitable will be going when it’s no longer possible to dodge the bullets. Directors–do you have anyone else on your staff, besides the catalogers, who is capable of thinking about your catalog records as data, and not just catalog records? If you do, consider yourselves lucky, and please, treasure them. If you don’t, start investing in some training for those catalogers, because you’ll need them and their expertise, no matter what happens and no matter what external services you see in your future. Trust me on this. Oh, and if you think that anyone will be able to persuade your users to interact with the catalogs you have now, I have a bridge you might be interested in purchasing for your front lawn.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, on to the rest of the summary. I admit to a bit of confusion on the first point under “What Should be Done Concerning Cataloging of Local Digitized Collections?” The point is well taken that libraries are not now able to measure the value of their digitized collections to researchers generally and that usage data is missing on how researchers find these collections to start with, but there are a couple of sentences embedded in the first paragraph of that section that left me scratching my head:

“Libraries gave strong support for the idea to develop a scholarly “impact factor” that measures the value and return on investment of digital collections. Such a factor may require data to be embedded within the metadata for these collections.”

I think I keep pretty good track of what’s going on in the world of metadata, both within and outside libraries, but what is meant by ‘ … data to be embedded within the metadata …”? Are we talking about licensing, viruses, or what?

The recommendations on the last page, couched as answers to the question “What Can Lyrasis Do To Help?” seem like the most conservative outcomes one could imagine for what may have been (hope springs eternal) some pretty interesting conversations. How about at least one game-changer in there, like:

* Lead. Explore ways for libraries of all kinds to participate in the data revolution happening around them, sometimes referred to as library linked data.

For the past few days I’ve been in Denver, as part of a commitment to present at a program entitled “The Semantic Web and RDA: Making the Catalog a Networked Bibliographic Environment.” The other speaker on the program was Karen Coyle, and both sets of slides for this program are available publicly, Karen’s on her site: kcoyle.net/presentations/ and mine at www.slideshare.net/smartbroad/aall-denver-2010.

The presentations went well, and as Karen says “Every time we talk about this stuff, a few more people ‘get it’.” True enough, and though neither of us think we’re quite at the tipping point, it seems closer, somehow, when we present these ideas and people get excited.

As we were having coffee after our star turn, a young woman came up to us and told us that, after two years as a law cataloger, she’d been thinking seriously about shifting into systems, but she was ‘really re-energized’ by our talk. That’s the best kind of compliment, and the kind that personally keeps me doing this, despite the downsides of travel and the cost in time it takes to do these presentations on a regular basis. Sadly, these kinds of gigs are really meant to be done by people with institutional support, like working librarians with real jobs, who do this sort of thing as a way to give back, to create a tenure record, or just to have time in what passes for the spotlight in librarianship. Karen and I are each trying to make a living as independent consultants, and the value proposition is very different for us.

But the trip and the interactions gave me more ideas for my workshop, and that’s a good thing.

One of the things that always happens for me after ALA is a compiling of notes and some reflection on what I saw and learned while in the whirlwind of meetings and activities. This year is no different. There were few real surprises—after all, like most of you I keep in pretty good touch with what others are talking about and thinking about all through the year. But in those areas where I play the closest attention, I’ve seen some important shifts in thinking, and it’s at the meetings at ALA that I see those shifts playing out. Another thing I like to do after conferences is to look and see what other people are saying about the meetings. Sometimes this helps me catch up with meetings I couldn’t attend, sometimes it gives me different perspectives on ones I did. One such post was Eric Hellman’s post about the linked data meetings at Annual on his blog, ‘Go to Hellman.’

“I’ve been at the American Library Association’s Annual Meeting this weekend. Given the common purpose of libraries and Linked Data, you would think that Linked Data would be a hot topic of discussion. The weather here has been much hotter than Linked Data, which I would describe as “globally warming”. I’ve attended two sessions covering Linked Data, each attended by between 50 and 100 delegates. These followed a day long, sold-out preconference. John Phipps, one of the leaders in the effort to make library metadata compatible with the semantic web, remarked to me that these meeting would not have been possible even a year ago. Still, this attendance reflects only a tiny fraction of metadata workers at the conference; Linked Data has quite a ways to come. It’s only a few months ago that the W3C formed a Library Linked Data Incubator Group.”

In the same conversation where Jon made his point about the the increase in interest in linked data over the previous year, I tried to convince Eric that the work we’d done on the RDA Vocabularies was a step in the ‘warmer’ direction, but I clearly didn’t make my point, to him, at least.** I think, though, that the ‘tiny’-but-growing fraction of metadata workers (both at the conference and not), are starting to get the point. It’s not an easy point to get, if you’ve been traditionally trained as a cataloger or not exposed to much of this work. I hope that the formation of the Library Linked Data Incubator Group will be very useful towards this end—ironically one of the arguments against a part of our work on the RDA Vocabularies, primarily from the more conservative members of the library world, is that as librarians, we’re not in a position to know what the Semantic Web wants and needs. If nothing else, the LLDIG will make those needs known, and we hope, do that as clearly as possible.

Eric went on to talk about the follow up to the preconference:

“On Friday morning, there was an “un-conference” organized by Corey Harper from NYU and Karen Coyle, a well-known consultant. I participated in a subgroup looking at use cases for library Linked Data. It took a while for us to get around to use cases though, as participants described that usage was occurring, but they weren’t sure what for. Reports from OCLC (VIAF) and Library of Congress (id.loc.gov) both indicated significant usage but little feedback.”

I was at the ‘unconference’ as well and participated in different breakout sessions than Eric did, but found them very useful to my own thinking (summaries are posted). Plans are in place to do additional follow up to those conversations at the Dublin Core Conference this fall, and then at Midwinter in San Diego. In particular I participated in a session led by CC:DA chair John Myers about increasing the understanding of the library community generally in regards to the ideas and technologies of linked data. As someone who frequently speaks at conferences and workshops, I believe this is a particularly important issue as the abstract ideas become understood and the implementation questions become more compelling. As a result of that discussion, I’ve been thinking seriously about developing a new workshop that I would attempt to take ‘on the road’ to groups and institutions. Given that my previous experience with doing this kind of thing in collaboration with institutions has been mixed (my discouraging experience with my Metadata Standards and Applications workshops comes to mind), it seems to me that it’s time to try doing it on my own, and, ensuring as well that I’m getting adequate compensation for the time spent providing it.

I’m hoping that I’ll be able to rely on interested members of the community for feedback as I think through the process of developing this kind of workshop. Watch this space for more …

** More about the building of the vocabularies can be found in our article in the January issue of DLib Magazine.

Corey Harper seems to have started a collection of statements taken out of context, some of which I’ll share here:

“If it’s not fish it has to be linked data” –Jennifer Bowen

“I’m too far underground to know where I am” –Jon Phipps

When I used the word “curmudgeon” in my previous post, I had an apparently uncommon definition in mind: unflinching truth teller. I’ve actually taken minute pleasure in thinking of myself that way ever since, in the not-so-long ago I asked my new boss what my new role on the team would be and, knowing me, he said “curmudgeon?”. I had to hunt a bit to find a definition that wasn’t the Andy Rooney-esque “crusty, ill-tempered, old man”, but I kind of liked this one:

…Nature, having failed to equip them with a servicable denial mechanism, has endowed them with astute perception and sly wit.

Curmudgeons are mockers and debunkers whose bitterness is a symptom rather than a disease. They can’t compromise their standards and can’t manage the suspension of disbelief necessary for feigned cheerfulness. Their awareness is a curse.

Perhaps curmudgeons have gotten a bad rap in the same way that the messenger is blamed for the message: They have the temerity to comment on the human condition without apology. They not only refuse to applaud mediocrity, they howl it down with morose glee. Their versions of the truth unsettle us, and we hold it against them, even though they soften it with humor.

- JON WINOKUR

Today I participated in a Linked Data Unconference at ALA 2010 in Washington DC, which was remarkably successful. Organized by Corey Harper from NYU and ably moderated by Karen Coyle, about 50 of us held two sets of three hour-long, highly engaging breakout discussions with reports back to the larger group. I participated in a discussion of some of the practical difficulties encountered trying to implement Application Profiles in a far from perfect Linked Data environment (I strongly recommended creating a local mirror of inadequately expressed in RDFS/OWL, but otherwise useful, data models) and a discussion of scholarly Linked Data use cases and data reuse (we looked hard at VIVO and VIAF and discussed metering data usage). It was fun! I was surprised.

Afterwards a few of us had a fine lunch together, discussing the nuts and bolts of RDA and the future of cataloging, a lively and fascinating discussion in the best possible sense of ‘lively’ and ‘fascinating’. It strikes me in retrospect that we formed a kind of curmudgeon’s table — Diane Hillmann, Corey Harper, Eric Hellman, Ed Summers, Karen Coyle, and me. All of us sharing strong opinions, agreeing and disagreeing whole-heartedly and with considerable good humor and affection. A table of warm and engaged people, knowing that it’s too late to save the world, maybe too late to save cataloging, but it would still be really interesting to try. It was great fun. I wasn’t the least bit surprised.