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The LC Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative plan

2011-10-31T11:45:00.002-04:00

The Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative plan is available at:

http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/news/framework-103111.html

The plan itself is a 10 p. PDF

http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/pdf/bibframework-10312011.pdf

Bibliographic framework is intended to indicate an environment rather than a "format".

Key points

-Broad accommodation of content rules and data models. The new environment should be agnostic to cataloging rules, in recognition that different rules are used by different communities, for different aspects of a description, and for descriptions created in different eras, and that some metadata are not rule based.

-Provision for types of data that logically accompany or support bibliographic description, such as holdings, authority, classification, preservation, technical, rights, and archival metadata.

-Accommodation of textual data, linked data with URIs instead of text, and both.

-Consideration of the relationships between and recommendations for communications format tagging, record input conventions, and system storage/manipulation.

-Consideration of the needs of all sizes and types of libraries, from small public to large research.

-Continuation of maintenance of MARC until no longer necessary. It is recognized that systems and services based on the MARC 21 communications record will be an important part of the infrastructure for many years.

-Compatibility with MARC-based records.

-Provision of transformation from MARC 21 to a new bibliographic environment.

The new bibliographic framework project will be focused on the Web environment, Linked Data principles and mechanisms, and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a basic data model. The protocols and ideas behind Linked Data are natural exchange mechanisms for the Web that have found substantial resonance even beyond the cultural heritage sector. Likewise, it is expected that the use of RDF and other W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) developments will enable the integration of library data and other cultural heritage data on the Web for more expansive user access to information.

You all may also want to look at the report from Stanford on Linked Data at
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/about_sulair/news_and_events/Stanford_Linked_Data_Workshop_Report_FINAL.pdf

Published in October 2011, the report was compiled by Michael A. Keller, Jerry Persons, Hugh Glaser, and Mimi Calter. (60 pages, PDF)

The preliminary project timetable
The Library of Congress will develop a grant application in the next few months. The two-year grant will provide funding for the Library of Congress to organize consultative groups (national and international) and to support development and prototyping activities. Work to be done, then, more or less in 2012 and 2013 includes: developing models and scenarios for interaction within the information community, assembling and reviewing ontologies currently used or under development, developing domain ontologies for the description of resources and related data in scope, organizing prototypes and reference implementations.

Additional LC bibliographic framework transition links

Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Website
http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/

Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Listserv
http://listserv.loc.gov/listarch/bibframe.html

Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control Website
http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/

Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop, 27 June – 1 July 2011 (published October 2011)

2011-10-27T11:28:00.000-04:00

The Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop, 27 June – 1 July 2011 was published in October 2011. The report was compiled by Michael A. Keller, Jerry Persons, Hugh Glaser, and Mimi Calter. (60 pages, PDF)

The Stanford University Libraries (SULAIR) and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) had a week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery and navigation of academic information resources. The report summarizes the workshop, charts the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and has short biographies and statements from each of the participants.

The accompanying survey is available at http://www.clir.org/pubs/archives/linked-data-survey/

With the assistance of other participants, the Stanford team will generate a model for a multi-national, multi-institutional discovery environment built on Linked Open Data demonstrating to end users, our communities of researchers the value of the Linked Data approach.

From the conclusion:
"Given the proliferation of URIs, whether RDF triples or more, from numerous sources it seems plausible to attempt to model and then construct a discovery and navigation environment for research purposes based on the open stores of RDFs becoming available. To many of us, this seems a logical next step to the vision of the hypertext/media functions in a globally networked world of Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Douglas Englebart. It is highly significant to us as well that Tim Berners-Lee, responsible for the launch of the World Wide Web, has led this line of thought through his publications and presentations and those of his colleagues at the University of Southampton, Wendy Hall and Nigel Shadbolt."

Final Report PCC ISBD and MARC Task Group September 2011 (78 p.) PDF

2011-10-11T11:32:00.000-04:00

The _Final Report_ of the PCC ISBD and MARC Task Group (September 2011) has been posted online. 78 pages. PDF.

"The MARC21 community needs to transition to an environment where nearly all records created omit ISBD punctuation.

As an initial step in such a transition, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging called for the establishment of a task group to further investigate these issues. The PCC ISBD and MARC Task Group was established in March 2011 and was charged with the following: investigate the omission of ISBD punctuation from the cataloging process in favor of having cataloging interfaces generate punctuation needed for display; perform a field-by-field analysis of MARC to identify instances of embedded ISBD punctuation; and, identify the use of any non-ISBD punctuation present in fields."

The report is really well-done. Robert Bremer, OCLC, chaired the group.

Thinking about how to use the Open Metadata Registry and HIVE to create vocabulary services for Yale's Cross Collection Discovery tool (CCD) and Yale's metadata workflow router and metadata editor, Ladybird

2011-09-12T11:57:00.001-04:00

After talking today with Daniel Lovins (Emerging Technology Librarian at Yale), I have begun thinking about how to use the Open Metadata Registry and HIVE to create vocabulary services for Yale's Cross Collection Discovery tool (CCD) and Yale's Ladybird, a metadata editor/router. I have a long way to go, but Daniel has gotten me started on what should be a promising path for me and for Yale library. Thanks, Daniel.

The Metadata Registry provides services to developers and consumers of controlled vocabularies and is one of the first production deployments of the RDF-based Semantic Web Community's Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS).

HIVE is an automatic metadata generation approach that dynamically integrates discipline-specific controlled vocabularies encoded with the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS). HIVE assists content creators and information professionals with subject cataloging and provides a solution to the traditional controlled vocabulary problems of cost, interoperability, and usability.

Yale's Cross Collection Discovery (CCD) provides a way to search across Yale's collections of art, natural history, books, and maps, as well as photos, audio, and video documenting people, places, and events that form part of Yale's institutional identity and contribution to scholarship.

Yale's Ladybird is a staff tool that manages the workflow and routing of digitized materials (and associated metadata) to a DAM system and to the Web. In order to perform these tasks, the interface is used to create or edit a metadata record for the digital representation of the asset.

COMET (Cambridge Open METadata) project completed July 2011

2011-09-12T10:01:00.000-04:00

COMET (Cambridge Open METadata) project was completed this July 2011.

The COMET blog final post sums up the work done, the lessons learned, and indicates some next steps.

The CUL open data service is worth a look. (It is funded under the JISC Infrastructure for Resource Discovery program.)

I was particularly interested in the document on the ownership of MARC21 records by Hugh Taylor, Head of Collection Description and Development at Cambridge University Library. It is nice brief on the issues of intellectual property law and contracts and licences as they relate to MARC21 records in library catalogs. Hugh is very good on "reading the ownership of MARC 21 bibliographic records." The whole project is nicely documented at the COMET project blog.

Restoring the Sterling Memorial Library nave at Yale

2011-08-12T18:44:00.000-04:00

Yale is beginning a project to restore the nave of the Sterling Memorial Library. Our new UL, Susan Gibbons, asked staff to share their ideas about how to restore the nave. Here is my idea.

I'll start with the past. The nave originally held the public card catalog. Because of that and because Yale's scholarly information collections were much of that time primarily paper-based and held mostly in Sterling Memorial Library, the nave/catalog was _the_ portal to Yale's collections. One had to use the catalog and the nave to use the library and one had to use the library because that was where the knowledge was stored. Staff and users stood side by side in the nave at the catalog--creating it, maintaining it, and using it. The nave was vital to the life of the mind at Yale, and it was a vital center of the community life of scholars at Yale. That era is gone and now the nave is empty. I refer to it among friends as the "Dead Zone." The soul of the nave has fled. Only the shell of it remains.

Let's turn to the future. We can only restore the nave by breathing a new soul into the space. Reverence for what was will not restore the nave. Nostalgia won't either. How do we breathe new life into that space?

The nave was alive when it was full of scholars (undergrads and up) and librarians using the great collections at Yale to advance their knowledge. We can restore the nave to life by bringing back purposeful scholars and librarians (not attract tourists). The restored nave must become again a tool for discovery and use of knowledge, a portal into a great scholarly workshop.

The nave (and such other spaces as the periodical, newspaper, L and B, and main reading rooms) must combine desirable spaces with available tools--digital and analog--in such a way as to become a sharable, collaborative workspace. It can't just be a bank of computers, or a coffee shop, or a classroom, or a study hall, or a co-working space--though it may need something of each of those; it must be a space for labor-intensive interactions among scholars, librarians, archivists, IT specialists, etc., and the collections--digital and analog. The key to the success of such a scholars' workshop is a mix of vision/conceptualization, tools (not just banks of computers), and, most importantly, skilled staff that generates a vibrant scholars' workshop.

Is a Bookless Library Still a Library?

2011-07-11T16:00:00.000-04:00

Time magazine has an article by that title written by Tim Newcomb, dateline July 11, 2011. It's main topic is Drexel's new library--built for a bookless library. Newcomb quotes Danuta Nictecki, formerly at Yale library.

But I write about it here mainly for the question the article asks in its title but doesn't begin to answer. Is a Bookless Library Still a Library?
How we answer it has important consequences for those served by libraries.

It isn't a simple question at all. The difficulty is first in the confusion between books as objects and what those objects carry. The Drexel library still has book content and journal content and etc.; it doesn't have that content in the familar codex format we call books; it still has the content of the books and journals and etc., but it has it in digital, online formats. Libraries without books are like banks without gold deposits in vaults or without paper currency or coins. A bank isn't a bank because it has money in one particular format; it's a bank because it provides services related to our use of money. We still call them banks--even though we don't have to walk into them anymore to use them.

The W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group DRAFT REPORT

2011-06-29T12:52:00.002-04:00

The W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group has issued a draft report for commentary. Linked library data is an opportunity to bring library concepts and practices to the Web in ways that transcend any individual library and its individual limitations.

I quote here one line from the benefits section. "The Linked Data approach offers significant advantages over current practices for creating and delivering library data while providing a natural extension to the collaborative sharing models historically employed by libraries, archives, and museums ("memory institutions")." And one more from the benefits to "memory institutions." "By using Linked Data, memory institutions will create an open, global pool of shared data that can be used and re-used to describe resources, with a limited amount of redundant effort compared with current cataloguing processes." Cheaper, faster, better.

From a cataloger's viewpoint, library linked data is the ultimate cooperative cataloging environment and the ultimate user services environment.

The report
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/DraftReportWithTransclusion
includes these sections:

Benefits
Vocabularies and Datasets
Relevant Technologies
Implementation challenges
Recommendations

Two related parts are:

Use Cases, a survey report describing existing projects
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/UseCaseReport

Vocabularies and Datasets, a survey report
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/Vocabulary_and_Dataset

The LLD XG invite comments from interested members of the public.

Feedback can sent as comments to individual sections posted on the dedicated blog at http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/w3clld/ or by email to the public mailing list (public-lld@w3.org, archived at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lld/ ) using descriptive subject lines such as '[COMMENTS] "Benefits" section.'

Comments are especially welcome in the next four weeks (through 22 July). Reviewers should note that as with Wikipedia, the text may be revised and corrected by its editors in response to comments at any time, but that earlier versions of a document may be viewed by clicking on the History tab.

It is anticipated that the three reports will be published in final form by 31 August.

RDA is a go (conditionally)

2011-06-14T15:48:00.001-04:00

The Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, and the National Library of Medicine have issued an executive summary statement from their Executives on the Report and Recommendations of the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee on the implementation of RDA—Resource Description & Access at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/cataloging/RDA_report_executive_summary.pdf

The cover statement by the executives of LC, NAL, and NLM is available at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/cataloging/RDA_Executives_statement.pdf

The official statement is:

“We endorse the report, with the conditions articulated by the committee. Even though there are many in the library community who would like to see a single “yes” or “no” response to the question should we implement RDA, the reality is that any standard is complicated and will take time to develop. We also recognize that the library world cannot operate in a vacuum. The entire bibliographic framework will have to change along the lines recommended in the report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. The implementation of RDA is one important piece, but there are many others that must be dealt with simultaneously. We especially note the need to address the question of the MARC standard, suggested by many of the participants in the RDA test. As part of addressing the conditions identified, LC will have a small number of staff members who participated in the test resume applying RDA in the interim. This will allow LC to prepare for training, documentation, and other preparatory tasks related to the further development and implementation of RDA.

The conditions identified by the Test Coordinating Committee must be addressed immediately, and we believe that the Committee should continue in an oversight role to ensure that the conditions are met. We have discussed the Committee’s recommendations with the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. We will continue to work closely with the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control to think about the overall direction of bibliographic control and the changes that are necessary to assure that libraries are in the best position to deliver twenty-first century services to users.

We believe that the long-term benefits of adopting RDA will be worth the short-term anxieties and costs. The Test Coordinating Committee quite rightly noted the economic and organizational realities that cause every librarian to ask if this is the time to make a dramatic change in cataloging. Our collective answer is that libraries must create linkages to all other information resources in this Web environment. We must begin now. Indefinite delay in implementation simply means a delay in our effective relationships with the broader information community.”

Library of Congress: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative

2011-05-23T21:09:00.001-04:00

The Library of Congress has begun a "Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative."

"A major focus of the initiative will be to determine a transition path for the MARC 21 exchange format in order to reap the benefits of newer technology while preserving a robust data exchange that has supported resource sharing and cataloging cost savings in recent decades."

"This work will be carried out in consultation with the format's formal partners -- Library and Archives Canada and the British Library -- and informal partners -- the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and other national libraries, the agencies that provide library services and products, the many MARC user institutions, and the MARC advisory committees such as the MARBI committee of ALA, the Canadian Committee on MARC, and the BIC Bibliographic Standards Group in the UK."

This could make the RDA effort look like a piece of cake. How will the process be arranged to include these players?

Good luck, though. Sounds like fun to me. Let's get to work.

The press release has more information.

The MARC pilot project final report by Henriette D. Avram (1968) 173 p.

2011-05-16T11:38:00.003-04:00

The MARC pilot project final report by Henriette D. Avram (1968) 173 p.

A bit of history today. The MARC pilot project launched library cataloging into the digital era in 1968. We are still using the MARC format today, but it is widely understood to be ready (or long overdue) for replacement.

As we bid to leave the MARC format behind, Avram's report on the pilot project is well worth perusing.

My employer, Yale University Library, was one of the participating libraries.

As I have continued to think about this today, I re-read Roy Tenant's 2004 article, A Bibliographic Metadata Infrastructure for the 21st Century in which Tenant broadly identifies ways we must "assimilate MARC into a broader, richer, more diverse set of tools, standards, and protocols." Tenant sees that we don't need another bibliographic format, we need an infrastructure that accommodates wide diversity in formats. This is an excellent article. Well worth reading for its application to our current situation nearly a decade after he wrote it.

We do need a replacement for MARC, one that will be better suited to the infrastructure Tenant outlines. The Network Development and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress, the Standards division at the Library and Archives Canada and the Bibliographic & Metadata Standards section at the British Library, the maintenance agencies staffed to care for MARC, should initiate a MARC replacement project.

Yale's Open Access policy

2011-05-13T15:31:00.000-04:00

Yale's "Open Access" policy
Yesterday, Yale announced its new "open access" policy for online images of millions of objects housed in Yale's museums, archives, and libraries, and more than 250,000 images are available through a newly developed collective catalog.

The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale's vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available. Yale is using a Creative Commons license, Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) for the open access material. "This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials."

This policy is a big big success for Yale and its Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI) and the libraries, archives, and museums at Yale. Without a centralizing, coordinating agency on campus, I can't imagine that Yale University would have been able to make this decision and connect it to a tool for discovery across Yale's many cultural and scientific units such as the libraries at Yale, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Yale Center for British Art. ODAI is proving its value to Yale.

RDA and the eXtensible Catalog

2011-04-14T09:58:00.000-04:00

Dave Lindahl and Jennifer Bowen, XCO Co-Executive Directors, wrote a brief statement that describes the benefits of implementing RDA for new metadata and discovery applications such as XC.

http://hdl.handle.net/1802/14588

In early March, Dave Lindahl and Jennifer Bowen met with the US RDA Test Coordinating Committee at the Library of Congress to discuss XC's partial implementation of RDA. The committee invited Dave and Jennifer to submit a written statement for inclusion as an Appendix to the group's final report, due out within the next month, which will include recommendations regarding whether and how the US national libraries (LC, NLM, NAL) will implement RDA.

From the statement:

"XC software represents the first live implementation of a subset of RDA in a FRBR‐based, non‐MARC environment. XC’s implementation of RDA has been led by individuals who have participated in the development of both the RDA Toolkit and the RDA vocabulary registry. XC’s use of RDA has also been informed by the real‐world requirements of actual working software, as well as through a user research process conducted at four ARL libraries."

and

"A community‐wide implementation of RDA within the library world will benefit not only users of the eXtensible Catalog, but also developers and users of other applications that make information about library collections accessible via the open web."

“What we find changes what we seek.”

2011-03-28T16:18:00.000-04:00

A librarian at Yale, Daniel Lovins, just led me to a review of a new book by Peter Morville and Jeffrey Callender--_Search Patterns: Design for Discovery_ (2010, O’Reilly). The review I read is at "I'd rather be writing," a blog about technical communication trends. The review is at http://idratherbewriting.com/2011/03/28/book-review-search-patterns-by-peter-morville-and-jeffrey-callender/

The line I took for the title of this post was one singled out by Tom Johnson, and I think it sums up the value of facets within search tools and points to a larger truth about how searching and discovery changes the searcher.

MADS/RDF Primer available for public review

2011-03-28T11:39:00.000-04:00

The MADS/RDF Primer is available for public review.
Status: Final Public Review Document
Updated: 28 March 2011
Previous Version: 19 November 2010

MADS/RDF is a way to record data from the Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) Authorities format for use in Semantic Web applications and Linked Data projects. MADS/RDF is a knowledge organization system (KOS) designed for use with controlled values for names (personal, corporate, geographic, etc.), thesauri, taxonomies, subject heading systems, and other controlled value lists. The MADS ontology has been fully mapped to SKOS. MADS/RDF is designed specifically to support authority data as used by and needed in the LIS community and its technology systems.

Note that the MADS/RDF is intended mainly for those designing and implementing LIS technology systems.

Now I'll wait to see how it is recieved by those who know ontologies far better than I do.

Yale's new UL, Susan Gibbons on future of libraries from ALCTS 2010 MW

2011-03-24T21:50:00.000-04:00

A talk from ALCTS Midwinter meeting Jan. 15, 2010

http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/resources/z687/gibbons.pdf
Time Horizon 2020: Library Renaissance
Susan Gibbons Vice Provost and Andrew H. & Janet Dayton Neilly Dean River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester

Gibbons says, "In thinking about the event horizon of 2010 to 2020, it is already clear that this will be a period of unprecedented change for libraries. More specifically this coming decade will mark the renaissance of technical services and a complete transformation of collection development. While the last ten years have witnessed a significant re-conceptualization of public services, it is technical services and collection development that will be at the center of the next significant phase of library transformation."

Read on.

New University Librarian for Yale: Susan Gibbons

2011-03-24T12:26:00.000-04:00

Yale has hired a new university librarian: Susan Gibbons. See the following article from the Yale Daily News from Tuesday, March 22, 2011.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/mar/22/new-university-librarian-headed-to-yale/

We're looking forward to a new UL.

A bit of required reading for academic librarians

2011-03-07T08:43:00.003-05:00

On Lorcan Dempsey's blog: The Collections shift
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002160.html

Read his blog, watch the embedded media, and read the reports and other writing's he cites.

This is the starting place for today's required reading. Dempsey notes a few things he's read or heard of recently about "several central trends: the move to electronic, the managing down of print collections, and the curation of institutionally-generated learning and research resources." These are the big three transformative trends for academic libraries and how librarians and libraries and the universities they serve deal with these three trends will determine the survivial of academic libraries.

The "move to electronic" is more precisely the move from paper-based media to digital media and the resulting transformation in the economics of the distribution and manufacturing of written materials--artistic, scientific, business-oriented, scholarly, personal etc. The sub-strata of materials has changed and that change has transformed the economics of production, distribution, and use of written work [and photography and music and etc.] Relatively expensive, durable and scarce materials such as books, reports, and journals that had to be distributed by ship, plane, train, truck or cart are now produced, distributed and used digitally. That transformation is not yet complete, but the completion date is approaching at an accelerating pace and will soon be here.

One consequence for libraries is the diminishment of the importance of existing print collections. Libraries must manage the shift from the centrality of the print collection to its successful fulfillment of its mission for the university it serves to a peripheral role in the _library's_ enterprise. Surviving that transition will not be easy. Thriving through that transition is almost unthinkable for anyone who equates libraries with books or thinks anything like "libraries are all about the humanities." Many academic libraries will flounder in this transition.

Curation of "institutionally-generated learning and research resources" is an opportunity for universities and not necessarily an opportunity for their libraries. A unveristiy press, university research labs, university museums or archives, offices of public affairs, IT units, and such newly formed entities as Yale's Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure may take on much of a unversities curatorial role for their "institutionally-generated learning and research resources." Additionally, curation may not be best done in a networked, digital environment on an institution by institution basis. Curation of "institutionally-generated learning and research resources" is likely to require the scale of the network itself to be successful. Universities will need to coalesce around discipline-based networks to curate their "institutionally-generated learning and research resources."

Metadata guidelines for the UK RDTF

2011-02-04T08:40:00.002-05:00

Andy Powell and Pete Johnston, of Eduserv, with funding from JISC, have put up some high level draft guidelines for "how metadata associated with library, museum and archival collections should be made available for the purposes of supporting resource discovery in line with the Resource Discovery Taskforce (RDTF) Vision."

See the guidelines at http://rdtfmetadata.jiscpress.org/

They are taking comments on the draft until Feb. 18.

You can read Powell's and Johnston's own commentary/announcement at their joint blog, eFoundations, at http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2011/02/metadata-guidelines-for-the-uk-rdtf.html

A few quotes from the guidelines.

"These guidelines have been developed such that they:

1. support the RDTF Vision;
2. are compatible with the outcomes of the JISC IE Technical Review meeting in London, Aug 2010;
3. are in line with Linked Data principles as far as possible;
4. are compatible with the W3C Linked Open Data Star Scheme;
5. are in line with Designing URI Sets for the UK Public Sector;
6. take into account the Europeana Data Model and ESE;
7. are informed by mainstream web practice and search engine behaviour and are broadly in line with the notion of “making better websites” across the library, museum and archives sectors."

"The guidelines are intended to help libraries, museums and archives expose existing metadata (and any new metadata that is created using existing practices) in ways that 1) supports the development of aggregator services and that 2) integrates well with the web of data. The intention is not to change existing cataloguing practice in libraries, museums and archives."

"RDTF metadata should be made openly available using one or more of three approaches, referred to below as the community formats approach, the RDF data approach and the Linked Data approach."

For what it is, it looks good. Powell and Johnston "believe that by putting this guidance in place it will be possible to create significantly more coherence in the way that metadata is created, managed and used across the library, archives and museum sectors than is currently the case."

Digital forensics

2011-01-14T09:14:00.000-05:00

A CLIR report on digital forensics for born digital collections is out. Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum,Richard Ovenden,Gabriela Redwine with research assistance from Rachel Donahue.

The report makes a case for applying digital forensics, an applied field originating in law enforcement,computer security, and national defense, to the archives and curatorial community since libraries, special collections, etc. increasingly receive
computer storage media (and sometimes entire computers) as part of their acquisitions of "papers" from artists, writers, musicians, etc. Upwards of 90 percent of the records (i.e. personal and corporate "papers") being created today are born digital (Dow 2009, xi).

Here's a quote from the introduction: "Digital forensics therefore offers archivists, as well as an archive’s patrons, new tools, new methodologies, and new capabilities. Yet as even this brief description must suggest, digital forensics does not affect archivists’ practices solely at the level of procedures and tools. Its methods and outcomes raise important legal, ethical, and hermeneutical questions about the nature of the cultural record, the boundaries between public and private knowledge, and the roles and responsibilities of donor, archivist, and the public in a new technological era."

This report cites an earlier one that sounds good, too. "The starting place for any cultural heritage professional interested in matters of forensics, data recovery, and storage formats is a 1999 JISC/NIPO study coauthored by Seamus Ross and Ann Gow
and entitled Digital Archaeology: Rescuing Neglected and Damaged Data Resources. Although more than a decade old, the report remains invaluable."

OCLC report on managing print collections in mass-digitized library world

2011-01-10T10:20:00.001-05:00

Malpas, Constance. 2011. Cloud-sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-digitized Library Environment. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2011/2011-01.pdf.

Cloud-sourcing Research Collections is a 76 p. (pdf) analysis of the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories.

Mass digitization projects like Google Books and shared online collections like the HathiTrust have given substance to the visions of a transformation of library use from paper to online resources. This "flip" and related demands for physical space and care of paper resources has resulted in renewed attention to print collections in academic libraries. This is the time for discussion within and among research libraries on how to construct new systems of services based on aggregations of digital resources, local paper resource collections and shared storage repositories for online and paper resources.

The report's main conclusion is:

"Based on a year-long study of data from the HathiTrust, ReCAP, and WorldCat, we concluded that our central hypothesis was successfully confirmed: there is sufficient material in the mass-digitized library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the United States, and there is adequate duplication between the shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities to enable a great number of academic libraries to reconsider their local print management operations. Significantly, we also found that the combination of a relatively small number of potential shared print providers, including the Library of Congress, was sufficient to achieve more than 70% coverage of the digitized book collection, suggesting that shared service may not require a very large network of providers."

This points a way forward for academic libraries. The report might be an interesting frame for a discussion at Yale of how we think of our collections in this environment and how we move to use the environment to create services for readers. It is one of the few reports that integrates questions of online resources with paper resources. That kind of integrated approach to collections, preservation, user/reader services makes a lot more sense than digital only or print only approaches.

Robert Darnton The Library: Three Jeremiads from the NY Review of Books, Dec. 23, 2010

2010-12-03T16:08:00.000-05:00

The Library: Three Jeremiads from the NY Review of Books, Dec. 23, 2010
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/dec/23/library-three-jeremiads/?pagination=false

Excellent piece on the crises in research libraries. It's all about money and the lack of it for research libraries.

3 Jeremiads, 3 problems

1st: Monographs and scholarship
" ... a vicious circle: the escalation in the price of periodicals forces libraries to cut back on their purchase of monographs; the drop in the demand for monographs makes university presses reduce their publication of them; and the difficulty in getting them published creates barriers to careers among graduate students."

"Another rule of thumb used to prevail among the better university presses. They could count on research libraries purchasing about eight hundred copies of any new monograph. By 2000 that figure had fallen to three or four hundred, often less, and not enough in most cases to cover production costs. Therefore, the presses abandoned subjects like colonial Latin America and Africa."

2nd: Journals
"A few years later, “sustainability” had become a buzz word, and the inflationary spiral of journal prices had continued unabated. In 2007 I became director of the Harvard University Library, a strategic position from which to take the full measure of the business constraints on academic life. Although economic conditions had worsened, the faculty’s understanding of them had not improved."

"How many professors in chemistry can give you even a ballpark estimate of the cost of a year’s subscription to Tetrahedron (currently $39,082)?"

"At Harvard we developed a new model. By a unanimous vote on February 12, 2008, professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences bound themselves to deposit all of their future scholarly articles in an open-access repository to be established by the library and also granted the university permission to distribute them."

3rd: Google Books
"The fundamental incompatibility of purpose between libraries and Google Book Search might be mitigated if Google could offer libraries access to its digitized database of books on reasonable terms. But the terms are embodied in a 368-page document known as the “settlement,” which is meant to resolve another conflict: the suit brought against Google by authors and publishers for alleged infringement of their copyrights."

"Despite its enormous complexity, the settlement comes down to an agreement about how to divide a pie—the profits to be produced by Google Book Search: 37 percent will go to Google, 63 percent to the authors and publishers. And the libraries? They are not partners to the agreement, but many of them have provided, free of charge, the books that Google has digitized. They are being asked to buy back access to those books along with those of their sister libraries, in digitized form, for an “institutional subscription” price, which could escalate as disastrously as the price of journals."

"... my happy ending: a National Digital Library—or a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), as some prefer to call it."

Open Bibliographic Data Guide: JISC study on the business cases for Open Bibliographic Data

2010-11-15T10:43:00.000-05:00

http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/

links to the _The Guide to Open Bibliographic Data_ that JISC developed on behalf of its partners in the Resource Discovery Task Force. It is about the business cases for Open Bibliographic Data – releasing some or all of a library’s catalog records for open use and re-use by others. The Guide uses 17 use cases to explore
* How to license the data
* Legal issues to be considered
* Potential costs and savings
* Practical implications in terms of processes, effort and skills
* Data formats and other technical options

The assumed rationale is about discoverability and is gaining in credibility the more our resources are discovered from ‘out there’ (through such as Google) and not from ‘in here’ (through the local OPAC). --most of the above quoted or modified slightly from the Guide.

A PDF version of the use cases is at http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Open-Bibliographic-Data-The-Use-Cases.pdf

On a quick review, the case studies seem useful: specific, brief, comprehensive. Each use case includes sections on description, motivation, benefits, consequences, rights & licensing, practicalities and costs.

A table of use cases and examples is at http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/examples

An example for use case 1 (publish data for unspecified use) is Open Library http://openlibrary.org and another is Cambridge U. Library http://openbiblio.net/2010/10/05/jisc-openbibliography-cul-data-release/

An example for use case 2 (publish open Linked Data for unspecified use) is Libris, the joint catalogue of the Swedish academic and research libraries http://libris.kb.se/

Understanding linked data and its potential for libraries

2010-11-10T11:57:00.003-05:00

I've been hearing a lot about linked data in the past year, and I find that I'm very fuzzy about what linked data is and how it matters or might matter to libraries, to organizations that have libraries and to people who may use libraries.

My first question is What is linked data? A good starting place for me is the definition at http://linkeddata.org

"Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as 'a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.'" --linkeddata.org, read Nov. 10, 2010.

I checked wikipedia for a definition and found a slightly different, more technical definition of linked data.

"Linked Data is a sub-topic of the Semantic Web. The term Linked Data is used to describe a method of exposing, sharing, and connecting data via dereferenceable URIs on the Web." --wikipedia, read on Nov. 10, 2010.

Of course, I had no idea what "dereferenceable URIs" are. Well, a dereferenceable URI is the normal and obvious way that links on the Web work: a URI refers to a page that the web server returns a copy of.

I'm in a technical vocabulary thicket,and I don't want to be. That may be useful later, but not now. I need to put it in my own words or into words I understand.

Let me try working with that definition cited by linkeddata.org: "... a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.'

Linked data is a way to expose, share, or connect to data on the Web so that the data can be understood or is meaningful to other machines on the Web. This is how Linked Data is a sub-topic of the Semantic Web. Additionally, Linked Data uses URIs as names for things and RDF as the data model so that statements about resources (in particular Web resources)are made in the form of subject-predicate-object expressions, and these expressions are known as triples.

Well, that is making sense to me, but I don't know that it would make much sense to anyone else, or be seen by anyone else as an improvement over the other available definitions. It helps me, though. That is enough for now.

Ed Summers on the linked data release from Deutschen Nationalbibliothek

2010-10-20T10:45:00.000-04:00

See Ed Summers' comments on the DNB release of linked library data at
http://inkdroid.org/journal/2010/10/19/linked-library-data-at-the-deutschen-nationalbibliothek/

Summers' piece is worth reading.

Here are some highlights.

The Deutschen Nationalbibliothek (DNB)has released linked library data for

■1.8 million authors from the Personennamendatei (PND)
■1.3 million corporate bodies from the Gemeinsame Körperschaftsdatei (GKD)
■187,000 subject headings from the Schlagwortnormdatei (SWD)
■51,000 Dewey Decimal Classification categories
The full dataset that the DNB has made available for download amounts to 38,849,113 individual statements (aka triples).

See the DNB announcement at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2010Oct/0016.html

This is a huge event for _library_ uses of linked data, and exemplary behavior from DNB. Other research and national libraries should emulate the DNB.

Summers cites Herta Müller's authority information as an illustration and notes the use of RDA vocabularies, which are also available as linked data. "RDF vocabularies are explicit ways of describing resources like people, places, topics, etc. When different things are described using the same vocabulary (or the vocabularies themselves are related together in a particular way) it becomes possible to merge the descriptions, and build software on top of it."

"Another really interesting thing to note about this RDF for Herta Müller are the links to Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herta_M%C3%BCller), VIAF (http://viaf.org/viaf/12324250) and dbpedia (http://dbpedia.org/resource/Herta_M%C3%BCller). These are important because they contextualize the DNB record for Herta Müller by relating it to other records for her, thus allowing it to be disambiguated from records describing other people named Herta Müller."

"[Summers] did some quick and dirty analysis of the full data dump from the DNB and found: 3,569,402 links to VIAF and 40,136 links to dbpedia (the Linked Data version of Wikipedia)."

Summers goes on to talk a bit about what more needs to be done.

"What remains to be done to some extent is leveraging this contextual information around our data in Library Applications, both cataloging, metadata enrichment applications and end user facing discovery applications."

There is a lot more in his piece, and links to many related tools, projects, and activities.

Getting on the cloud

2010-08-16T15:24:00.000-04:00

On Friday, I began renting a virtual server from linode.com. It's a linux thing. I'm using Ubuntu. Renting the virtual server is cheap and pretty easy. My colleague, Daniel Lovins, is helping me with advice, encouragement and answers to a few dumb questions. (Thanks, for the hand-holding and the example, Daniel.) Today, with Daniel's help, I installed Apache and MySQL. I'm starting to learn Vi, too. My plan is to set up drupal, an instance of vufind, and the eXtensible Catalog Metadata Toolkit (XC MST), and then I'll see what I can do with these tools in this environment. I have a lot to learn, but I feel that I am now able to actually play with the right toys.

Dempsey on supply and demand

2010-08-09T10:30:00.003-04:00

Lorcan Dempsey's Aug. 8, 2010 blog posting on "Sorting out demand" is insightful and useful. His ideas are his 3rd top trend as presented at the 2010 LITA Top Tech Trends panel at ALA Annual Conference. http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002124.html

His argument about the shift (in libraries) from a focus on managing supply to "sorting out demand" is an economic one. Costs - in time, effort or money - for the user drives what services the library can provide and the "right" structure for the library. Libraries in the 20th century reduced the user's supply-based transaction costs by integrating the many sources of supply and bringing them close to the user. Libraries in the 21st century (or this early part of it)must also reduce user costs but those will be different costs as the supply transaction costs are falling due to the effect of digital format and the network. Dempsey mentions several examples of how libraries can provide services on the demand side: recommendations, contextualizing content for particular communities, connective services, tailoring content to purpose, and managing institutional assets. Each of these examples is interesting and promising, but not seem to be as compelling as the 20th century economic rationale for libraries.

I continue to think that libraries as we know them will be changed in ways very like bookstores and printed journals or newspapers; they will not serve the necessary local distribution needs as well as a globally networked provider. Some will survive because of local peculiarities or because they develop special services for their community--these may be the same thing. Research libraries will become more research museum-like, that is, more artifact-centric. But how a university, for instance, manages its institutional digital repositories and its licensed online resources may make more sense outside of the library. Yale has created a university-wide Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure, that, though in its institutional infancy, is clearly the focal point on digital repositories at Yale, digital preservation at Yale, and discovery of resources across the university's many collections in libraries, archives, museums, etc. The changing economics will change the institutional structures. The more radical the changes in economics the more radical the resulting institutional changes.

Lastly, Dempsey closes his post with a link to Dan Chudnov's prescient 2006 post "help people build their own libraries" http://onebiglibrary.net/story/because-this-is-the-business-weve-chosen

catalogs and scholarship: a bit of sentiment

2010-08-06T15:05:00.001-04:00

OK, it must be Paul Courant day here or something like that. I was looking at his blog post about the closing and more specifically the removal of the U. Michigan card catalog, and in his discussion of responses to the removal he spoke of his own sentimental response. These are the lines that struck me:

"... I’ll always remember the card catalog as the rich, powerful and brilliant piece of scholarship that it was, and as a place that I visited in eager anticipation of learning something new. I don’t think that I was ever disappointed."

The catalog as a work of scholarship is a view one rarely hears anymore, but it is the correct view of the card catalog of a research university. Those catalogs were the heart of the heart of the university, or the soul in the machine, or whatever lovely, sentimental phrase you most prefer to use. When one was "in" the catalog following a citation or browsing an author's works or perusing a subject, one was in more or less the active mind of the library and thus one could imagine it as the mind or memory of the university or of scholarship itself.

If the catalog was a work of scholarship, then the cataloger was a scholar. And in that I think we can feel the loss that many catalogers feel when they consider the past 30 years and look ahead to the future of cataloging and libraries: their work as scholars is at an end. It is possible to see a descending arc--the catalog as scholarship to the catalog as information repository to the catalog as a database. And the arc descends for the cataloger from scholar to information manager to data assistant. This view is a sentimental one and a depressing one; it is not objectively true, but I know that it feels true to many catalogers. It is part of the sorrow of catalogers that many lament the loss of status as scholars and don't feel any warmth for the status of a data-centric programmer.

Paul Courant's talk at OCLC: "Economic Perspectives on Academic Libraries,"

2010-08-06T09:56:00.002-04:00

Paul Courant's recent talk at OCLC is now online. It is called, "Economic Perspectives on Academic Libraries," and it is worth a look and listen. http://www.oclc.org/research/news/2010-08-05.htm

His talk and slide take about 70 minutes. There is a QA video, too. Another 15 minutes or so.

His talk is interesting just to get his perspective as a university librarian (U. Michigan) and as a former provost (also at UM) and as an economist (on faculty at UM).

Summary: A library is a complicated institution, a big nonprofit business that supports the mission of an even bigger nonprofit business. It plays essential roles in the production and distribution of scholarship, which can be understood as an industry. For over a century, a library's focus has been almost entirely on the interests of the local institution and its local value has been almost entirely dependent on it role in sharing the costs of expensive information. However, digital information technology is radically altering the value of that focus and that role. A library is profoundly affected by both the emerging role of the network and by the fact that copying and distribution (of books, articles, etc.) are now very cheap. Courant develops these themes and shares some of his thoughts on the effective and efficient functioning of academic libraries.

There is no transcript to read, but there are 17 slides to view and both and MP3 to listen to and a Webcast to watch and hear.

His blog is at http://paulcourant.net/ and is called Au Courant.

two surveys

2010-07-29T13:26:00.003-04:00

Two surveys worth looking at. One by Ithaka S+R and one by BL/JISC.
The Ithaka S+R report:
Faculty Survey 2009: Key Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies (April 7, 2010) at
http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/faculty-surveys-2000-2009/Faculty%20Study%202009.pdf

The BL/JISC report:
Researchers of Tomorrow:A three year (BL/JISC) study tracking the research behaviour of 'Generation Y' doctoral students. Annual Report 2009-2010 (June 2010) at
http://explorationforchange.net/attachments/056_RoT%20Year%201%20report%20final%20100622.pdf

Each is excellent and worth reading, but my first impression is that nothing here is surprising. Digital technologies are transforming scholarship and communication and the relation of libraries (and archives and musuems) to scholars (faculty and graduate students) is changing. The need for libraries as direct intermediaries between scholars and local collections is lessening. Digital technologies present new opportunities for scholarship and communication, but institutions--publishers, societies, libraries, universities--have been slow to capitalize on them in any coordinated way. Researcher behaviors have adapted to the new technologies and have as yet held on to traditional attitudes, values and skills per evaluation and use of sources.

Digital information seeker--a report on OCLC, RIN, and JISC projects

2010-04-07T09:04:00.001-04:00

The Digital Information Seeker: Report of findings from selected OCLC, RIN and JISC user behaviour projects is out. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/reports/2010/digitalinformationseekerreport.pdf

It was produced for JISC by Lynn Silipigni Connaway, PhD and Timothy J Dickey, PhD, OCLC Research. Dated Feb. 15, 2010.

This report gives a really nice look at the landscape of user studies. Its 61 pages are a succinct review of a selected sample of studies.

The report was not intended to be definitive. It provides a synthesis. The report makes it easier for librarians and other information professionals to better understand the information-seeking behaviors of libraries’ intended users. It also makes it easier to review the issues associated with developing information services and systems to best meet users’ needs.

The 12 studies included in this report:

Perceptions of libraries and information resources (OCLC, December 2005),
http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/2005perceptions.htm

College students’ perceptions of libraries and information resources (OCLC, April 2006),
http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/perceptionscollege.htm

Sense-making the information confluence: The whys and hows of college and university user satisficing of information needs (IMLS/Ohio State University/OCLC, July 2006),
http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/imls/default.htm

Researchers and discovery services: Behaviour, perceptions and needs (RIN, November 2006),
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/researchers-and-discoveryservices-behaviour-perc

Researchers’ use of academic libraries and their services (RIN/CURL, April 2007),
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/researchers-use-academiclibraries-and-their-serv

Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (CIBER/UCL, commissioned by BL and JISC, January 2008),
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmemes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf

Seeking synchronicity: Evaluating virtual reference services from user, non-user and librarian perspectives (OCLC/ IMLS/ Rutgers, June 2008),
http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/synchronicity/default.htm

Online catalogs: What users and librarians want (OCLC. March 2009),
http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/onlinecatalogs/default.htm

E-journals: Their use, value and impact (RIN, April 2009),
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicatingand-disseminating-research/e-journals-their-use-value-and-impact

JISC national e-books observatory project: Key findings and recommendations (JISC/UCL, November 2009),
http://www.jiscebooksproject.org/

Students’ use of research content in teaching and learning (JISC, November 2009),
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/aboutus/workinggroups/studentsuseresearchcontent.pdf

User behaviour in resource discovery (JISC, November 2009),
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/userbehaviourbusandecon.aspx

Implications for libraries:

• Each library serves many constituencies with different needs and behaviors.
• Each library must do better at providing seamless access to resources.
• Each library must recognize that more digital resources of all kinds are better for users.
• Each library must prepare for changing user behaviors.
• Each library's access tools need to look and function more like search engines and Web services since these are familiar to users and they are comfortable and confident in using them.
• Each library must value high-quality metadata for its resources since metadata is vital for discovery.
• Each library must better promote its brand, its value, and its resources within its community.

Research Libraries, Risk and Systemic Change from OCLC Reseach

2010-03-26T16:17:00.004-04:00

Research Libraries, Risk and Systemic Change: a report from OCLC Reseach is available as an online pdf at http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-03.pdf

This report is from data gathered in 2008 and used at OCLC internally since then, but it is just now being published externally. It makes a clear, concise, and compelling case for change in libraries. The identification of risks and the strategies for mitigation are sensible and prudent. One wonders how the research library community could act collectively to implement these strategies. The Association of Research Libraries seems to be one useful organization to shape collective action. Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is another.

How might this analysis be used by individual libraries or ad hoc groups (such as the Ivy plus libraries or the borrow direct libraries) to mitigate the risks and seize the opportunities for which these risks are but shadows?

OCLC report: Implications of MARC tag usage on library metadata practices

2010-03-19T15:49:00.003-04:00

OCLC has published a report called, Implications of MARC Tag Usage on Library Metadata Practices[pdf]

I've only begun to read it.

The "implications" section of the Exec. Summ. are interesting.

1. Be consistent. Splitting content across multiple fields will negatively affect indexing, retrieval, and mapping to other encoding schema.
2. Respond to local user needs whether that is counting plates in a book or adding contents notes.
3. Focus on authorized names, classifications, and controlled vocabularies that key word searching of full-text will not provide (as full text online negates some value of descriptive surrogates).
4. Use specific MARC fields for particular types of note if they are available rather than the general 500 note.
5. Map the 200 or so MARC 21 fields in use to simpler schema. (MARC data cannot continue to exist in its own discrete environment, separate from the rest of the information universe. Leverage it and use it in other domains to reach users in heir own networked environments.)
6. Accuracy of fields that are used in machine matching becomes more important in environments using linked data to leverage fuller descriptions and other related information generated from other sources.

And MARC's future:

1. MARC is a niche data communication format approaching the end of its life cycle.
2. Encoding schema will need to robust MARC crosswalks to ingest millions of legacy records.
3. How would we create, capture, structure, store, search, retrieve, and display objects and metadata if we didn’t have to use MARC and if we weren’t limited by current library systems?
4. How do we best take advantage of linked data and avoid creating the same redundant metadata in individual records?
5. How do we integrate library metadata with sources outside the traditional library environment?
6. To meet the demands of the rest of the information universe, give priority to interoperability with other encoding schema and systems.

Toward a New Alexandria, or, Lisbet Rausing on the future of libraries

2010-03-15T10:57:00.006-04:00

Read this article: Toward a New Alexandria: Imagining the future of libraries by Lisbet Rausing in March 12 New Republic.

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/toward-new-alexandria?

I hate to be something is a "must read," but I think this is one for all.

First, Lisbet Rausing, the author, is known to us at Yale as the woman behind the grant to support various staff positions via grants including the Arcadia Grant that is supporting our work with non-Latin scripts, our OCLC reclamation project, etc.

Second, she is calling for a broad re-definition of libraries, universities, and governments in their efforts to support access to scholarly research.

Here is her definition of the problem.

"What is the library, when the totality of experience approaches that which can be remembered? What is it when we no longer preserve only those fragments that time, fire, and barbarians have left us? When we are no longer are able to safeguard only remnants of our discourses on thought, memory, and images, but the thoughts, memories, and images themselves—complete? What do we do when we have not only the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, but also Vasari’s blog, wiki, twitter, texts, emails, chatroom, Facebook, radio interviews, TV appearances, and electronic notebooks?"

A secondary problem is the wrong she sees in the narrow scope of what we call access to the scholarly record. It is a "pay to play" world.

"But by and large, the scholarly community has not made available to the public its “core” research material, such as, to choose a few examples, the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Historical Statistics of the United States Online, BMJ Clinical Evidence, Early English Literature Online, ehRAF Collection of Ethnography, Index of Christian Art, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, Index Islamicus, Frantext, Oxford Music Online, ARTstor, and Aluka. Try accessing these databases via Google instead of through your university account. It is a thought-provoking experience. Many make very clear indeed that they are commercially owned and thus debarred to all, except for those able to pay eye-watering fees."

Those problems also present opportunities for libraries and the institutions and societies that support them. Those opportunities can be seized and the potential gains realized. As Rausing puts it,

"In other words, the question for scholars and gatekeepers is not whether change is coming. It is whether they will be among the change-makers. And if not them, then who? Who else will ensure long-term conservation and search abilities that are compatible across the bibliome and over time? Who else will ensure equality of access? Ultimately, this is not a challenge of technology, finances, or ultimately even laws, difficult though they are. It is a challenge of will and imagination."

While we are sensibly quite focused on the immediate budgetary crisis, we can't meet that crisis well unless we keep in mind these are the new challenges we must face, the new opportunities we must take.

Third, she writes well and is a pleasure to read.

My favorite sentence in the article:

"And at least the academic databases have entered the digital realm. Academic monographs, although produced by digitized means, are then, in what is arguably an act of collective academic madness, turned into non-searchable paper products."

Brilliant.

Sustainable economics for a digital planet: ensuring long term access to digital information

2010-03-09T09:38:00.004-05:00

The final report of Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access was released recently. http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf (PDF; 120 p.)

From the preface, p. 7:

"If there is one finding that perhaps merits special attention, it is that sustainable economics for digital preservation is not just about finding more funds. It is about building an economic activity firmly rooted in a compelling value proposition, clear incentives to act, and well-defined preservation roles and responsibilities. Lacking these ingredients, digital preservation efforts—and the materials in their care—have little prospect of persisting over time; with them, our digital heritage will have a sound economic foundation for the future."

Some key points.

1. the scale of digital creation is far outpacing the capacity to store the data (by 2012 there will be 2.5 million petrabytes of data and just over 1 million petrabytes of storage.

2. 3 critical questions:

What digital information should we preserve?
Who will preserve it?
Who will pay for it?

3. 4 information types considered

scholarly discourse
research data
commercially owned cultural content
collectively created Web content

4. difference between traditional preservation and digital preservation

In contrast to traditional preservation, digital preservation is a dynamic process with multiple actions taken over the course of the digital lifecycle.

code4lib 2010

2010-02-26T09:02:00.009-05:00

Just back from code4lib 2010 in Asheville, North Carolina. A few quick comments today--mostly about the 2 keynote talks. Cathy Marshall, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, and Paul Jones, ibiblio, etc., each gave an excellent talk. Marshall's ethnographic investigation into people's behaviors over time with their digital stuff (especially with respect to keeping or not keeping it) was a fun and thought-provoking start to the conference. Her work points to complexities with the intersection of keeping and losing, discovering and remembering, neglect and curation.

Jones' talk built in part on Robin Dunbar's anthropological studies of primates' behavior in building and maintaining social relationships. His work shows how human urge to relate to one another drives what we know and act on. He noted the shift in the past year from Web use driven by search engine results to Web use driven by recommendations via social networks. It's all about how the power of small talk--gossip--to build trusted relationships among people drives how we think and act.

Marshall's talk keeps recurring to me as I think about preservation, discovery, and use of our shared digital stuff. How do Marshall's insights into how we actually behave with our own digital stuff affect our thinking and actions as institutions preserving digital stuff for later reuse?

Jones' talk keeps recurring to me as I think about how libraries might facilitate discovery and use of information by focusing on social networks rather than search tools. What would happen if we thought of a catalog as part of a social networking environment and not as an isolated search engine?

The many talks varied a lot in character, topic, approach, and quality. As a whole, they were good to excellent presentations, and aggregated like this they presented a snapshot of where the coder and librarian intersect is now. The lightning talks work well to diminish the distinction between active presenters and passive audiences. Dan Chudnov's ask anything hour worked well, too. The key to code4lib is "only connect." The conference became a kind of exemplar of Jones' point about how we create trusted relationships and thus think and act individually as members of small groups.

Overall, my first time at code4lib was great. Gathering this community together is a powerful catalyst for development within the library domain.

Karen Coyle on libraries, metadata, and the Semantic Web

2010-02-18T12:08:00.003-05:00

Karen Coyle's article "Understanding the Semantic Web: bibliographic data and metadata" may be of wide interest in libraries. It is about 30 p. and is the full content of _Library Technology Reports_ v. 46, issue 1, Jan. 2010. (This is available online at Yale via Gale Cengage Academic One File.) The first chapter (of two) is available online at http://alatechsource.metapress.com/content/p3022442071g7655/fulltext.pdf

Coyle briefly places traditional (i.e. Panizzi and since) library bibliographic data in its contemporary context (Internet, etc.) and calls for changing our traditions to fit the new context. She then discusses several steps necessary to make the change from what is more or less textual descriptions (e.g. catalog cards, MARC records) to sets of data elements that can be processed by computers (e.g. linked data in the semantic web.)

Overall, this is a nice brief on library metadata and its relation with the semantic web, RDF (Resource Description Framework), identifiers, and linked data. If you already know this, Coyle's article is worth the review. If you don't already know this, Coyle's article is a good place to begin.

Portico certified as trustworthy by CLR using TRAC checklist

2010-01-27T09:34:00.003-05:00

Portico certified as trustworthy by Center for Research Libraries (CLR)using Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) checklist.

See the brief (8p.)CLR report at
http://www.crl.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/CRL%20Report%20on%20Portico%20Audit%202010.pdf

Portico http://www.portico.org is a not-for-profit digital preservation service. Portico is a dark archive (and that presents some issues of concern for the audit process.) Portico, like JSTOR, is part of ITHAKA, http://www.thaka.org a not-for-profit organization

CRL http://www.crl.org is an international consortium or university, college and independent research libraries.

Portico is looking like a good choice for a domain-wide digital preservation repository that should save libraries and their host institutions from the burdens of doing digital preservation locally.

When is an Antelope a Document?

2010-01-25T15:33:00.003-05:00

When is an Antelope a Document?
A blog post by: Ijonas Kisselbach
in Enterprise Content Governance

http://blog.vamosa.com/blog/?p=507

Nice post on documentation. Brief. Well said.Follow the link in the piece to the fluidinfo piece.

ODAI report to CNI on digital content & strategy at Yale

2010-01-13T12:00:00.002-05:00

http://odai.research.yale.edu/sites/default/files/file/CNI2009-Final.pdf

The above link to ODAI's presentation to CNI in Dec. 2009 is a nice summary of what ODAI is doing and how the digital strategy it has for Yale is working out.

Reading is good

2010-01-05T09:50:00.003-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/books/05paterson.html

Katherine Paterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia, is reported in the NYTimes to be the newest national ambassador for young people’s literature. The article quotes her saying, "I think of all the joy reading has given me,” she said. “It is not just because it is good for you, but because it is good."

Printed books, e-books, libraries, clouds, whatever--what remains is the solid basis for it all that reading is good.

New Year

2010-01-04T10:09:00.000-05:00

Just to note the New Year 2010. What will it bring? What will we do with it?

Christmas Break

2009-12-21T09:34:00.001-05:00

I'm home on a long break for Christmas and the New Year. Not back to work until Jan. 4, 2010. Wow. 2010. I'm living in the future.

Think Global, Act Local - Library, Archive and Museum Collaboration

2009-12-10T15:07:00.004-05:00

Waibel, Günter and Ricky Erway. 2009. “Think Global, Act Local – Library, Archive and Museum Collaboration.” Museum Management and Curatorship, 24,4. Pre-print available online at: http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2009/waibel-erway-mmc.pdf.

"This article introduces the library, archive and museum workshops held by RLG Programs at the University of Edinburgh, Princeton University, the Smithsonian Institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Yale University, and presents the lessons abstracted from these day-long events."

Waibel and Erway argue for creating deep collaboration among LAMs at the network level to reach users. They report on "five LAM workshops, conducted in late 2007 and early 2008 by RLG Programs staff Günter Waibel, Ricky Erway and consulting facilitator Diane Zorich, [that] aimed to surface information about existing collaborative activities and be a catalyst for deeper collaborations. ... The University of Edinburgh, Princeton University, the Smithsonian Institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Yale University participated in the workshops."

Brief and nicely done, this gives a good overview of goals, challenges and strategies for LAM collaborations.

Smithsonian Institution Collections Search Center

2009-12-07T14:13:00.003-05:00

Last month, the Smithsonian Institution launched a Collections Search Center at

http://collections.si.edu/search/

This search tool brings together over 2 million searchable records with 265,900 images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other resources from the Smithsonian's museums, archives & libraries.

The work was done by Quotient. Quotient is a systems integrator and IT services solution company for commercial, government organizations and federal agencies.

Quotient redesigned the existing Collections Search Center with a focus on improving the visual aesthetic, usability, and appeal for students, teachers, scholars, researchers, and the general public. Quotient's design and development team worked out several design directions and partnered with the Smithsonian to increase accessibility and compliance as well as to enhance the site with an interactive slideshow framework.

It is nicely done. In some respects Yale University is like SI--a broad-based research institution with fast-growing research collections and a mission to advance knowledge and educate.

two studies on scholarly communication

2009-11-30T11:33:00.007-05:00

I saw these in a post on hangingtogether, the OCLC RLG Programs blog. Both are worth a look.

1. A comparison of repository types and the affect on scholarly communication

Comparing Repository Types: Challenges and Barriers for Subject-Based Repositories, Research Repositories, National Repository Systems and Institutional Repositories in Serving Scholarly Communication by Chris Armbruster Research Network 1989 Laurent Romary INRIA November 23, 2009
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1506905

Four kinds of publication repository are described: subject-based, research, national system and institutional. Two shifts in the role of repositories may be noted. For content, a well-defined and high quality corpus is essential. For service, high value to specific scholarly communities is essential.

Challenges and barriers to repository development are laid out in three dimensions:
a) identification and deposit of content
b) access and use of services
c) preservation of content and sustainability of service

2. A case-study-based look at how researchers work and how they relate to policies and services from information service providers and employers.

Patterns of information use and exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences: A report of research patterns in life sciences revealing that researcher practices diverge from policies promoted by funders and information service providers by the RIN and the British Library.
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/disciplinary-case-studies-life-sciences

The report concludes that ‘one-size-ﬁts-all’ information and data sharing policies do not achieve scientiﬁcally productive and cost-efﬁcient information use in life sciences.

Conferencething: Library Thing's anti-conference @ ALA MW

2009-11-24T15:42:00.004-05:00

Library Thing is hosting an anti-conference (unconference) the Friday of ALA's MW meeting in Boston, Jan. 15. 2009. This is a great idea and could be a really rich opportunity for librarians, Library Thing users, publishers, etc. to meet and talk and think about the future of books, readers, libraries, authors and publishers.

http://www.librarything.com/groups/conferencething#forums

The Harvard Report

2009-11-17T12:00:00.007-05:00

Harvard's Report of the Task Force on University Libaries is now available. http://www.provost.harvard.edu/reports/Library_Task_Force_Report.pdf

Very thoughtful and appropriate to Yale University Library, too. The library there and here needs to align its resources to support access to scholarly resources rather than to amass and store collections.

New funding and operating models are needed to focus the library on services in an age of digital tools.

Its 5 recommendations (for "Harvard" read "Yale"):

1. Establish and implement a shared administrative infrastructure

The fragmented organization of the Harvard libraries represents the fossilization of contingent historical decisions, based on past circumstances and actors. This structure now impedes nimble, effective, and fiscally responsible responses to twenty-first century challenges. We recommend reforms focused on administrative services that, when unified, will provide better and more cost-effective service to faculty and students.

2. Rationalize and enhance information and technology systems

This focus on systems improvement will not succeed, however, unless paired with changes in the model for decision making and funding. A widely distributed “veto” and excesses of local customization have impeded the effective development of technology infrastructure both within and outside Harvard’s libraries. The Task Force believes that Harvard must develop a robust, shared information architecture to guide future development and to orient investments in innovative projects. Core systems must be standardized across Harvard libraries to enable the University to collaborate internally and externally more effectively than we do today.

3. Revamp the financial model for the Harvard libraries

The current system of financing library materials and services impedes efforts to collaborate across the different parts of Harvard University, and often establishes incentives for actions that aid one part of the library at the expense of the whole. This phenomenon is most clearly reflected when content costs are shifted from one unit to another.

4. Rationalize the system for acquiring, accessing and developing a “single university” collection.

The Harvard University Library system needs to rationalize the manner in which all parts of the University collect and provide access to materials, and orient its focus more clearly toward ensuring access, as opposed to the current default model of building collections by acquisition. This shift is already in prominent view in many disciplines of the natural and social sciences, where ownership of materials has given way to providing access to materials that may be housed on a publisher’s server, at other institutions, or in other countries. Many fields, including the humanities, will continue to depend on physical materials, but the emphasis on ensuring access in perpetuity to materials should nonetheless increasingly supplant acquisition in the case of widely available resources. The University’s efforts to build a single, shared collection must also be coordinated more effectively. A centralized purchasing and licensing office that negotiates with vendors should be empowered to speak to vendors with a single voice whenever possible. Longer-term efforts to reform the scholarly communications and publishing system, such as the University’s leadership in the open access movement, should continue to be emphasized and supported from within the library system.

5. Collaborate more ambitiously with peer institutions

Harvard should enhance its efforts to work with other libraries and cultural institutions to build a sustainable information ecosystem for the 21st century. In some cases, this collaboration will mean building upon existing efforts to work directly with partner institutions.

As described above, Harvard’s information technology systems must be improved to become more interoperable, internally and externally, in order to facilitate external collaborations with the goal of maximizing access to scholarly materials for our faculty and students. Throughout the library system, Harvard must be more ambitious in its efforts to work with external partners to share costs and resources to improve library collections and services to current and future users.

David Hockney, iPhone, and the idea of "original" in a digital world

2009-11-04T09:34:00.012-05:00

I've been reading Lawrence Weschler's recent article in the NY Review of Books on David Hockney and his use of the iPhone to make digital paintings.

David Hockney's iPhone PassionBy Lawrence Weschler. New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 16.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23176

And listening and viewing the associated podcast and slideshow of Hockney's digital paintings.
http://www.nybooks.com/features/slideshows/hockney/

These are born digital works of art. Hockney makes the pictures on his iPhone and sends them to several friends; they send them on to their friends. Weschler notes that none of these images are "copies." Each is the "original." There is no difference between one or another of these images. Hockney has not made a series (an unlimited series?) No one has applied a process to make copies that introduces any difference between the "original" and the "copy." Although Hockney only made one "copy" of any of his digital paintings, there are simply multiple originals. One and many at once. Original and copy at once. The cognitive dissoance is stimulating and revealing.

I find this interesting in how thoroughly this shows the concepts of "original" and "copy" that we use all the time with art objects and books and such are overthrown by digital production and distribution tools and processes. What new ideas and new words will come to replace "original" and "copy"? What new mental models and thus operational models will we construct to live with multiple originals? What new social arrangements will we make to accomodate ourselves to this radical abundance of information, of art, and of originals?

The 21st Century Academic Library

2009-11-03T15:29:00.006-05:00

The Yale Archival Reading Group (YARG) has selected as its next text

Lewis, David W. "A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century," College & Research Libraries 68 (5): 418 434.

http://ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crljournal/2007/sep/Lewis07.pdf

This is a must read for academic librarians.

Lewis develops a strategy for the next 20 years (more or less) of academic libraries.

Good assumptions and reasonable strategies. However, Lewis doesn't see consolidation of academic libraries as a primary factor in the next couple of decades and continues to think of libraries primarily as physical locations or spaces. Thus he misses the importance of consolidation to libraries as providers of networked information services for teaching, learning & research (and I'd add publication, too.)

As providers of networked information services, there is little reason to be tied to or sub-ordinate to a particular college or university. Individual researchers, students, teachers and writers could draw upon a global information service for their specific needs as a researcher, student, teacher or writer. Of course, campus learning environments would have to be open to such networked information services--but they will have to be to take advantage of the Internet or cloud or world wide computer.

In general, the consequence of consolidation for libraries as providers of networked information services is one big library (probably a for profit advertising supported operation with some non-profit players on the edges) for the Internet. Locally, the academic library would become a museum of the book (and the serial, the map, the manuscript, the archive, the sound recording, the film, etc.); in short, a special collections library with collections that are tied to the library's parent institution.

As I see it, libraries will split into highly consolidated providers of networked information services and local, institution-specific special collections libraries/archives/museums/.

MARC marketplace: a report

2009-10-30T16:12:00.003-04:00

A study of the North American marketplace for MARC records done for LC by R2 consulting.

http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/MARC_Record_Marketplace_2009-10.pdf

Library as app

2009-10-29T09:48:00.003-04:00

Saw today in the NY Times that Google now has a free GPS service for smart phones. That made me wonder about other services becoming free apps on smart phones. Why not libraries?

The app is just the service delivery point, the organization behind that service point can be (and in the case of Google's GPS service) is a huge complex enterprise.

One consequence of library as app, though, would be that we don't need tens of thousands of local (town, company, college, etc.) library apps. We just need a handful for the world and one of those may dominate the whole field the way Google dominates searching now.

Interesting consequences to such a move from many libraries each tied to a parent organization toward a few libraries providing individualized services. All those services needn't be online, but the contact would be. Delivery of tangible materials to home or office could be part of the app service, for example.

The whole library sector of the economy would be transformed.

Lorcan on library systems environment

2009-10-26T11:31:00.004-04:00

Lorcan Dempsey has commented before on library systems environment. Here he updates his earlier comments, links to the recent NISO presentations, and provides incomplete but insightful notes on the presentations.
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002015.html#

Recently at Yale, we interviewed three candidates for an E-Collections job. Each of the three gave a talk with the title (more or less) trends in e-collections. Not one of them cited Dempsey. Is that the fault of each speaker or a sign of a larger disconnect within the library profession? The E-Coll. candidates were all thinking (sensibly so) only about licensed (purchased or rented, but licensed just the same) e-resources. Perhaps Lorcan is seen as a cataloging guy or an OCLC guy or a systems guy and not paid attention to by those in related but distinct activities like using an ERM to manage a collection of licensed resources.

Oh, here is the link to the NISO Forum: Library Resource Management Systems
http://www.niso.org/news/events/2009/lrms09/agenda

Library as metaphor

2009-10-26T09:22:00.003-04:00

I've been noticing that many discussions of ebooks, cloud computing, omnipresent cell phones, etc. speak of totality of information available online as "a library" or, frequently, "the library." The idea seems to be that by calling whatever font of online information one is promoting a "library" makes it sound good. All apple pie and motherhood. Apparently, people think well of libraries, and this use of "the library" as a metaphor for accessibility and trustworthiness for online information is mostly a good thing for libraries and librarians.

But sometimes, and often, librarians and those working closing with librarians on digital information projects, berate libraries for not keeping up on the latest online technologies or not adapting to the online environment fast enough or thoroughly enough to satisfy these commentators. When I see this happening, it is never or amost never one particular library that gets the drubbing, but a sort of generalized, universal library as if all libraries were part of the same organization or worked in concert like a corporation. The formula sometimes goes something like this: "Google is digitizing books on a massive scale and creating a universal library, but libraries are still stuck circulating books and doing serials check in." Or, "Libraries need to compete with Google and Apple and Amazon for people's attention."

The problem that jumps out at me is the equivalence between Google, et al. and libraries. Libraries are about as like Google as the world's population of independent booksellers are. Even less so. The booksellers are independent. Almost every library is a dependent, sub-unit of another organization. Each is defined less by being a peer of any other library than it is by being the child of its parent organization--a city, state or national government, a for profit company, a non-profit organization, a school, a research university. Google, et al. are rich, single, independent organizations with global mission and reach. No library is like this, and libraries taken together are nothing like this either.

As a metaphor, libraries are one. In real life, there is no such thing as "the library." Analyses that confuse "the library" with real libraries miss the mark in their criticisms, their expectations, and their solutions. Bringing libraries actively and successfully into the networked information environment--the linked up, social cloud of all knowledge--will require commenters and doers to close their eyes to the illusion of "the library" and see the reality of many small libraries that serve specific, particular and local masters.

David Weinberger on Abundance at LITA (audio)

2009-10-23T10:27:00.003-04:00

http://litablog.org/2009/10/forum-2009-keynote-audio-david-weinberger/

An audio file from David Weinberger's 2009 LITA forum talk on Abundance. I've blogged about Abundance before. I'd rather have a transcript. It's nice to listen, but slow.

Web of Books

2009-10-20T15:34:00.003-04:00

Peter Brantley at Internet Archive has a slide show about BookServer.
http://www.slideshare.net/naypinya/web-of-books

About the dream of open discovery (and use) of ebooks through tools (catalogs) based on OPDS (tech. spec.) and Atom (the XML scheme). Like Stanza, only generalized for any tool.

This would be good . . .

Social Media Strategy Framework

2009-10-20T12:45:00.004-04:00

Ron Dawson's social media strategy framewok looks interesting.
http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2009/07/launch_of_socia.html

"The Framework begins with LEARN, follows two streams of ENGAGEMENT and STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT, and comes together in the ongoing imperative to DEVELOP CAPABILITIES.

The five key points for each element are also written below.
LEARN
Use social media yourself
Study relevant case studies
Educate senior executives
Hear from practitioners
Explore the latest trends"

It's not the 10 Commandments, but not a bad set of guidelines.

Helene Blowers on libraries

2009-10-19T14:13:00.002-04:00

OCLC distinguished seminar series Oct. 9, 2009: Finding the Phoenix ... with Helene Blowers.
http://vidego.multicastmedia.com/player.php?p=v1g45788

Very interesing presentation.

She blogs at http://librarybytes.com/

Yale ODAI has web page now

2009-10-19T09:42:00.002-04:00

Yale's Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure now has a web page.

http://odai.research.yale.edu/

The page was announced on Friday. ODAI was established in the fall of 2008 to "develop a university-wide digital content strategy."

Carr's Big Switch redux

2009-10-14T14:48:00.003-04:00

I'm about 1/2 done with Big Switch, and its good.

Carr's thesis is that information services (hardware and software) are now and increasingly operating on the scale of the electrical power utilities. Just as companies don't generally create their own power, they now no longer need their own IT depts. As network access speeds and reliability approach that available on one's own computer, the network itself becomes one big machine. He's look at and past things like Amazon's EC2 "elastic computing cloud" that allows companies to use Amazon's computers (H&S) as if they were their own. Another example is 3Tera's AppLogic, a cloud computing platform.The customer pays for the computing power consumed when they consume it--just like we pay for electricity. Wow!

Carr briefly highlight large-scale consequences of the electrical gridon society and suggests that similarly large-scale effects will follow from the utilitization of computing. I think he's right. Consider the consequences of large-scale, utility-style cloud computing on digital preservation. If say higher education institutions outsource their computing utility-style to global third-party providers, then preservation of the digital content (an oxymoron; what we mean is curation of digital content over time via migrations) also moves to the third party. There the scale is much larger, part of the ongoing access to content, and costs to individual institutions is amortized across the aggregate of all the institutions using the third party computing utility. In short, indiviual institutions (here colleges and universities) need not themselves directly work to preserve their digital content. They have out-sourced it to their computing utility. It (digital curation--my prefered phrase for digital preservation) still has to be done but not repeatedly at a local (say we call it--retail) level. There are many trust issues here, but then most of us trust our utilities now for water and power.

Things RDA

2009-10-14T09:13:00.003-04:00

http://ac.bslw.com/community/blog/category/rda/

a blog on RDA from backstage folks; a good list of links to RDA materials.

Among the best:

1. http://www.rda-jsc.org/rda.html – The RDA page on the Joint Steering Committee website.

2. http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm – The registered RDA elements and vocabularies.

3. http://tsig.wikispaces.com/Pre-conference+2009+presentation+materials – CLA power points and other materials from Montreal Pre-conference.

The Law of Linked Data

2009-10-13T15:40:00.002-04:00

http://www.mkbergman.com/837/the-law-of-linked-data/

Mike Bergman at AI3 blogs about the Law of Linked Data. "The Linked Data Law: the value of a linked data network is proportional to the square of the number of links between data objects."

He argues that linking (meaningfully) the existing nodes on the 'net produces network effects for the semantic web. He makes a nice analogy with Metcalfe’s law, which "states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system.

Bergman thinks a good marshal would deliver law and order to linked data and the semantic enterprise. What would the good marshal do? Well, he doesn't say beyond "deliver law and order." What the hell does that mean? OK, aside from that the piece is worth reading and it links to more good reading, too. Are footnotes the original linked data?

Report on Large-Scale Digitization of Manuscript Collections

2009-10-12T14:52:00.002-04:00

Extending the Reach of Southern Sources Proceeding to Large-Scale Digitization of Manuscript Collections: Final Grant Report / Prepared by the Southern Historical Collection University Library The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

I like the questionnaire/decision matrix and though it here applies to questions of what should be prioritized for digitization, it could be modified to capture metadata relevant to what should be prioritized for digital preservation. See Appendix G, page 57 for the questionnaire.

http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/archivalmassdigitization/Extending_the_Reach.pdf

Google books editorial in NYTimes

2009-10-09T09:10:00.006-04:00

Sergey Brin wrote in the NYTimes today about the Google book deal in an op-ed piece called "A Library to Last Forever. " He makes a good case for a deal of some sort and gently addresses a few of the concerns that have been raised. His argument for the deal has two aspects: one, implied by the title, that the deal will protect books forever in a new kind of library that is disaster proof and, apparently, Google has solved the digital preservation problems (forever is a long time.) The other aspect is access. The book deal will make a century's printed output easily avaiable to all. Sounds good, but I don't know much about most of what he was talking about. The one thing I know something about--access to library collections--was mentioned in one sentence that is just completely wrong.

"Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks."

What the hell is he talking about? There is no need to fly and hope. He must know that you have at least one other choice: use your computer to 1. look up the book in WorldCat to see what libraries have copies 2. email your local library to use its inter-library loan service to get the book for you. He can't be ignorant of this--Google has a deal with OCLC that joins Google Book Search and WorldCat--so why did he say "fly" and "hope"? One effect of this: it makes me wonder if the other things he says are just as fishy as this. I don't know anything about those other things, but seeing what he said about the one piece I do know about makes me doubt everything else he says.

Knowledge in an age of abundance

2009-10-08T10:11:00.004-04:00

A talk at LITA Forum by David Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous.

http://www.al.ala.org/insidescoop/2009/10/05/lita-forum-saturday-keynote-knowledge-in-the-age-of-abundance/

"Citing the Scottish philosopher Andy Clark, Weinberger explained that the internet becomes almost a sort of extension of our mind (scaffolding, he called it) so that we think with our brains and store information elsewhere."

My reaction:

Information abundance (for the affluent or for affluent societies, anyway) does seem to be a primary characteristic of our information economy. Our institutions though are shaped by the past environment that was characterized by information scarcity. Libraries seem a prime example. When information is scarce, then collecting it creates pockets of abundance for specific sets of users in particular places--a city, a university, etc. But when information is abundant, then creating local collections of information (to overcome information's "natural" scarcity) is a waste of time. The environment libraries (and the host institutions of libraries: cities, nations, universities, etc.) thrived within is gone. Libraries and other institutions built for an information economy characterized by scarcity must re-make themselves so they fit an information abundance economy. Libraries--as we have known them--are moot.

One model for libraries that seems to be working in the abundant information economy is the library as museum. The library becomes less information-centric and more artifact-centric. Artifacts may remain scarce, so the scarcity-based model of a library as museum could work for collections of rare, unique or otherwise special materials. But libraries as information-centric institutions are ill-suited for an abundant information economy. Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of this ill-fit is that libraries are primarily _local_ institutions that serve a host organization (city, state, university, etc.) The new organizations that have grown up in the abundant information economy are global: Amazon, Google, etc., and one can see a similar pattern of movement from many small local entities to a few large global entities in other information-centric activities like banking and stock brokerage.

In an age of abundant information, the information-centric organizations we need help us find what we are looking for (search tools like Google,) share what we have found (like blogs and social tools), and use or re-use what we have found (productivity tools designed with the "cloud" in mind.) The traditional infrastructure libraries and similar collection-oriented institutions provide doesn't address the needs of users in an economy of information abundance. It seems likely that the information-centric organizations that emerge to help users navigate and manage and use abundant information will be global organizations that are not subordinate to local host institutions like Sioux City, Iowa, the US Dept. of Labor, Yale University, etc. Its a big change.

Five trends in discoverability

2009-10-08T09:24:00.002-04:00

Lorcan Dempsey posted on his blog about a U. MN study on discoverability.

The 5 trends are

1. Users are discovering relevant resources outside of traditional library systems.

2. Users expect discovery and delivery to coincide.

3. Expanding use of portable Intenet devices.

4. Recommendation increasingly push discovery.

5. Users rely increasingly on non-traditional information objects.

This is worth reading.

Thingology post on Ebook economics: Are libraries screwed?

2009-10-07T09:16:00.002-04:00

http://www.librarything.com/thingology/index.php

Tim Spaulding has a nice piece on ebook pricing for libraries. A lot of doom and gloom, but the gist is on target publishers/bundlers will rent ebooks to libraries as e-journals are now and thus price increases for ebooks on the scale and model of e-journals is likely.

The whole concept of collection development is altered when the library is a renter and not an owner of books and journals. If a library is rooted in its possession of a collection, then a library that rents is not a library.

iPRES '09 today and yesterday

2009-10-06T09:21:00.002-04:00

International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2009) at Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, October 5th and 6th, 2009, explores the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our scientific and cultural digital heritage.
http://www.cdlib.org/iPres/

blog postings on iPRES 09 from Digital Curation blog at http://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/search/label/iPres09

LC's effort to define an extended date/time format

2009-10-05T09:36:00.004-04:00

Library of Congress has proposed an extended date/time definition for use with ISO 8601 and possibly with W3C as an XML schema type.

http://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/index.html

The problem: No standard date/time format meets the needs of XML metadata schemas. W3C XML Schema built-in types xs:date, xs:time, and xs:dateTime are inadequate, as is W3CDTF, and TEMPER. ISO 8601 and the W3C schema are incompatible. The LC proposal addresses that and adds BCE dates, open date ranges, and useful/necessary concepts like "uncertain" and "approximate" to the definition and the format.

The proposal could be incorporated into schemas such as MODS and METS. (Note: it is already in use within the PREMIS schema.) It may be proposed for standardization in ISO 8601 or it might be proposed to W3C for adoption as an XML schema type – the benefits of this are clear, among them: strict validation would be supported.

Google Book deal explained

2009-09-30T09:36:00.002-04:00

The folks at JISC and eFoundations have been commenting on the Google book deal. This link goes to a brief with some links. http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2009/09/the-google-book-settlement.html

VIAF now available as linked data.

2009-09-25T14:37:00.002-04:00

Thom Hickey of OCLC posted on the VIAF as linked data on his blog.

Search the VIAF beta at http://viaf.org/

Thom says,

There are some 9.5 million personae described in VIAF and have established more than 4 million links between the files. To us linked data means:
URIs for everything
HTTP 303 redirects for URIs representing the personae our metadata is about
HTTP content negotiation for different data formats
An RDF view of the data
A rich a set of internal and external links in our data

ONIX for ISTC Metadata

2009-09-24T09:47:00.003-04:00

EDItEUR and the International ISTC Agency(IIA) have developed an ONIX format to be used by ISTC registrants and Registration Agencies for two-way communication related to the processes of registering a new ISTC work or amending the metadata associated with an existing ISTC work record. A draft version of the format (the IIA recently approved the publication of Version 1.0) can now be found on the EDItEUR website as ONIX ISTC Registration Format <http://www.editeur.org/106/ONIX-ISTC-Registration-Format/>

This is an important milestone for practical work identifiers.

I have two questions.

1. I have not been following ISTC closely for some time, and as I look at its web pages I wonder What relation the ISTC concept of work has to FRBR?

I recall there was considerable difference from FRBR in how the ISTC effort conceptualized a work. Is that still true. The ISTC about web page says the ISTC reference works not manifestations, but I didn’t find any definition of work nor any reference to a concept like expression.

2. How might ISTCs be used in WorldCat to collocate records for the same works?

Physical Therapy for carpal tunnel

2009-09-23T10:41:00.002-04:00

Today I had my first physical therapy session for the carpal tunnel symptoms I have in my hands and arms. It went well. The therapist, Nancy, is nice and effective. I'll see her again next week and until then I'm to work on my posture at my workstation and do some stretches for my neck and shoulders.

Autumnal Equinox

2009-09-22T11:46:00.001-04:00

Today is the autumnal equinox. The sun crosses the celestial equator heading south for winter. Day and night are balanced. I've got nothing to say about work, but I just wanted to note this reminder of earth's tilted tie to the sun and the seasons that result.

Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch.

2009-09-21T13:01:00.001-04:00

I've just started reading Nicholas Carr's new book, The Big Switch. He claims information is the new electricity--a utility-based commodity that powers the economy. The sub-title, Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google gives one a sense of its scope.

Why I call this local weather

2009-09-21T12:51:00.001-04:00

In trying to find a way to think about my work--my job and my profession, I look for metaphors that might explain or frame the experience. My latest thought on this--following last year's crash in asset valuations, deep cuts in work budgets, and layoffs, is "work is weather." No one controls the weather, but we all experience it. We adapt to it; we might anticipate it; we talk about it; and we might screw up the whole thing (unwittingly change the climate), but we can't control it. And it struck me that work is like weather. And I thought that I could use this page to talk about the weather that work is as I experence it. Thus it is local. The local may or may not be part of a larger system, a global trend, an overall climate, and I may sometimes connect the local with the larger scales, but my attention is on what affects me directly and what I can or can't do about it. Work is weather. This blog is about my local weather.

my new home page

2009-09-18T16:31:00.001-04:00

I just figured out I could use this blog as my new home page. Doh. So the lists of blogs I like and links to libraries and magazine and such do a lot of what my web page did. And the posting thing gives me a chance to do a work diary. OK. I think that makes sense. Hey, it's Friday afternoon. I'm going to go have a weekend that has nothing to do with work.

First Post

2009-09-18T14:54:00.001-04:00

I'm just testing this out to see if it is at all helpful. I'm not sure what I want to do with this blog. I think that I'll limit it to my professional interests in librarianship.