Understanding linked data and its potential for libraries

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.

two surveys

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.

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

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.

The 21st Century Academic Library

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/.

Library as app

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

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

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.

Helene Blowers on libraries

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/

Google books editorial in NYTimes

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

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

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?

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.

Why I call this local weather

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.

First Post

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.