Restoring the Sterling Memorial Library nave at Yale

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?

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

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)

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

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.

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

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

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.”

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

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

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

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.