It has been another busy week, and unfortunately Thursday has slipped into Friday. There have been a few updates to earlier Thursday Threads items, so I’m turning this into “Friday Followups” instead. We’ll attempt to get back new items next Thursday, but in the meantime take a look at these updates.

“RDA Revolt” Continues

Netflix Battling with Comcast Over Payments to Stream Content

This week I sat in on the first of the three “Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future” webinars being hosted by ALA. This one was hosted by Karen Coyle with the title New Models of Metadata where she talked about library-specific efforts such asRDA and FRBR as well as the linked data effort in the wider world of information. There was a great deal of concern expressed in the chat window by participants about the future of cataloging, of cataloguers, and of MARC. The latter brought up memories of Roy Tennant‘s “MARC Must Die” declaration. My take away, though, isn’t that MARC is dead as much as MARC is a dead end.

Cover art from 'Library of the Dead' audio book

MARC, not dead yet?

What trips up our community even more, I think, is that we have a tendency to equate this communications format with mental model of how we describe things from a bibliographic point of view. We think of discrete records that describe these things rather than a network (or, more accurately, a graph) of interrelated nodes. This forces us to focus on the textual content of fields and not on the relationships between things. And in doing so, we are not making the best use of our limited efforts to describe the things in our curatorial care.

MARC may not be dead, but it is a dead end.

I seem to remember, in the early heady days of the internet, there was a cry from the library profession to “Catalog the Internet” — to create descriptive records and controlled vocabularies for every resource out there deemed useful. The early Yahoo!, with a librarian on the staff, was going to help by putting everything in a neat, orderly classification system. The rest of us were going to catalog sites like mad and put them all into WorldCat (and keep them up-to-date). A nice dream.

Looking back, we can probably guess the reasons why this dream isn’t reality today: ill-suited classification schemes, sites that defy classification, etc. I think the real killer, though, was that we thought we could do it ourselves. But you know what? There is too many of “them” creating content on the internet and not enough of “us” to keep up.

I was reminded of this history as a I read a “HOWTO” called “Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging: How to mark sites so you and others can find them” found via an LISnews posting. Written by non-librarians (presumably) for a non-librarian audience, it describes a “collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links.” Sounds reasonable enough, yes? After all, as a profession we just need to step in and give them LCSH ¹ as a “open-ended labeling system”, right?

Nope, the next sentence of the article reads: “Tagging lets you categorize information online your way.”

What?!? Their way? No way! We’ve got things like MARC, AACR, Dewey, and LCSH that have taken us decades to build. We know how to do this better than anyone else, so y’all just sit back and let us do our jobs. ²

But in the grand tradition of the history of the internet, collectively its users routed around failure. ³ And here it is done in grand fashion with 13 recommendations for user-supplied, globally recognized tagging:

1. Be a lemming.
2. Follow the herd.
3. Avoid camels.
4. Like nature, del.icio.us abhors a vacuum.
5. Punctuate with care.
6. Independence is a virtue.
7. Hang out at crossroads.
8. Co-ordinate your efforts.
9. Tags are written in pencil.
10. Bonus tip for Mac users: the Cocoalicious client.
11. On del.icio.us, everyone knows you’re a dog.
12. Shh! This one’s for:you.
13. Spread the word.

Is it a perfect system? No — and one could pick at the many faults.

Does it work? Arguably, well, yes.

Update (20080404T2147) : Update link to “Thirteen Tips…”

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.loc.gov/cds/lcsh.html to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Subject_Headings on November 17th, 2010.

The text was modified to update a link from http://lisnews.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/05/125239 to http://lisnews.org/node/18783 on January 13th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. I couldn’t help but laugh when I read the big news for the 2006 edition of LCSH: “BONUS! Includes Free-floating Subdivisions as a separate section in Volume I.” Hurray!
2. In the words of Michael Gorman, “I have spent a lot of my long professional life working on aspects of the noble aim of Universal Bibliographic Control—a mechanism by which all the world’s recorded knowledge would be known, and available, to the people of the world.” I offer that this excerpt resonates with many in the library profession today, and that we think we can still build a system of Universal Bibliographic Control that will be so good everyone else will obviously adopt it.
3. One of the strengths of the internet is its capacity to “route around” failure, as explained in this piece from “NCSA’s Looking Back On Three Decades Of Internet History“:
   

   But in the early 1960′s, researchers began to realize that a computer network would be much less vulnerable to failure if it was more widely spread out — less like the air travel system than like the network of back roads weaving together every municipality in the country. Each point is connected to its nearest neighbors by several redundant paths. If a connecting node between A and B fails, it is easy to find an alternative route.

My undergraduate background is in computer science, and from that perspective I have a great deal of admiration for MARC and AACR as well as their creators and proponents: Henriette Avram and Michael Gorman. At their creation, MARC and AACR propelled library services to new heights of efficiency and usefulness. Here’s my problem, though: we no longer live in the 1970s, and the fundamental tools of our trade should not be based in nearly 40-year-old technology.

This post started out as a comment to an LISnews thread by Kathleen de la Peña McCook that pointed back to a posting with the title Michael Gorman, Fischerspooner, Amnesty International and Hamlet. The more I thought about it, though, the more the comment went beyond a criticism of my perception of Michael Gorman’s 1;

try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-16323142-1");
pageTracker._setDomainName(".libraryjournal.com");

pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}

GS_googleAddAdSenseService("ca-pub-1872221973353849");
GS_googleEnableAllServices();

GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-1872221973353849", "LJ_160x160_B");

GA_googleFetchAds();

Articles">world view. I must admit that I was also influenced by the Evolution of Dance video that is making the rounds on the net (thanks, Thomas!) — hence the byline to this post. So I’ve edited the comment and posted it here (with comments and trackbacks open, I might add) for posterity.

I noted this statement in the 1;

try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-16323142-1");
pageTracker._setDomainName(".libraryjournal.com");

pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}

GS_googleAddAdSenseService("ca-pub-1872221973353849");
GS_googleEnableAllServices();

GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-1872221973353849", "LJ_160x160_B");

GA_googleFetchAds();

Articles">announcement of Henriette Avram passing: “Though Avram was a systems analyst by training, not a librarian, her work … revolutionized access to library materials.” Right on the mark. With that background in computer science I’d like to think I have a somewhat unique (or at least minority) perspective on Avram’s and Gorman’s work. They did what they did in a world with the twin challenges of expensive computing cycles and scarce storage. MARC and AACR were created when punch cards and 9-track tapes ruled the world and computers took up rooms. (Wanted one for your desk? Hah!)

Fast forward to today. Computer cycles are so cheap that we stack CPUs in huge racks to collectively work on solving a problem. Storage is so cheap that we consider a verbose, ASCII-based markup language (a.k.a. “XML”) as the state of the art in the transmission of data. Compare the information density of 1000 characters of MARC versus 1000 characters of XML. And more to the point, let’s not forget AACR where every colon, period, and dash carries meaning versus the explicit description of attributes in XML. Example? Look at

versus

See what I mean? The first is 51 characters, more or less, and the second is 185 characters. Now I’d argue that the second is not much more expressive than the first. (The second is MARCXML — a raw translation of the MARC record format to XML.) But take a look at this more mainstream XML format (from MODS):

A human can read and understand that as well as being parsable by a computer.

Now anyone that would have proposed the second or third of these examples in the 1960s or 1970s would have been laughed out of the machine room and told never to come back. Sure, you could write a computer program back then to read and write those XML-based formats, but it would have been so computationally- and storage-expensive that it would never have been taken seriously, much less actually contribute to the spread of machine-based cataloging tools.

So back to this decade, when storage is cheap and computer processing power even cheaper. Interoperability with other systems outside the library domain is more and more important. There is a computer on every desk…and one in your pocket. The user is empowered with a combination of better human/machine interfaces (we’ve exchanged punch cards for keyboards, mice and graphical user interfaces) and inexpensive communication mechanisms (that make machine-aided tagging and recommendation engines possible).

I’ve never met Ms. Avram, nor have I followed her work (and in fact I didn’t know of her connection to MARC until this announcement), but I wonder what she would think of the MARC/AACR combination now. Given her training in systems analysis, would she say we are making the best use of computing technology today?

Is this the death knell for the librarian? Not necessarily. If the profession continues to train and promote the librarian of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, then yes. If that librarian is one that recognizes the shift to user-empowered technology in the past decade, nebulously characterized as “Library 2.0″, then we have a valuable value-added role to play in the information-seeking and -use activities of citizens in this new world. Are our users disco dancing? If not, we’d better figure out how they are dancing now…

The text was modified to update a link from http://lisnews.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/13/1719246 to http://lisnews.org/node/26973 on January 13th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. "https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
   document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"