At ALA Midwinter, ALCTS sponsored a panel discussion about sharing library-created data inside and outside the library community, with a particular focus on cataloging data. I was honored to be ask to speak on the topic from the perspective of a consortial office. This is the second and final post in a series that represents an approximation of what I said on the panel.

The first part examined the nature of surrogate records that we create as a means to get users to content. The post looked at where we get records, how humans and machines can create them, and the rights associated with component data that makes up the records.

Right to reuse records without restrictions

The first area where is important is with discovery layers. A new generation of discovery layers are taking surrogates from a variety of sources – catalogs, publishers, index/abstract services, etc. – and performing actions such as consolidating records and building relationships between surrogates. These derived surrogates are presented to users in new interfaces or new portals into existing interfaces. Examples of these systems are the Extensible Catalog project at the University of Rochester and the newly announced Serials Solutions Summon product. OhioLINK recently solicited responses from vendors where this kind of capability is a key product of a new discovery layer. Other projects (such as subject-specific portals) also seek to re-purpose the data – mix it up with other sources of data to create new uses and views that are specific to a particular user community. Anything other than a permissive-for-all-by-default will put up roadblocks and cause builders of these systems to seek data from other services.

In addition to presenting the surrogates to users in new ways, libraries are also investigating new forms of workflow and collaborative activities surrounding the creation and maintenance of bibliographic records. One of the strong desires of many involved in the OLE Project is cooperative purchasing and cooperative technical services. OhioLINK has also recently issued an RFI seeking new options for highly collaborative workflows in the maintenance of surrogate records. Old models of charging for use of records can hinder the ability of cooperating institutions to optimize costs and efforts of back-room library options.

The elephant in the room is the recently proposed OCLC Records Use Policy. Setting aside the debatable legal framework under which OCLC asserted the right to set a usage policy on records from the cooperative, there were clauses in the proposed policy that jeopardize the usability of records, and as a consequence the viability of the cooperative as a whole. Actions that restrict use of data or create uncertainty around the use of data lessen the value of that data. I think few would argue that value can be created by aggregating services on top of the data; the activities in the WorldCat Grid and Developer’s Network point to that. Revenue could be generated in fees charged to non-cooperative members. It is conceptually important to separate the hosting of the surrogates from the layered services on top of them – WorldCat Local, mediated ILL, collection analysis, by way of example.

Parting thoughts

Post-panel Thoughts

Thanks to Charles Wilt, Executive Director of ALCTS, for inviting me to speak at the ALCTS Forum and to Karen Calhoun for facilitating the invitation. My appreciation also goes out to my co-panelists: Karen Calhoun (who has posted her slides online), John Mark Ockerbloom (who also posted his slides and approximate speech transcript), and Brian Schottlaender (who eloquently summarized statements from the other panelists and took point in fielding questions from the audience).

The text was modified to remove a link to http://lisnews.org/node/add/blog on January 13th, 2011.

At ALA Midwinter, ALCTS sponsored a panel discussion about sharing library-created data inside and outside the library community, with a particular focus on cataloging data. I was honored to be ask to speak on the topic from the perspective of a consortial office. This is the first in a series of posts that represents an approximation of what I said on the panel. (Also be sure to read the summary of the session by Norman Oder in Library Journal.)

I think it is important to step back and reflect on the nature of what we are talking about. We build bibliographic records as surrogates for the desired object, meaning that the surrogate is a means to an end – retrieving the described object – and not an end onto itself. We build indexes of these surrogates for patrons to use to discover information. All other factors held constant, the better the surrogate, the greater the chance the user will find the information they are seeking. The following discussion looks at the sources of records, the way they are built, and what it means to try to share them.

Sources of Records

The humans creating these surrogate records are typically called “catalogers” although I’m coming to prefer the term descriptionists as a more accurate portrayal of their activity (if, for no other reason, that the description activity engaged in by these professionals extends beyond what we traditionally consider “the catalog”). Using the tools of taxonomies and ontologies, the descriptionist creates the surrogate of the item to put into the catalog systems.

There is another way emerging, however, to create these surrogates: through computer algorithmic computation against the object itself. In his book Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger talks about the fungible nature of metadata and data: “metadata” is what we know and “data” is what we want to find out. In a talk given at Google in May 2007, he gave an example of using something known — like a quote from a book — to find out something — like the author of that book. (Skip to 29 minutes and 25 seconds into the video.) The “metadata” (the quote) was used to find the “data” (the author) that was being sought.

This is Google’s big experiment in computational analytics. It is relying on an analysis of the text of the item itself to be the descriptive surrogate. It employs algorithms that look at every word — perhaps even every concept — in an item and weights it relative to those words and terms in other items in the corpus.

Amazon has done something similar for years with its “Key Phrases” techniques. For Amazon, Capitalized Phrases are people, places, events, or terms mentioned in a book. Statistically Improbable Phrases are the most distinctive phrases in a book as compared against the corpus of texts in its catalog. These become a form of index points – the surrogates – for finding the item.

Of human-generated or machine-generated, which of these is better – a measure of effectiveness in precision and recall as well as an assessment of the relative cost to create – is undoubtedly a topic of research and debate. For those of us more familiar in the ways of the descriptionists, however, it is undoubtedly time to become familiar with the ways of the computationalists to understand the strengths of each.

Ownership of records

Ownership of the data in records is even cloudier than what is outlined above. By my estimation, we are entering a world in which there are four types of attributes that make up our bibliographic records. The first is the recitation of the facts, whether copied from the item-in-hand or obtained as a feed of information from publishers. The second is the creative work of the descriptionist in adding value to the surrogate in the form of classification numbers, subject headings, abstracts, and the like. The third is the additions that the computationalists – or, more specifically, their algorithms – bring to the object’s description in the surrogate. This can take the form of the previous discussed Google Book Search algorithms as well as Amazon’s Capitalized Phrases and Statistically Improbable Phrases. It also includes actions specific to our traditional domain of human-generated surrogates; for instance, of the algorithms OCLC runs across the Worldcat dataset to merge records and improve records. And finally, thinking beyond the boundaries typical of AACR2 and MARC, there is a fourth type: user-contributed information. The creative efforts of users to add tags, reviews, summaries, and commentary add to the surrogate, and with that we kick wide open a door to the problem of who “owns” these surrogate records.

The issue of who “owns” the user-contributed information to records is handled in a wide variety of ways. In LibraryThing, for instance, the creator retains copyright over tags, reviews, summaries, and comments, and grants LibraryThing non-exclusive rights to make use of that creative effort. LibraryThing also has a function where users can add “Common Knowledge” (character names and occupations, locations, honors/awards, and quotations, among other details) about the item. Users add Common Knowledge augmentations with a Creative Commons “By, Share-Alike” license. The Open Library project asserts no rights over the data in its system; it declares the material in the open library database to be facts, and therefore in the public domain (at least under U.S. copyright law). The newly announced ‡biblios.net repository of records uses the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License, developed by Talis in the UK and Creative Commons. It, too, asserts that the subject data is in the public domain and offers suggested community norms surrounding the use of the data.

Ownership of records is also a continuing source of discussion among members of the OCLC cooperative. If a brief record from a publisher is added into the WorldCat database and is subsequently enhanced by one or more members, who “owns” the record. If a library systematically adds enhancements to records that matter to its own community – enhancements such as paper and binding types – who “owns” those records?

One way to handle this variety of who (if anyone) owns portions of the surrogate is to split records based on who contributed what. This would enable consuming systems to make decisions on what data to include based on the conditions the owners might put on their creative acts. (Keep in mind that legal precedent would seem to indicate that the facts expressed in the surrogate couldn’t be protected by copyright restrictions.) But our existing record structures do not give us a way to do this, nor does there seem to be any work going on to enable this to happen. Perhaps we are all just burying our collective heads in the sand and hoping it will go away.

More to come…

The text was modified to update a link from https://biblios.net/ to http://biblios.net/ on February 11th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from https://biblios.net/pddl to http://biblios.net/pddl on February 11th, 2011.

United Airlines, along with many other carriers, has instituted a policy of charging for checked luggage. For United, the first bag is $15 and subsequent bags are $25 each. If you check-in for your flight online between now and January 31st, however, you can save $3 on each the first bag. The online check-in process asks for your credit card to complete the transaction. You can also print your boarding pass during the check-in process. When you get to the airport, use the self-service kiosks to start your check-in process again. The baggage tag will then automatically print behind the counter and you’ll soon be on your way.

This might be old news for some — it has been two years since I’ve been on a flight when I had to check a bag — but a combined 8-day trip of the OLE project in Lehigh University and the Midwinter meeting in Denver means I’ll be out longer than the typical carry-on bag will allow. Still scheme for charging for bags based on a day’s flight activity seems a bit foreign to me. The $15-per-day’s-itinerary doesn’t correlate to any actual charges I can think of. If the main cost of handling checked bags was for the additional labor of handling them, I would expect charges for each segment of a day’s itinerary. Likewise, if the charge is to handle the additional cost of fuel to transport the checked bag, it would make sense for the charge to be by segment. So as near as I can figure out, with 15 minutes of thinking about the topic, the added baggage charge doesn’t really reflect the cost of actually transporting the bag and is just a way to collect more money.