Nearly a week after it was posted, I came across a posting by Karen Calhoun of OCLC summarizing her impressions of the ALCTS Forum at Midwinter. I thought I had been closely watching the dialog around the policy, so I was surprised when I came across it. That makes me want to write this open letter:
Dear OCLC,
Last week, the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. published a story on the proposed OCLC record use policy and the controversy surrounding the proposal. As the first story on the controversy to reach the mainstream press, it spawned a flurry of discussion in the blogosphere.
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.
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.)
Panelists will share a variety of perspectives on community norms, policies, and best practices for accessing, using, and sharing the data that supports the discovery and delivery of library collections. What can libraries and the organizations that serve them learn from the open data movement and sites like Wikipedia? What principles and practices for shared data creation and maintenance will most help and strengthen libraries in the future? Panelists will also be addressing the changes in the OCLC Record Use Policy, particularly in light of the recent announcement from OCLC on the establishment of the Review Board of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship.
The panel is called the ALCTS Forum: Creating and Sustaining Communities Around Shared Library Data, and it will be on January 26th from 8:00am to 10:00am at the Colorado Convention Center, Korbel Ballroom 3C. Yours truly has been asked to speak on shared catalog data from the perspective of a library membership organization (OhioLINK) that provides consortial access to a large union catalog, licensed content, dissertations, and digital media. Also on the panel are:
A non-librarian colleague forwarded a link to an essay by Mark Pesce called The Alexandrine Dilemma. From the context of one of the comments, I think it might have been the text of a keynote given at New Librarians Symposium in Australia last month. It is a thought-provoking piece that, well, provoked some thoughts.
Jerome McDonough of the Graduate School of Library & Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign presented a paper this summer at the Balisage conference with the title Structural Metadata and the Social Limitation of Interoperability: A Sociotechnical View of XML and Digital Library Standards Development.1 The title is very hard to penetrate, but the contents of the paper lay bare a theory for why we don’t have large, swirling pools of shared digital objects that cross institutional silo boundaries.
In reading a background paper for the American Social History Online portal, I was reacquainted with a paper by Muriel Foulonneau, Thomas Habing and Tim Cole from UIUC called “Automated Capture of Thumbnails and Thumbshots for Use by Metadata Aggregation Services.”1 This is the abstract:
The practice of including thumbnails in short record displays, increasingly common in local implementations, is being adopted by metadata aggregation service providers as well. In addition, thumbnails and Web thumbshots have begun appearing as part of Web search results. This article reports on a project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to make more comprehensible heterogeneous resources available on the UIUC CIC metadata portal by incorporating thumbnails and thumbshots of image and Webpage resources in the context of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. In addition to thumbnails provided by partner data providers, UIUC has developed an automated process to generate thumbnails and thumbshots from the Webpages resources pointed to by the metadata records.
I’ve been following the discussion by Stu Weibel on his blog about the relationship between Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Dublin Core Abstract Model (DCAM), and I think I’m as confused as ever. It comes as a two part posting with comments by Andy Powell Pete Johnston (apologies, Pete), Mikael Nilsson, Jonathan Rochkind, and Ed Summers. Jonathan’s and Ed’s comments describe the same knowledge black hole that I’ve been facing as well; in Ed’s words: “The vocabulary I get–the DCAM is a tougher nut for me to crack.”
Roy Tennant is advocating the phrase “Descriptive Enrichment” over “Bibliographic Control” in response to draft report from the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, and I’m stepping up to say — I’m right there with you, Roy!1 Your analysis reminds me of statements made by David Weinberger in the Google Tech Talk in response to his book Everything is Miscellaneous. David offers new definitions to words that we use regularly: “metadata” is what we know and “data” is what we want to find out. In the talk, he gave an example (29 minutes and 25 seconds into the playback; this link will take you right there) of using something you know — like a quote from a book — to find something you don’t know — like the author — by putting the quote into a search engine. The “metadata” (the quote) was used to find the “data” (the author) that was being sought.
