During the cookies and lemonade break during JCDL this afternoon I surprised one of the well-respected elders of the field with this question: are we really making progress? are we winning a fight against entropy ¹? I wasn’t out for a quote for publication at the time so I won’t reveal the individual’s name, but I will report that there was a chuckle then the reply “cautiously optimistic.”

This person went on to say that access to raw information has improved much over the last five years — that the internet and its tools have increased the capacity to publish and retrieve information. ‘Sure,’ s/he went on to say, ‘we have a number of hard problems to solve — linking related object to each other and so forth — but we are making progress.’ I, too, offered a chuckle and agreed, and we went back to our cookies and lemonade.

Entropy and chaos are powerful forces, however, and it was just after this brief encounter that we heard from Carl Lagoze with a talk called Metadata aggregation and “automated digital libraries”: A Retrospective on the NSDL experience. Although the paper is a modestly dry report on the issues resolved and overcome in “running a relatively large-scale digital library (over a million objects) by collecting, processing, storing, and using metadata” ², the oral presentation was anything but dry. In fact, it offered a sobering reminder of how hard this is and the challenges before us. He did it with four questions:

1. What is a digital library anyway?
2. What is the role of metadata in a digital library?
3. What is “low barrier” technology? [This one was tied to the observation that OAI-PMH, while modestly simple compared to other protocols, still requires a lot of effort to get right. See reality lesson #4 below.]
4. Where should expensive and limited human energy be allocated?

… and seven reality lessons:

• Reality lesson #1: Metadata is not being created
  In truth, there is not a lot of funding set aside in projects to create metadata.
• Reality lesson #2: Participating as a metadata provider is complicated by a “knowledge gap”
  Doing so requires three skill sets that are frequently distinct: Domain expertise (e.g. “mathematics”); Metadata expertise (e.g. “Dublin Core”); and Technical expertise (e.g. encode it in XML and use a formal protocol).
• Reality lesson #3: Harvested metadata is not necessarily useful metadata
  “Correct” metadata is not necessarily “rich” metadata. The general problem of metadata quality remains unsolved — even the best automated/automatic transformations are not good enough.
• Reality lesson #4: OAI-PMH is not necessarily low-barrier and automatic
  Doing OAI-PMH right incorporates lots of details and assumed knowledge (UTF-8, XML schema validation, URL encoding, date stamping, resumption tokens, etc.). An even after sometimes months of hand-holding data provider, the initial success does not persist in the majority of cases; the failure rate of subsequent harvests is high. And the “incremental harvest” functionality is a nice concept but it doesn’t work: support for “deleted” records is inconsistent in data providers; less than 50% of providers claim to persist deletions and many persistent claims are faulty. Too often server failures and harvest failures require a full harvest ‘resync’.
• Reality lesson #5: Human cost of large-scale harvesting is high
  In the case of NSDL, their metrics show that they exchange 170 messages per year per provider and that it takes on average 98 message exchanged for first harvest to succeed (which, as previously noted, subsequently fails).
• Reality lesson #6: Matching individual metadata records of equivalent resources is hard
  I didn’t have anything in my notes about this, but as I recall his comments were about the lack of ways to uniformly handle these surrogate objects in the OAI-PMH protocol.
• Reality lesson #7: Lots of (even good) metadata does not make a complete digital library (and maybe not even a digital library that is highly useful for education)
  There is a real need to understand the value-add of a digital library: capturing the wisdom of the community served as well as focusing less on structured information and more on relationships among resources and user-derived relationships and annotations.

So what do I think? You know — I’m not sure. These are tough problems, and the world would be a better place if they were solved. We can demand answers, but sometimes there just isn’t enough of a shoulder to stand on from the giant below. Still, one can’t help but wonder if all of the energy put into the collective “digital library” problem so far has just dissipated into chaos.

Footnotes

1. Defined as: “Measure of disorganization or degradation in the universe that reduces available energy, or tendency of available energy to dwindle. Chaos, opposite of order.” Do you remember your Second Law of Thermodynamics?
2. Lagoze, C., Krafft, D. B., Cornwell, T., Dushay, N., Eckstrom, D., Saylor, J. 200y. Metadata aggregation and “automated digital libraries”: A retrospective on the NSDL experience. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Chapel Hill, NC, USA, June 11 – 15, 2005). JCDL ’06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 231. [arXiv:cs.DL/0601125]

If you look along the right-most row in this picture, about midway vertically in the shot, you can see someone in a cream-colored shirt with an Apple laptop. (You can tell it is an Apple laptop because of the glowing white logo in the center.) That’s me.

ZoneTag Photo Monday 10:19:18

Originally uploaded by jacksonfox.

The plenary session of JCDL this morning was Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law School and University of Oxford) entitled “Open Information: Redaction, Restriction, and Removal.” This was so good that I couldn’t stand to stop and take notes. I did write down one bit: “Libraries are the best hope…for the controlled release of information.” His point was that the library profession is a trusted gatekeeper — librarians have a track record of providing orderly access to shared information resources and taking seriously the responsibility to provide access to those resources under the terms with which they were acquired. (Although there was a great deal of humming in the room at one key point of the presentation — those that were there know what I mean.) Can publishers entrust content to us such that the library controls the DRM that protects the content? Would publishers be willing to give the library the content in an unrestricted form with the promise, in the form of a legal agreement, that the library will apply the appropriate DRM at the appropriate time? Could that be a new role for libraries in this new DRM-happy society?

JCDL is ranking high one of the most useful (and when not useful one of the most interesting) meetings I’ve attended. This is my first time here, and although I’d heard about it before I did not realize what a treat it would be to attend. I’m a practice-oriented guy with an eye towards useful (implementable) theoretical stuff, and so far JCDL has hit that sweet-spot very nicely. The down side is this — here at the start of the second day of the meeting I just need to dump my brain into this and a few other postings and hope that I’ll have a chance to get back to these thoughts some day.

Potentially Useful Stuff

Metadata Data Dictionary for Analog Sound Recordings (Poster #17) — OhioLINK is getting more into sound recordings with an acquisition of about 30,000 on the drawing board, so I found this poster a useful jumpstart in learning about the various data elements that the authors had found for capturing descriptive, administrative and preservation metadata for analog recordings. (It focused on 78-rpm and LP phonograph artifacts, but it is still a very useful overview.)

Pathways Core: A Data Model for Cross-Repository Services (Poster #6) and Augmenting Interoperability Acrosss Scholarly Repositories (Panel Discussion) — This is truly a placeholder because I’m still digesting what this all means. In short, the former proposes a data model for a package of identifier content that can serve as a pointing surrogate to a content element in a repository. No, this isn’t simply an identifier; rather it is a package of the provider’s identity and provider’s object identifier, a statement (contract?) from the provider about the persistance of the object in its repository, semantic information, and pointers to other identifier packages that make up the whole. Confusing? Yeah. Like I said — this is a placeholder for a hopeful future posting. So the panel talked about how these identifier packages/surrogates can be used to promote interoperability between repositories. Not really in an OKI Repository OSID kid of way — rather a way one repository can hold a placeholder surrogate of a content that is actaully in another repository (e.g. “Overlay” journals). Herbert’s slides are online; hopefully more will follow.

Named Entities 1 — a group of papers that had some very interesting ideas about how to disambiguate, collate, and dedupe personal names, place names, and the like. Good stuff here — thanks to Ed Summers for IRC back-channeling me out of where I was to hear this session.

I’ve got stuff to say about the Open Content Alliance part of the Monday opening session and more stuff on the Pathways Core and Named Entities. But, like I said, this’ll have to serve as a placeholder for hopefully future time to write about it.

The text was modified to update a link from http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00001001/ to http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/4601 on December 31st, 2010.

I am excited almost beyond description to be sharing a panel with Sandy Payette (Cornell
University, USA), Andrew Treloar (Monash University, Australia), Matthias Razum (Fiz
Karlsruhe, Germany), and Carl Lagoze (Cornell University, USA) at the upcoming Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. The tutorial is on Sunday afternoon (Sunday, June 11, 2006, 1:30-5:00pm local time) with the title “The Fedora Service Framework – Advanced Applications and Panel Discussion”. Sandy’s recent announcement include this abstract:

This tutorial will focus on advanced application areas in which Fedora is being applied. The first application area is institutional repositories, with a focus on why a service-oriented architecture approach is desirable, as well as issues around workflow and access control. The second is the emerging area often characterized as”e-scholarship” with a focus on data modeling, workflows, and essential features of advanced scholarly publication systems. The third area will focus on the use of Fedora to create a unified knowledge environment for higher education and e-research. The fourth will discuss the use of Fedora to enable collaborative digital libraries, with a focus on the use of RDF to create rich information landscapes the push beyond the standard “search and access” paradigm. The presenters will then participate in an hour long panel discussion taking on significant issues and challenges that cut across these application areas.

I’ll be talking primarily about OhioLINK’s vision for a common digital object repository and how we are going about it with a hosted repository service for all of the colleges and universities in Ohio.

The presenters have been e-mailing back-and-forth now for a few days, and we’ve decided to limit ourselves to just 30 minutes a piece a leave a large block of time at the end for questions, answers, speculation, pontificating, and anything else that might happen. I’m really looking forward to the audience participation at the end — it will be a good way to validate our ideas to a wider audience. (Plus I’ll get to meet Andrew and Matthias in person to put a face to the e-mail address!)

Online registration is closed since the program begins this weekend, but onsite registration is still available.

Tutorial Agenda

• Introduction (Sandy Payette, Co-Director of Fedora Project, Cornell University, USA)
• Fedora for Institutional Repositories (Andrew Treloar, Monash University, Australia)
• Fedora for e-scholarship and scholarly publication (Matthias Razum, Fiz Karlsruhe, Germany)
• Fedora for Unified Knowledge Repository for Higher Education (Peter Murray, OhioLINK, USA)
• Fedora for Collaborative Digital Libraries (Carl Lagoze, Cornell Information Science, USA)
• Panel Discussion: Hot Topics for Repositories