Threads this week without commentary. (It has been a long week that included only one flight of four that actually happened without a delay, cancellation, or redirection.) Big announcements are one from the Library of Congress to re-envision the way bibliographic information travels, one from Douglas County (Colorado) Library’s experiment with taking ownership of ebooks and applying its own digital rights management, and a study on the ecosystem of spam.

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Transforming our Bibliographic Framework: A Statement from the Library of Congress

Spontaneous comments from participants in the US RDA Test show that a broad cross-section of the community feels budgetary pressures but nevertheless considers it necessary to replace MARC 21 in order to reap the full benefit of new and emerging content standards. The Library now seeks to evaluate how its resources for the creation and exchange of metadata are currently being used and how they should be directed in an era of diminishing budgets and heightened expectations in the broader library community.

- Transforming our Bibliographic Framework: A Statement from the Library of Congress, Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative

Also see John Mark Ockerbloom’s Open data’s role in transforming our bibliographic framework for more details and links to other posts talking about the Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative.

Douglas County Library to Distribute Ebooks with its own DRM

We are pleased to announce a partnership between the Colorado Independent Publishers Association (CIPA), and two Colorado libraries: Red Rocks Community College Library, and Douglas County Libraries.

Many members of CIPA have entered the world of digital publishing. By June of 2011, Red Rocks Community College Library and Douglas County Libraries will not only offer eBooks from CIPA’s authors for checkout through their library catalogs, but will also allow click-through purchases of these titles.

- New e-book partnership, Douglas County Libraries

There are more details on a post on the ALA Presidential Task Force on Equitable Access to Electronic Content blog along with an earlier post about that library’s experiments with Adobe Content Server.

Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions

For years, a team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, the billions of unwanted e-mail messages generated by networks of zombie computers controlled by the rogue programs called botnets. They even coined a term, “spamalytics,” to describe their work.

Now they have concluded an experiment that is not for the faint of heart: for three months they set out to receive all the spam they could (no quarantines or filters need apply), then systematically made purchases from the Web sites advertised in the messages.

- Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions, by John Markoff, New York Times

It has been years since I’ve done meaningful work with JPEG2000, but I still try to keep tabs on what is happening in that community. In that vein, Rob Buckley — formerly of Xerox Research and now on his own with a consulting business — pointed me to an announcement about a JPEG2000 Summit happening at the Library of Congress next month.

The plan for the meeting is:

The program starts with a half-day tutorial on JPEG 2000 on the morning of the first day, followed by two sessions of presentations. The program will conclude on the afternoon of the second day with a small invitation-only working session to identify key objectives and collaborations for broadening the understanding and use of the technology.

Registration is free but required because of the limited space. If I were in or near D.C., I’d surely be there but my day job doesn’t align well enough to the agenda to justify the trip. I continue to think that use of JPEG2000 is a significant enough upgrade to TIFF practices for archiving and presentation to justify the cost of making a transition. (That statement says nothing about a wholesale conversion of archive TIFFs to JPEG2000s; existing TIFFs can stay as they are but current practice should take advantage of the features offered with JPEG2000.) The organizers are ending the summit with “a small invitation-only working session to identify key objectives and collaborations for broadening the understanding and use of the technology.” I’m looking forward to the output of that working group.

Add this event to your desktop calendar program.

Next Monday (November 30, 2009) a colleague at the Library of Congress will be giving a presentation on modeling bibliographic information based on a “Paper Tool” technique adopted from physics. The title of the talk is “Re-Imagining the Bibliographic Universe: FRBR, Physics and the World Wide Web and will be presented by Ron Murray (no relation), Digital Conversion Specialist in the Preservation Reformatting Division of LC.

A PDF of the presentation slides (35MB ZIP file) is now available online.

The presentation is open to the public, and will be from 10am to noon in the Mumford Room (6th floor of the LC Madison Building). The abstract of the talk is:

In response to dramatic increases in the quantity and types of culturally significant resources in libraries, cataloging theories like FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) have become more complex when compared to traditional cataloging theories. The need to re-conceptualize and justify bibliographic resource description theories is now critical, due to the emergence of the World Wide Web – whose structure and content is more varied and more dynamic than that of libraries. To support the argument that the “commonsense imagery” of analog materials limits our thinking about cataloging and about resource description in general, the speaker will review how for atomic physicists, the “commonsense imagery” of physical processes had to be abandoned in the early 20th Century because the mathematics that explained the measurements of physical processes could no longer be related to any perceivable object or event. The diagrams that have fueled physicist’s imagination since 1945 correspond to nothing in the physical world – but were instead generated by the theories created by the physicists. The speaker suggests that the complexity of analog and digital Cultural Heritage resources warrants a similar approach to their description. This approach – “Paper Tool” creation and use – applies equally well to bibliographic descriptions of library content as well as to the emerging Semantic Web.

I’ve been privileged to watch Ron’s work unfold over the past few months, and what he has created is a compelling abstract model for handling the interrelated nature of bibliographic data with FRBR structures. FRBR tells us that bibliographic data contains more complexity than flat MARC records can allow, and Ron’s paper tools shows us graphical evidence of that complexity. And not only the challenges that such complexity suggests, but also the benefits we gain by tackling that complexity head on. Just to give you a taste, his modeling technique describes the various works, expressions, manifestations, and items of Pippi Longstocking like this:

Pippi Longstocking in Paper Tool Modeling

Although I won’t be able to attend the presentation in person, I understand that a recording will be made available later. Even so, if you are in the Washington DC area next Monday, I strongly suggest that you attend Ron’s presentation to get the full effect of his presentation of the model and the ability to ask questions.

The presentation flyer also contains this information: Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance by contacting (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov. For more information about this program, contact Angela Kinney (anki@loc.gov) or Judith Cannan (jcan@loc.gov).

The text was modified to remove a link to http://files.me.com/kandroma1/nnwy9z on May 17th, 2011.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was giving $3 million in “funding, software, technological expertise, training and support services” to the Library of Congress to build on-site and online exhibits of LC historical collections. Others have commented on this. From a Jester’s point of view, I’ve got problems with this on two fronts: Microsoft using LC in a cheap marketing ploy and LC’s use of a new technology that impedes access for no good technical reason.

Library of Congress as shill for Microsoft

This excerpt from the undated page “Microsoft signs cooperative agreement with U.S. Library of Congress” is the beginnning of my uneasiness. Emphasis and links added:

Scale: The Library of Congress receives upwards of 2 million visitors per year. Also, LOC.GOV is one of the top sites for search engines for international and U.S. historical searches and receives millions of hits and unique users per month. Children and teachers across the country will learn by using this site, the materials created here will be approved curriculum in all 50 states.

Scope of influence: This initiative will influence library technology worldwide. Libraries large and small from around the country and the world look to the Library of Congress for technical guidance and are certain to take note of what tools are being used in the NVE ["New Visitor Experience"] and on MyLoC.gov [not yet operational]. Because of its scale and breadth, it will have influence not only in the U.S., but also for scalable web sites in general. The Library of Congress will engage top educators to create educational content which will meet strict guidelines mandated by state departments of education for inclusion in public schools.

Partners: Schematic: User Experience. Portal Solutions: infrastructure implementation. [What the heck does this mean?]

The Technology: For the on-site visitor, Kiosks will be built using Windows Vista and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) using touch-screen technology for an immersive experience. Visitors will be given a “passport” (optionally mapped to a Windows Live ID), which can be used to digitally keep track of what exhibits each visitor has seen.

The publicly available web site will offer the ability to visit the library in a virtual environment which will complement the physical visitor’s experience. Because the Library of Congress is so vast, tourists will be able to “complete” their visit on line using the web site, which will have kept track of their visit when they were present at the library using the “passport” technology.

Clearly Microsoft is using this $3 million “gift” (again, we’re not sure how much of it is real cash and how much is in-kind software licenses and suck) to push the adoption of Silverlight. I’ve got a problem with a public institution like the Library of Congress being used to push a commercial advantage. If Microsoft paid YouTube $3M to make videos available in Silverlight rather than Flash, it would be a different story. That Microsoft convinced HardRock (not a cultural heritage institution) to put up content in Silverlight doesn’t bother me. If Silverlight had been adopted by the Library of Congress based on its own merits, it would be another story entirely. (Based on the information released to date, it doesn’t appear that this was the case.) That leads into the next issue I have with the LC/Microsoft deal.

Silverlight-exclusive Content Impedes Access

Silverlight does not have a wide scope of adoption; it is not installed already on the vast majority of machines on the net. Many access the internet in places that don’t allow for plug-ins to be installed. (We hear about this at OhioLINK with regards to the educational videos available through RealMedia at OhioLINK — and RealMedia has been out for a decade! We’re actively investigating a shift to Flash-based players, by the way.) Content that is available exclusively in Silverlight is effectively not available to those that cannot — for technical or know-how reasons — install the plug-in.

A justification could be offered if Silverlight represented a big-enough shift in capability to justify the added effort to install the plug-in. I don’t see any evidence that it is. For instance, I’m not convinced that Deep Zoom in the upcoming version of Silverlight is really all that interesting. It would appear to use JPEG tiles to get information from the server to the applet in the browser — the same fundamental technique used by the Zoomify Flash applet and AJAX techniques like Google Maps. The Silverlight framework seems to give a clean, one-step way to implement the creation of the tiles on the server, but that can be replicated in other ways. (See for instance, my own efforts to create a shim between JPEG2000 and Zoomify.) Besides, from a content accessibility perspective, why would we make the programmer’s life easier if it makes the viewer’s life harder.

Final Thoughts

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.

As I said, I’m with you, Roy — descriptive enrichment, in the form of providing our users as many metadata points as we can to find what they are looking for, is what our future should be about. And thanks for the link to the rant by Michael Gorman on RDA.

So now is someone going to write this up and send it through the official LC comment channel?

I haven’t posted anything about the report mainly because I haven’t finished reading it yet. (The Jester ducks his head when reading Karen Schneider’s e-mail to the LITA list about the general lack of commentary — you might be able to find the post through the mailing list archive. That said, Karen has put up a posting that is tracking commentary.) I’ve been struck by three things so far, though:

1. The power and force of the first paragraph:
   

   The future of bibliographic control will be collaborative, decentralized, international in scope, and Web-based. Its realization will occur in cooperation with the private sector, and with the active collaboration of library users. Data will be gathered from multiple sources; change will happen quickly; and bibliographic control will be dynamic, not static. The underlying technology that makes this future possible and necessary—the World Wide Web—is now almost two decades old. Libraries must continue the transition to this future without delay in order to retain their relevance as information providers.

   Wow! If that doesn’t set the stage for a description of the coming disruption to the profession, then I don’t know what more can be said.

2. The second is in the general description of areas of recommendations (point number 2 on page 2 of the report):
   

   Transfer effort into higher-value activity. In particular, expand the possibilities for knowledge creation by “exposing” rare and unique materials held by libraries that are currently hidden from view and, thus, underused.

   This is what I referred to as the “third wave” in the recent talk I gave at the NISO workshop on institutional repositories: the digital (or digitized) local materials. My thoughts in this arena are strongly influenced by the writings and presentations of David Lewis of Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis. This slide comes from his presentation “Disruptive Innovation and the Academic Library.” In David’s terms, he foresees an increase in the amount of money libraries spend on curated collections — those things that are local and unique — and a decrease in the amount spent on purchased — or commercially produced — content. This point from the draft report speaks right to this slide.

3. The third is this paragraph on page 7 under the heading “Guiding Principles: Redefine Bibliographic Control”
   

   The bibliographic universe today includes an enormous variety of materials: published materials that are purchased by libraries; materials that libraries license for user access; digital materials on public networks; and materials that are unique to an individual library. It is not uncommon that these disparate materials are described and managed through different processes, and are offered separately for user access. Users would be better served if access to these materials were provided in the context of a unified philosophy of bibliographic control.

   This points to important activity such as IMLS Leadership Grant to NELLCO for a universal search system that are addressing the fact that there are no “information gatekeepers” anymore; the users are going to get to the information with or without us. So we had better make it easy for user to discover the riches that lie in our own collections or risk becoming irrelevant.

So, unfortunately, that is as far as I’ve gotten. I’m still aiming to get through the report by the comment deadline and have a coherent critique of the work rather than just praise about key parts that struck me as important.

Footnotes

1. And I would have said so in a comment on your blog entry, but after 10 minutes of struggling with three different browsers to actually get the commented accepted by LJ’s blog software, I gave up and posted it here.

Xerox and the Library of Congress announced a joint effort last week to study the use of JPEG 2000. This is welcome news! The project is “designed to help develop guidelines and best practices for digital content,” a result that will be most welcome for those of us that want to do the right thing but lack the time and/or technical expertise to pin down exactly what the right thing is. I think it is safe to say that inertia has taken us this far with our collective TIFF-based practice, and even the most conservative preservationist would probably acknowledge that the state of the art has moved in the past quarter century to a point where there might be a better way.

I’m familiar with Rob Buckley’s work at Xerox, and that he is overseeing Xerox’s efforts in this collaboration means we can anticipate a great outcome. As others have noted, the time is ripe for work in this area.

Activity still continues on the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIP). There were two stories in Washington DC newspapers in recent weeks. The more interesting of the two came from the May 16th Washington Post in a column by Jim Barksdale and Francine Berman called Saving our Digital Heritage. Barksdale — of Netscape Corp. fame and now a member of the NDIIP advisory council — and Berman make a brief but impassioned plea for restoring the NDIIP funding that was rescinded earlier this year. (The other article, in the Washington Times, (“Saving the digital record”, 25-Apr-2007, article no longer available online) oddly praises the program but makes no mention of the funding rescission.) And I heard today from an “Unnamed Washington Source” that the leadership at the Library of Congress will seek to have some, if not all, of the funding restored as part of a future continuing resolution. (Hopefully one that won’t get vetoed.)

At the same time, the Library of Congress is planning several NDIIP-related programs at the American Library Association annual meeting next month. One hopes that all of this buzz will encourage Congress to restore funding support for the program.

Update (20070525T2015): It would appear that the bill passed by both houses of Congress (version #6) did not include language to put back funding for NDIIIP. Or, at least I don’t see mention of it — it is a big bill.

Update (200804042140): Removed the link to the Washington Times article — it is no longer available online.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/news0407.html on January 20th, 2011.