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.

Jerome lays the issue out right away. Paraphrasing from several papers, he says:

Despite its success, however, XML has not lived up to many librarians’ expectations within one area, that of interoperability…. Digital library developers have expected that shared use of an XML standard for structuring of content and metadata (what is commonly called “structural metadata” within the digital library community) would ensure content interoperability and provide a clean division between content and higher level tools and services designed to work with standardized encodings of that content. In practice, this goal has proved extraordinarily elusive. Experiments conducted by participants in the Library of Congress National Digital Infrastructure for Preservation Program (NDIIPP) to test the exchange of digital objects between repositories failed even when participants were using the same XML-based encoding format and producing valid XML instances to exchange.

What Jerome is referring to is the ability to readily move objects from one repository to another. This would seem inherently doable on the surface — the offering repository and the receiving repository are both using XML and perhaps even the same “structural metadata standard” (METS, MPEG-21, etc.). These standards provide “a structural grammar for the encoding of complex digital objects” — the kind of thing needed to move these complex digital objects around various repositories. Jerome lays out two reasons why this doesn’t occur. First, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility in the metadata standards as a result of efforts to make each of the standards abstract enough to encode every conceivable structure. Document authors have choices in the depth of levels of description, labeling of object components, and arrangement of the object structure relative to creation of one or more interrelated descriptive metadata files. The second issue he identifies is the problem of “standards independence”, or the desire by the document standard author to have his/her metadata schema stand alone. Relying on other schemas may decrease the usefulness of the new standard to other organizations and environments.

The paper is a rich history of structural markup standards that have lead the profession to where it is today. He concludes with suggestions for the digital library community to move past this problem. One solution is to declare that our community is more concerned with using the flexibility inherent in the metadata standards for local needs than we are with sharing digital objects across silos. Counter to this is to refine standards to reduce the flexibility so as to increase the chances that the standards will promote interoperability. Jerome also offers the idea of promoting the activity of converting between various metadata formats to a more recognized and valued level. (He notes, for instance that the XSL stylesheets created by the Library of Congress that convert MODS into MARC/XML and back are omitted from the ‘Standards of the Library of Congress’ web page.)

Via Lorcan Dempsey.

Footnotes

1. McDonough, J. (2008). Structural Metadata and the Social Limitation of Interoperability: A Sociotechnical View of XML and Digital Library Standards Development. InBalisage: The Markup Conference Proceedings 2008. Montréal, Canada. Retrieved October 2, 2008, from http://balisage.net/Proceedings/html/2008/McDonough01/Balisage2008-McDonough01.html.

Waves of change are crashing on the shores of the library profession. New media, new tools, new techniques, and new expectations collide to cause excitement, anxiety, confusion, and concern. It may be difficult to determine where we are and where we are going. At our present crossroads, it is useful to view the pressures and effects of change on our services as a matrix of commercial versus local on one axis and physical versus digital on the other. Interesting observations about the nature of content and our reaction to it can be made at the intersections of commercial and local with physical and digital. This essay uses these intersections to examine the waves of content coming to the library and our ways of managing it.

The first wave

Also part of this first wave is the management of local, physical material. This is usually in the form of special archive materials – content produced by the institution and/or curated one-of-a-kind items such as author manuscripts, correspondence, and other ephemera. An entire profession – that of an archivist – is devoted to this kind of material.

The second wave

The third wave

Does the library have a role in managing local, digital material? Should the library have a role? The JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study suggests it should. It described the impact of this new wave as “applying library expertise to new views of corporate intellectual assets, such as the long term management and ‘exposure’ of both research and undergraduate outputs, in a multimedia and collaborative world.”¹ David Lewis, Dean of the University Library at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, says the transition from purchased to open access content “will do more to reshape what libraries will be and do in the future… but this has not yet been carefully considered or broadly discussed.”²

In some sense, the break between the second and third waves is the difference between the management of content that is “done”, versus the management of content as it is being created. In the first two waves, the library profession focused on the curation of knowledge published in a fixed form, usually by commercial publishers, in a reactionary manner towards the end of the content creation cycle. A focus on curating local, digital content, however, means that libraries can more directly insert their services at the point where content is being created.

One of the criticisms by authors of institutional repositories is the extra steps required to deposit their content into the library’s repository, after going through the effort of submitting it to a publisher.³ From their perspective, they are asking, “Why do I have to do this extra work for my published (‘done’) article?” What if, instead, the author stored their work-in-progress in a library service from the beginning? We could offer the promise of robust backups and versioning, collaborative writing tools, and access from anywhere. With the working draft on our servers, we could mine the text to suggest content from our curated stores, and even suggest potential collaborators based on similarities of works. And with the completed draft on our servers, “publishing” it in the institutional repository becomes a simple checkbox – “yes, make this public” – as we have already collected all of the necessary metadata that would go into the archive package in the repository.

Waves are crashing on the shores of our libraries. Waves of content that represent a fundamental shift from the physical to the digital, and the commercial to the local. Waves of change that form opportunities to evolve our services for library users by offering effective tools for the management of content, as it is created. Are you ready to ride the waves?

The text was modified to update a link from https://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/handle/1805/953 to https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/953 on January 28th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. Adamson, V., Bacsich, P., Chad, K., Kay, D., & Plenderleith, J. (2008). JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study. p. 35. Retrieved April 17, 2008, from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/resourcediscovery/lmsstudy.pdf
2. Lewis, D. W. (2007). A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century. College & Research Libraries, 68(5), p. 425. Also available from the IUPUI Digital Archive.
3. For more on the difficulties research faculty see with institutional repositories, see Foster, N. F., & Gibbons, S. (2005). Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories. D-Lib Magazine, 11(1). doi: 10.1045/january2005-foster.

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.

The paper cites dissatisfaction with results from metadata portals that consist exclusively of textual descriptions of the objects. It also cites studies that show the addition of thumbnail images to the results display improves user satisfaction. With that in mind, UIUC wrote Thumbgrabber — a Windows application written in Visual Basic that uses Internet Explorer to find images in websites and/or take image snapshots of web pages as they have been rendered. In the UIUC context, the application is fed URLs from records harvested via OAI-PMH, although it would seem like it would be able to process any arbitrary list of URLs.

This is a useful tool to keep in mind as we think more about aggregating the metadata records into vertical (subject-specific) portals and repurpose metadata records in other ways.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://cicharvest.grainger.uiuc.edu/thumb.asp on January 28th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. Foulonneau, M., Habing, T.G., Cole, T.W. (2006). Automated Capture of Thumbnails and Thumbshots for Use by Metadata Aggregation Services. D-Lib Magazine, 12(1) DOI: 10.1045/january2006-foulonneau