Interestingly enough, ALA Publishing has published a new book on RDA called “Introducing RDA : A guide to the basics” by Chris Oliver.

Even though RDA is only set to be released June 2010, this new book is summarized as setting out a plan as how to make the transition from AACR2 to RDA.

In addition, this book hopes to:

• Concisely explain RDA and provide examples
• Put RDA into context
• Explain how RDA can help information discovery

Two other new items are the Library Technology Reports from January and February: Understanding the Semantic Web and RDA Vocabularies for a Twenty-First Century Data Environment.

Of the 3 new items, I would invest in the Library Technology Reports only because there is so much information out on the Internet for free about transitioning from AACR2 to RDA. Also, the National test has yet to begin. This book by Chris Oliver might be a good investment further down the road after the National test.

Filed under: cataloging, RDA, Uncategorized Tagged: RDA

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Salem Press is conducting the Library Blog Awards. Seems so five years ago, but still, nominate and vote for your favorite weblogs.

Last week at the Institute of Museum and Library Services' 2010 WebWise conference: "Imagining Our Digital Future," the topic of metadata thoroughly permeated the presentations and conversations.

At lunch on Thursday, March 4, each table was assigned a facilitator and a topic for discussion. At the metadata table, one librarian in very early stages of a digital project asked, "Are your institutional repository records in your catalog too?" Facilitator Jenn Riley, Metadata Librarian at Indiana University, shared the recent discovery that WorldCat Local was including harvested records from the IU repository in their local search results -- an exciting development precipitating further action on their part to tidy up their harvested records. Umbrella search solutions such as AquaBrowser were also cited as a solution.

These off-the-cuff remarks sounded much less time-intensive than crosswalking repository records to MARC in order to batch ingest them into the OPAC, a solution another librarian had been considering. The brief conversation among eight lunching librarians and museum professionals left this blogger wondering -- what discovery solutions are you using at your institution?

-by Alice Platt

Exciting news from Omeka

The Omeka team is reaching for the clouds. After more than a year of planning and development, we are very pleased to announce the impending arrival of Omeka.net, a hosted web service that will bring standards-based online collections and exhibitions to the internet cloud. Be first in line for an invitation to try the free Omeka.net Alpha, including a special bundle of plugins, themes, and storage, when it launches in April.

Omeka.net will expand Omeka’s current offerings with a completely web-based service. No server or programming experience required. Similar to services offered by WordPress, the popular open-source blogging software, with the launch of Omeka.net users will be able to sign up for a free hosted Omeka site. Just create a username and password, and your online collection or exhibition is up and running.

This new hosted web service will further the Omeka project’s mission to make collections-based online publishing more accessible to small cultural heritage institutions, individual scholars, enthusiasts, educators, and students.

With Omeka.net, your online exhibit is one click away.

OCLC is a founding member of the Open Identity Exchange (OIX).

Last week at RSA; the premier annual online security conference in San Francisco, the formation of a new organization was announced: Open Identity Exchange (OIX). OIX will establish a framework of 'standard' interoperable legal agreements. These agreements will be vetted and accepted by members of OIX and used to establish 'networks of trust'. OIX does not try to establish a single network of trust as the legal agreements for different types of activities will clearly need different legal agreements. Health Record sharing has different demands than Photo Sharing. The first trust network that has been established will enable people with OpenIDs or InfoCards issued by Google, Equifax and PayPal to access US government web sites.

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Kristin Martin is Metadata Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to joining UIC, she performed metadata work and cataloged electronic resources at both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the State Library of North Carolina. She is the Blog Coordinator for the ALCTS Metadata Interest Group.

Alice Platt is the Digital Initiatives Librarian in the Shapiro Library at Southern New Hampshire University. She received her Master of Library and Information Studies from Florida State University in 2009, where she was a graduate assistant in both the FSU Libraries’ Digital Library Center and the Technical Services department. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of South Carolina in 1998.

30 March 2010 - 15.30-19.00VENUE: University College London, Roberts Building, Torrington Place, WC1E 7JEFEE: £5 (ISKO members and students FREE)Creepy-crawlies, mammoths and lotus blossom, all have a place at the Natural History Museum. Today the data painstakingly collected over centuries by naturalists and other scientists are being liberated from their institutional archives, made available

This is not your typical ‘why MARC must die’ post. It’s instead about very low level structural problems in a Marc21 binary file that my ILS outputs. It’s not about the semantics of MARC at all, it’s about the structural features of the Marc21 format.

I never had to know much about low-level Marc21 format details before, and wish I still didn’t, but I had to because my ILS (Horizon) is outputting certain bibs as MARC that the Marc4J Java library used by SolrMarc refused to read, claiming they were structurally invalid in various ways. (Never would have figured this stuff out with the invaluable help of sesuncedu, robcaSSon, and others in #code4Lib).

But this may help someone else figuring out why Marc4J can’t read their MARC.

1. Invalid leader bytes

In the leader of a Marc21 record, byte 10 is always ascii ‘2′, byte 11 is always ‘2′ as well, and bytes 20-24 are always ‘4500′.   At least they’re supposed to be.  Theoretically these bytes allow a record to specify details about the nature of it’s binary format — but these details are fixed in Marc21, and in all other Marc variants we know of, it’s a flexibility that was rarely or never taken advantage of in any Marc format.

However, Horizon actually stores most of it’s leader bytes in a db column.  And if the leader bytes are something other than these invariants in that db column, Horizon’s marc export will include those leader bytes — even if they are invalid, even if they do _not_ accurately describe the Marc record they are attached to (which wouldn’t be a valid Marc21 record if it was true).

Since these values are invariant in Marc21 and most (all) other Marc formats, most Marc parsers ignore them.

However, Marc4J doesn’t, it actually treats them as gospel.  So if those bytes were wrong, Marc4J will try reading the record improperly. And if those bytes weren’t ascii decimal digits at all, Marc4J will claim it can’t read the leader.

So I just had to fix those in our production ILS.  And figure out where they’re coming from, and try to stop them from coming in again? Really, I blame our ILS here for even allowing such completely wrong bytes to be in it’s internal db.

(A perhaps better solution from the other end is fixing the Marc4J PermissiveReader to not pay attention to those bad bytes, assuming the invariant values. sesuncedu has prepared a patch doing some of that for Marc4J, hopefully it’ll get in there.)

2. Bib Records Too Long For Marc

Because of the nature of MARC21’s ‘directory’ structure, there is a maximum length that a MARC record can be. If it’s above this length, the MARC directory doesn’t have enough bytes in it to describe where the fields beyond this length are in the record, and the MARC record is unreadable. (Incidentally, it’s very odd that MARC includes internal byte offsets recorded as ascii decimal chars, rather than ordinary binary data.  If it used more typical simple binary encoding of integers for byte offests, the maximum length of a MARC file would be quite a bit larger.  But it doesn’t. Oh well.)

So what does Horizon marc export do if it has a record which has too much data, which will go over the maximum record length in MARC?  It outputs it anyway. But the marc record it outputs is seriously messed up. It’s got a MARC directory which may be entirely illegal (not a multiple of 12), it’s got a wrong leader bytes 0-4 ‘length’, possibly other problems.   Depending on the individual record and exactly how Horizon ended up outputting it, Marc4J might just skip it as a bad record and go on. That’s the best that could be expected.

However, more often, Marc4J gets entirely confused because of the bad leader bytes 0-4 length, and doesn’t understand where the subsequent record in the marc file actually begins.  So every other record after this too long one in the marc file is a loss to Marc4J/SolrMarc indexing. Either every subsequent record can’t be indexed at all, or even worse, every subsequent record is indexed by Marc4J/SolrMarc, but completely wrong, because Marc4j/SolrMarc got the wrong data.

I need to work out a patch for Marc4J PermissiveReader so when encountering such a record, Marc4J can at least recover by properly finding the beginning of the NEXT record, using the Marc Record Separator character.

3. Blank/null tags

This one might be Horizon-specific. Horizon allows the operator to accidentally add a tag to a record that has a null tag value. Not 100, 245, or something else, but just null.   This accident could have been made manually, or could have been made by some sort of automated import script when we batch loaded records into Horizon.  When the Horizon marc exporter encounters such a record, it does output marc21 for it, but completely invalid and wrong marc21.

I blame Horizon for this, it ought not to allow null tag values to even exist in the db, and if they do, ought to be ignored on export, not create an invalid marc record on export.

This is another problem that often results in Marc4J getting completely confused about where one record ends and the next starts, making the entire rest of the Marc file after such a record un-readable.  Probably because of a bad leader bytes 0-4 length value, so perhaps if I can work out a patch to above, it will at least result in Marc4J succesfully skipping such a record and going on to the rest of the file.

4. Illegal chars in Marc values?

This one I haven’t completely gotten to the bottom of yet, because I made the mistake of fixing the couple examples I found in the Horizon Staff Client, where it didn’t really show me exactly what was going on.

But I think some Marc control characters (Field Terminator or Record Terminator) wound up in some of my record values in the db. (No doubt as the result of an import gone wrong at some point in the past).  The Horizon marc exporter simply included them unescaped in it’s marc output. Resulting in special marc control characters in illegal places, or places where they don’t mean what they mean, in the marc file. This also messed up Marc4J something awful.

Again, I kind of blame Horizon here, for allowing bad data in it’s internal store, and then for writing bad data out in marc export when such bad data is in it’s internal store.

NEW! 4 Feb 2010:

Marc control character in internal data value.

I’ll describe this one in Horizon-specific terminology, cause it’s clearer.

The horizon “bib” table holds an individual marc field in the ‘text’ column.  Every ‘text’ column ENDS in the Marc Field Terminator character (decimal 30, hex 1E, sometimes displayed as “^^”).

However, some of our values have that Marc Field Terminator character _not_ as the last character, but internally.  This creates problems in marc export, where the marc created by marcout is invalid unparseable marc.  (as it includes marc Field Terminator control character in illegal position).

This problem is not visible in Horizon Staff Client, the control character is not shown. But it’s hiding there in the database anyway.   If you open an individual record in Horizon Staff Client and then simply re-save it, it SEEMS to fix the problem in at least some cases (not sure about all), but probably makes more sense to fix it in bulk through an automated process anyway.

As a technical note:  I used this SQL against hzdev db to find the number of bibs which contained char(30) as some char OTHER than the last in dbo.bib.  It takes quite a while ro run. This would have to be re-done for dbo.bib_longtext.longtext, another table that data destined for marc export can hide. You could base an automated fix off of this SQL technique.

select  count(distinct bib#) from dbo.bib where (charindex(char(30), text) != char_length(text))

Correction:  that SQL will also find values that do not end in the FT at all.  While Horizon ordinarily does so that’s sort of an error, it doesn’t cause any problems. Here’s one to find only ones with an internal FT after all, not including ones with no FT whatsoever:

select  count(distinct bib#)  from dbo.bib where  (charindex(char(30), text) not in(0, char_length(text)))

New! 9 Marc 2010: 5. Illegal Marc8 encoding

Records in our catalog are not in UTF-8 but in the library “Marc8″ encoding. However, if there’s weird data in the db,  our catalog will happily export marc that actually includes bytes which are not proper Marc8. For instance, in the situation I ran into, two “ESC” characters in a row.   Fortunately, I have not run into very many of these, since I have no idea how (or if it’s possible) to automate discovery (let alone fixing) of all possible types of bad Marc8 encoding output.

A note on MARC control character terminology

One confusing thing in dealing with this stuff that took me a while to figure out is how MARC uses it’s own special weird names for certain control characters.

MARC has a “Field Terminator” (which is sometimes called ‘field separator’ in marc docs instead of ‘terminator’) and a “Record Terminator” (also sometimes called ‘record separator’ in docs instead of ‘terminator’).

But the ascii values used for these special MARC control codes already had names in ascii, and they are confusingly similar but not the same names!  This certainly leads to confusion.

Marc “Field Terminator” == Hex 1E == Decimal 30 == Ascii “Record Separator” == “control-^” or “^^”, which is how stock vim will display it.

Marc “Record Terminator” == Hex 1D == Decimal 29 == Ascii “Group Separator” == “control-]” or “^]” which is how stock vim will display it.

(Correction 3 Feb, this next is also part of the marc standard):

Marc “Subfield Delimiter” ==  Hex 1F == Decimal 31 ==  Ascii “Unit Separator” == “control-_” or “^_” which is how it will show up in vim.

Also update 3 Feb 2010.  I made this little sign and now keep it on my wall next to my desk, so I can refer to it ha.

Filed under: General

One of my favorite blogs to check in on is Dodie Gaudet's QUICK T.S. Her most recent post, Perpetual Beta & Bibliographic Records nicely describes how catalogers have thought about bibliographic records in the past and suggests how we might want to change our approach.

Following the biggest change to cataloguing rules in a generation, CIG Scotland is delighted to welcome Alan Danskin from the British Library to talk about the implications of adopting RDA and FRBR.

Time: 9.30-12.30
Date: 20th April 2010
Venue: Edinburgh University Library, George Square, Edinburgh

This event is free, but places are limited and registration is essential. To register please contact Kathryn Penfold at kathryn.penfold@ed.ac.uk

Common Tag is an interesting project, it is an attempt to create more linked data.

Common Tag is an open tagging format developed to make content more connected, discoverable and engaging. Unlike free-text tags, Common Tags are references to unique, well-defined concepts, complete with metadata and their own URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can more easily create topic hubs, cross-promote their content, and enrich their pages with free data, images and widgets.

It uses RDFa. There is a tool, Zemanta, to help embed Common Tags in weblogs.

News from the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at LC.

Update No. 11 (February 2010) is now available on the MARC website (www.loc.gov/marc/). It is integrated into the documentation for each of the Online Full and Concise formats that are maintained on that site -- the Bibliographic format, Authority format, Holdings format, Classification format, and Community Information format. The documentation includes changes made to the MARC 21 formats resulting from proposals which were considered by the ALA ALCTS/LITA/RUSA Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee (MARBI), the Canadian Committee on MARC (CCM) and the BIC Bibliographic Standards Group in January 2010. Many of the changes in this update have been made to accommodate the new cataloging rules, Resource Description and Access (RDA). Note that no changes are needed to the Holdings, Classification, and Community Information Formats in this update.

The changes are indicated in red in Update 11. Update 10 (October 2009) changes have also been kept in red since that update was only recently issued and 10 and 11 are being combined. Each format also has an appendix, "Format Changes for Update No. 10 (October 2009) and Update No. 11 (February 2010)" that lists the changes that comprise the combined update. The Web version of the formats is the official version and is considered the start for implementation planning for MARC 21. Users are not expected to begin using the new features in the format until 60 days from the date of this announcement: May 5, 2010. For more information about format documentation see: http://www.loc.gov/marc/status.html

The printed version of the update will be available through the Cataloging Distribution Service in the future. The print format update will combine Updates 10 and 11 into one update dated 2009/February 2010. The printed publications will be announced when they are ready for distribution.

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 With the release of RDA, people on every blog and listserv and Twitter feed are debating its merits. But I’ll tell you right now: RDA is not going to work. Why?

 1. It’s not easy.

2. It’s not free.

You can debate it up, down and sideways, but honestly, it’s as simple as that. Clay Shirky (in Here Comes Everybody) says, “When an activity becomes more expensive, either in direct costs or increased hassle, people do less of it.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: cataloging is hard. When it’s hard to do things right, people will get it wrong. Through no fault of their own. Who can blame the cataloger who applies subject headings incorrectly when there are literally 4 volumes of instructions, many of which have different rules and guidelines for each different subject? Who can blame someone for misremembering if a colon or a semi-colon precedes the 300b field? Who can blame a person for entering the title of a work in title case, rather than lower case (except for the first word and proper nouns), especially when the former is a national community standard taught in elementary education. And who can blame someone for not following these outdated standards because technology makes them no longer applicable or necessary?

This needs to change. It’s impacting our ability to offer quality services and access to materials.  We need to make it easy to do things well.

 I understand how complicated and complex some aspects of cataloging can be. But I don’t think “complex” necessarily has to equal “difficult.” I think there are ways we can structure software and cataloging interfaces to work for us rather than against us. When I first heard of RDA and it’s requisite electronic interface, I had envisioned it to be something along the lines of a “choose your own adventure,” or an electronic flow chart, where answering questions about the resource in hand would lead to the complete, automated creation of a catalog record.

I understand the use of consistency and standards, and how previously this was achievable solely through human application. But that’s no longer the case–many of these outdated standards can be automated, and in turn, more consistent than applications prone to human error. And if the profession values such standards, and truly wants everyone and every library to adhere to and meet those standards in order to create more interoperability, those standards not only ned to be easy to implement, they need to be freely accessible.

Many librarians are balking at the cost of implementing RDA, I think rightfully so, although not for the same reasons. I’m not bitching about it because it’s unaffordable for smaller libraries, or because it’s a subscription rather than a one-time printed book cost (although I think those are valid points). I’m bitching because putting a dollar amount on something, now matter how low it is, will stop people from using something, especially if there’s a free alternative. In this case, I see the free alternative as ‘ignoring rules altogether and/or making you your own standards.’ Requiring a price makes adhering to standards–a key value-added service of libraries and librarians–inaccessible. Which is pretty ironic, considering that libraries are supposed to be all about access. We’re all proactive about offering access to our patrons, but we can’t extend that same philosophy to ourselves, to help us do a better job??

The more depth and complexity in cataloging standards, the more we need to make it as easy as possible for catalogers to apply these standards. More work will get done (and done correctly!), more tasks delegated, turn-around times improved, access increased–all of which benefit not only the cataloger and other library staff, but in turn the patron, which is ultimately what it’s all about.

Help us, ALA. Give us better, faster, easier, more efficient ways to do our jobs so that we can, in turn, make our patron’s information experiences better, faster, and more efficient. If you can’t or won’t help us, who will?

“Don't Knock Naps, They Make You Smarter” (USA Today Science Fair) and “Naps Clear Brain's Inbox, Improve Learning” (National Geographic Daily News) are news reports on research by Matthew Walker, University of California, Berkeley.  The research was described in a press release entitled “An Afternoon Nap Markedly Boosts the Brain’s Learning Capacity” but presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science under the title “Current Models of Mechanisms of Sleep-Dependent Memory.”  Here is an excerpt from USA Today Science Fair:

The interdisciplinary numbers for sleep, memory, and learning are in psychology.  The interdisciplinary number for sleep is 154.6 Sleep phenomena, e.g., The Mind in Sleep: Psychology and Psychophysiology. The number for memory is 153.12 Memory, e.g., Memory. The number for learning is 153.15 Learning, e.g., Human Learning.   Many works treat memory and learning together; they are classed in 153.1 Memory and learning, e.g., Learning and Memory: Basic Principles, Processes, and Procedures.  According to the rule of application, works about the effect of sleep on memory and learning are classed with memory and learning (see also Introduction section 5.7 [A]).

Works on the physiology of human sleep, memory, and learning are classed in subdivisions of 612.82 Brain. Works that focus on sleep are classed in 612.821 Sleep phenomena, e.g., The Neuroscience of Sleep and The Physiologic Nature of Sleep.  Works that focus on memory are classed in 612.823312 Memory—human physiology (built with 612.8233 Conscious mental processes and intelligence plus 12 from 153.12 Memory, following instruction at 612.8233), e.g., Neural Plasticity and Memory: From Genes to Brain Imaging and Neuroimaging of Human Memory: Linking Cognitive Processes to Neural Systems.  Works that focus on learning are classed in 612.823315 Learning—human physiology (built with 612.8233 plus 15 from 153.15 Learning, following instruction at 612.8233), e.g., The Autonomous Brain: A Neural Theory of Attention and Learning.

The Kingston University Archives and Special Collections houses a number of collections including The Iris Murdoch Collection and Vane Ivannovich Collection.
 
In 2009 the archive acquired the books and papers of renowned theatre critic Sheridan Morley (1941-2007). These include his collection of books as removed from his home, running into many thousands of volumes plus personal papers and other items such as volumes of press cuttings of his reviews; research notes for many of his biographies including that of Noel Coward; correspondence with many actors including John Gielgud, Alec Guinness and others.
 
The visit will showcase some of the items from the collection held by the archive and provide opportunity to discuss the challenges of cataloguing both the books and archive materials of this and other collections

Aim: To examine the challenges of the processing of a new archival collection.

Objectives:

To develop professional networks by meeting fellow professionals.

To gain knowledge of some of the process involved in the cataloguing and indexing of a large archival collection

 
Date: Wednesday 14th April 2010
Location: Kingston University Library, Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, KT1 2EE
Time: 2-4 pm
Limited to maximum 10 people. For more information, or to book a place, contact:
Katrina Clifford, Kingston University - k.clifford@kingston.ac.uk

The European RDA Interest group (EURIG) and the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC) are planning a seminar on the new cataloguing rules and their implications for libraries in Europe and in particular its non-English speaking cataloguing communities.

RDA in Europe: making it happen!  EURIG-JSC joint seminar, to be held at the Royal Library, Copenhagen, on 8th August 2010.

Topics to be covered during the seminar will include: RDA: background and context - RDA: a demonstration of the online toolkit - RDA: a non-Anglo-American perspective - Translation issues - Implementation plans - Future development of the rules - Reports from European countries considering a move to RDA - Time for discussion.

The programme is available at: http://www.slainte.org.uk/eurig/docs/EURIGJSCSeminar2010Programme.pdf

Further information at: http://www.slainte.org.uk/eurig/meetings.htm#eurigjsc2010 or from Anders Cato, email: anders.cato@kb.se.

Registration: http://rda.axaco.se

Hi all,

I have just uploaded a new version of MarcEdit to the website.  This version specifically addresses two bugs and introduces the Task Automation function into the application. 

Bug Fixes:

• Changes not saved in the MarcEditor:
  Under certain conditions, MarcEdit would lose track of changes made within the program.  This occurred primarily after changes had been made and then the Find All Function was used.  This has been corrected as of this version.
• Save As…file not found error:
  When using Save As to Save data, MarcEdit would throw an error if the file being saved did not previously exist.  This has been corrected as of this version.
• Invalid prompts to save a file before closing:
  MarcEdit tended to error on the side of always asking users to save their data before closing.   However, even if a user had saved their data, the message may still have popped up.  This has been corrected as of this version.
• Find/Replace – replacing without using Match Case:
  While it is always recommended when doing global replacements to do them using the Match Case option – prior to this version, unchecking the match case option would cause the replacement to take too many characters.  This has been corrected as of this version.

Enhancements:

• Task Automation tool:
  The task automation tool is a recorder that allows users chain together replacement functions.  Sadly, I haven’t been able to add information to the help file, however, I did record the following video tutorial to provide some initial background to get started using the function.  One quick note – this is a new tool so when using it, please verify changes.  Moreover, feedback is definitely appreciated.
  Video Tutorial:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmqTGfTubU4

You can download the updated version of MarcEdit at: MarcEdit_Setup.msi or the Linux/Mac/Other version build at: marcedit.zip.

–TR

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Ting is an initiative which is creating a shared systems and data infrastructure for Danish public libraries - and potentially others. At its heart is a 'data well', an enriched aggregate of data (see a list of data sources here). Another important component is Ding, a Drupal-based content management system for presenting library resources.

Libraries currently participating are Copenhagen and Aarhus public libraries. They are working with DBC, the provider of the Danish union catalog, bibliotek.dk, among other services,

Some features of the websites are described on the Ting blog. I liked the emphasis on the integration between website and database. Facets are on top of the results display rather than on the side. There is some work-based clustering. There is a nice suggestion feature on the search box.

Here is a high-level architectural view:

Ting is an interesting initiative. I do not have a lot of context to assess it. I do not know how well its aggregation of data will compare with others and I only spent a little while looking at the library websites. It provides an example of the shared approach I recently suggested would become more important. I was introduced to it last week in a nice presentation by Mats Hernvall at a meeting in Lund. He discussed the importance of scale and collaboration in developing library services and noted that DBC were interested in further partnerships.

Note: updated from beta to production URLs for the library websites.

I heard Anders Söderbäck of the Royal Library in Sweden speak in Lund last week on the perennial topic 'what is a library'. He reminded us of Daniel Dennett's remark:

This in turn reminded me of a post I did here a while ago about Dan Chudnov's definition of the mission of the library:

Dan Chudnov has an interesting post on the mission of the library. What is the all-consuming mission of the library? His answer is an interesting one, which on reflection works surprisingly well. He argues that his professional mission as a librarian is this:

Help people build their own libraries.
[Because this is the business we've chosen | One Big Library.]

What I like about this is that it - if I understand it correctly - covers emerging as well as current scenarios. Examples: to help with the creation, organization and curation of locally created materials, or to help with shared bookmarking/citation management/reading list services. As I suggest elsewhere we are developing a new vocabulary of collections: playlists, reading lists, repository, ... [Hedgehogs]

Here is Daniel Dennett in Worldcat Identities.

Related entry:

• What is the library

In preparing some recent presentations I have been talking about three primary ways of experiencing the web which emerged successively and continue to work together. Here I will call them the site-web, the search-web, and the context-web (alternatives might be site-centric, network-centric, and user-centric).

Site-web. Our early experience of the web tended to focus on individual websites. Enumeration of websites was common, in lists, directories and guides.

Search-web. Attention soon shifted to the network of websites as a whole and search quickly emerged as central to our web experience. Google rose to prominence based on the insight - expressed in its pagerank algorithm - that not all websites are equal.

Search is now our primary way of finding resources and navigating the web. This was underlined, I think, by the introduction of the single box in the Chrome browser for both URL entry and search. A while ago, I was looking for something with my son. He was amused that I was typing in a longish URL - search is how he goes to everything, even where he knows the URL.

Context-web. It seems to me that we are now moving to what I call for my purposes here the context-web. Search remains important but is no longer enough. We expect services not only to know about resources on the web, but also to know about us. We are seeing servces contextualised by their knowledge of people using those services and their relationships. Think about how Google is incorporating location- and social-based results in their searches. If I search for cameras, I will be shown mapped results from near Dublin Ohio and I will be shown what people in my 'social circle' are saying about cameras (my 'social circle' is what Google knows about people in my social networks - Twitter and so on). As the recent controversy about Buzz showed, Google knows quite a bit about me through my use of is services (I regularly use Search, Reader and Gmail, and dip into other services).

Facebook and Twitter also know something about me. As does Microsoft, where I have a Zune profile where I can 'friend' my son who has an Xbox profile (and indeed I can see his Xbox friends).

Much of the current competition we see between the big web/media companies relates to the management of our context. Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and Apple would like to be able to mobilize our context to provide more valuable services.

Code4Lib has wrapped up. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend this year. But the Code4Lib people are great about posting presentations to their wiki site. Just as in past years, presentations are now being posted at: http://code4lib.org/conference/2010/schedule#conf. Also, check out the “Recent Comments” section where some of the presentations are being posted as PDFs.

Some of the topics from the conference:

• The cloud
• Linked data
• Cloud computing
• Library metadata
• Enhancing your ILS
• and so much more…

Filed under: cataloging, Linked data Tagged: Code4, metadata

The main reason that I keep pushing the semantic web is not that I think the semantic web is the answer to all of our problems -- but I do think we need to have something to be moving toward in terms of transforming our data carrier to something both more modern and web-compatible. The semantic web gives us some basic concepts of data design. I'm not sure that the semantic web concepts will hold for data as complex as the library bibliographic record, but there's only one way to find out: do it. That's a huge task, of course.

The first question to be answered is: What are our data elements? In theory, this should be one of the simpler questions, but it's not. I can create a list of all of the MARC fields, subfields, and fixed field elements (which I have, and they are linked from this page of the futurelib wiki), but that doesn't answer the question. Here's why:

Indicators

The indicators in the MARC fields are like a wild card in poker -- they can be used to utterly transform the play. Some of the indicators are simple and probably can be dismissed: the non-filing indicators and the indicators that control printing. Some are data elements in themselves: "Existence in NAL collection" is essentially a binary data element. Many further refine the meaning of the field, allowing the field to carry any one of a number of related subelements:

Second - Type of ring

# - Not applicable

0 - Outer ring

1 - Exclusion ring

Others name the source of the term, such as LCSH or MeSH. It'll take a fair amount of work to figure out what all of these qualifiers mean in terms of actual data elements.

Redundancy

There is non-textual (although not non-string) data in the MARC record, primarily in the fixed fields (00X) but also in some of the number and code fields (0XX). Some of these, actually most of these, are redundant with display information in the body of the record. Should these continue to be separate data elements, or can we remove this redundancy and still have useful user displays? Basically, having the same information entered in two different ways in your data is just begging for trouble and we've all seen fixed field dates and display (260 $c) dates that contradict each other.

Inconsistency

Primarily due to the constraints of the MARC format, the same information has been coded differently in different fields. A personal author entry in the 100 field uses subfields abcdejqu; in the 760 linking entry field, all of that data is entered into subfield a. It's the same data element, and by that I mean that the some contents are contained in the concatenation of abcdejqu as in a. Bringing together all of these krufty bits into a more rational data definition is something I really long for.

And of course my favorite... data buried in text

So much of our data isn't data, it's text, or it's data buried in text. My favorite example is the ISBN. Everyone knows how important the ISBN is in all kinds of bibliographic linking operations. But there isn't a place in our record for the ISBN as a data element. Instead, there is a subfield that takes the ISBN as well as other information.

020 __ |a 0812976479 (pbk.)

This means that every system that processes MARC records has to have code that separates out the actual ISBN from whatever else might be in the subfield. Other buried information includes things like pagination and size or other extents:

300 __ |a 1 sound disc : |b analog, 33 1/3 rpm, stereo. ; |c 12 in.

300 __ |a 376 p. ; |c 21 cm.

---

Once this analysis is done (and I do need help, yes, thank you!), it may be possible to compare MARC to the RDA elements and see where we do and don't have a match. I have a drafty web page where I am putting the lists I'm creating of RDA elements, but I will try to get it all written up on the futurelib wiki so it's all in one place. I encourage others to grab this data and play with it, or to start doing whatever you think you can do with the registered RDA vocabularies. And please post your results somewhere and let me know so that I can gather it all, probably on the wiki.

This was a quiet week in FRBRville, as far as I know. If you know different, do speak up!

upstream.openlibrary.org

upstream.openlibrary.org is public. It’s the new look for Open Library. Have a look at, for example, the work The Maltese Falcon, which links to 27 editions (or Manifestations), including this 1989 Vintage printing.

If you want to grab the data about that edition, you can get it in JSON or get it in RDF.

DAISY news

A news note from the Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) Consortium about funding supported by the Ulverscroft Foundation “to assist the development of library services for print disabled people worldwide and to foster cooperation between library services serving these persons.”

Kathy Teague and Wendy Taylor, Librarians, RNIB National Library Service, UK

Kathy and Wendy are responsible for coordinating the Cataloguing Working Group of the IFLA LPD’s Global Accessible Library Project and are involved in the acquisition of a new library management system by RNIB NLS. They wish to visit the Celia Library in Helsinki, Finland to study their implementation of the new FRBR bibliographic model [Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records] which permits the assigning of relationships between different accessible formats of the same work. Celia belongs to the Finnish DAISY Consortium and is the first specialist library in this field to implement this model. Their visit has clear potential to enhance the DAISY Consortium member RNIB’s services and worldwide developments. Ulverscroft has offered 2,700 to fund this visit.

Originally posted in shorter version as a comment on a post by Karen Coyle on this issue…

The frustrating thing here is that libraries ARE willing to pay a reasonable amount to SUBMIT their holdings to an ILL service, such as OCLC’s, which (unlike their cataloging copy service) really has no competitive peers (yet…?).

Libraries get no DIRECT benefit from this — submitting holdings just means other libraries can more easily request things from YOU, and I don’t think fulfilling ILL requests is usually a profit center. Libraries are willing to do it just to serve the larger community, and out of “generalized reciprocity” where they realize that we all need to submit holdings so we call can request from each other.

Libraries ARE still willing to pay a reasonable fee to fulfill their community responsibilities to resource sharing. They’re just not willing to pay an UNREASONABLE fee, or to be ‘locked in’ to buying cataloging from a service that is not the best quality-to-price point for them, in order to continue resource sharing!

(MSU noted they pay tens of thousands of dollars for the reosurce sharing/ILL service, and are willing to keep paying that, just not an unreasonable per-record rate for loading:)

Regarding these statements, MSU’s Haka wrote, “The contention has been made that actions such as ours seek to undermine the WorldCat database. I would simply respond that the price currently quoted to upload these records into the database is the factor that should be questioned.” He also notes that the $88,500 MSU pays for resource sharing “does not seem like freeloading.”

So… you think we’ll see a SkyRiver resource sharing network too? (I guess III already has one? Maybe they’ll provide infrastructure to open it up to non-III libraries?  Although III’s own reputation/history for promoting ‘lock in’ at all costs…  Is SkyRiver itself open and useable by non-III libraries?)

I don’t know if OCLC’s actions are an intentional attempt at forcing ‘lock in’, or due to unfortunate lack of technical flexibility in their back-end systems.

But if the former, it’s just as likely to backfire, and cause them to lose the Resource Sharing business that libraries were perfectly happy to keep with OCLC at a reasonable price!

What I would do if I were king of OCLC

Which I am clearly not.

1) Work with SkyRiver to get OCLC numbers added to as many SkyRiver records as possible. Not share cataloging copy, but merely get a SkyRiver cataloging record to have a MARC field somewhere meaning “this record represents the same manifestation as OCLC record # N.”  OCLC already has quite a bit of technical expertise with this kind of record matching, from their ‘reclamation service’. Charge SkyRiver a reasonable rate for this service, which SkyRiver is going to be willing to pay if the price is reasonable, because SkyRiver is worried about not being able to attract cataloging customers if they become locked out of OCLC resource sharing, and having OCLC numbers on the records will lead to…

2) Perhaps some of the apparently unreasonable expense of OCLC’s “just add holdings” quotes to MSU is not just an attempt to punish/enforce lock-in, but is actually because it’s expensive to load holdings from non-OCLC records, because you’ve first got to figure out what OCLC record they correspond to. But if the ‘foreign’ records have an OCLC number equivalency in them, as above, then it becomes technically must more feasible/efficient/cheap.   So OCLC can offer a much more reasonable per-record price for loading holdings (not loading the records themselves, with another vendor’s copy; just holdings attachments)  from records that have an OCLC equivalency in them.

OCLC gets to retain resource sharing record loading income from customers moving to other vendors for cataloging, instead of losing them entirely. OCLC gets a new revenue stream from vendors such as SkyRiver, paying to establish OCLC equivalencies on their records.  SkyRiver’s happy, because their customers aren’t being ‘locked in’ to OCLC.  Libraries are happy, because services have been “de-coupled” and they can choose the service at the best quality/price point for them. OCLC members who request items via the resource sharing service are happy, because their database of holdings continues to be as comprehensive as possible (and OCLC is happy that their valuable database of holdings maintains and increases in value with as many holdings as possible).

If lots of OCLC members move their cataloging away from OCLC, OCLC is still going to lose net revenue, but I think that’s inevitable at this point, the train’s already left the station. Better to establish revenue streams for their (without peer) resource network from libraries that are cataloging elsewhere, then to lose those too.

Many OCLC members are already purchasing cataloging from other vendors in addition to OCLC.  Many of those records do not end up having holdings registered in OCLC.  If those vendors could be brought into the fold as above, then it’s more revenue for OCLC, and more holdings in their database making their database more valuable (which is what gives value to their resource sharing service, and other services like WorldCat in the first place).

You can try to stick to the business model of 20 years ago, harming the interests of actual libraries in the process, and probably fighting a losing battle anyway. Or you can adjust to new environments with new business models. OCLC has still got a lot of valueable assets — discouraging people from supplying records to their resource sharing network (with infeasible prices) threatens to reduce the value of their assets.

In fact, even calling that a 20 year old business model might not be accurate. When OCLC still had competitors like RLG, did OCLC allow libraries who purchased cataloging copy from other sources to attach holdings for resource sharing at a reasonable cost?  I’m not sure if they did or not. But if they did… what’s changed?  If they did, that would make it seem like it’s less of a technical issue, and more of OCLC trying to take advantage of their (possibly short-lived) monopoly position to lock in customers. (Anti-trust issues?).

Filed under: General

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We talk a lot about de-coupling of software, so you are not stuck with a monolithic stack of software, but can mix and match components that meet your needs.

The same thing applies to vendor services. Apparently OCLC will not really let you share your holdings for ILL with them unless you also buy your cataloging copy from them. (How much of your cataloging copy? Few OCLC members get 100% of their copy cataloging from OCLC, despite the policy fiction to the contrary).

Okay, officially they’ll “let” you, but they’ll charge you a prohibitive enough fee to make it infeasible.

Cathy De Rosa, VP for the Americas and Global VP of Marketing for OCLC, sought to clarify the situation in a conversation with LJ….De Rosa framed MSU’s request as essentially a request for the cooperative to perform “data stewardship” duties for MSU’s records, in addition to the services provided by the resource-sharing subscription, but said “that’s not the way the cost-share model works today.”

It’s not entirely clear to me how sharing your holdings for ILL (OCLC’s original Raison d’être, right?) necessarily involves “data stewardship”, but I don’t know the details of how OCLC’s systems work.

OCLC may very well be constrained here by technical limitations of their system (their own lack of ‘decoupling’ in their in-house software), not simply by a business decision. Perhaps there is no efficient way for OCLC to load your holdings if you aren’t doing copy cataloging, it ends up costing them just the same either way.

If so, that’s unfortunate, for everyone involved. It seems to me that it’s in the interest of OCLC members, OCLC as an organization, and libraries that may be considering OCLC services — to let you share your holdings for ILL even if you aren’t buying cataloging copy from OCLC.  It means that OCLC’s holdings registry for ILL sharing (and for WorldCat API’s) remains competetive, remains the best around. Driving people away from sharing holdings only hurts OCLC, does it not?

Unless they think they can trap people into buying (some large percentage) of their cataloging from OCLC by this “coupling”.   But that ship has already left the harbor, I bet almost all OCLC members are buying non-trivial supplementary cataloging records from other vendors, and more and more will consider cheaper alternatives for larger portions of their cataloging.   If OCLC can’t compete in quality-per-dollar, they aren’t going to be able to succeed in ‘trapping’ libraries into buying cataloging anyway.    If they try, they’re just going to send their OTHER services, that libraries DO want to keep paying for, down the road to ruin too.

“We share the resources, and we share the costs,” she concluded, noting that the cooperative also invests significantly in activities such as: “data stewardship, infrastructure and standards support, FRBR, controlled vocabulary services, WorldCat Identities, crosswalks between metadata formats, record enhancement, automated record delivery from vendor partners, MARC format updates, name authorities management, audience-level data work, mapping and visual data discovery, and a growing number of WorldCat APIs for linking to Web services, to name a few of the shared services.”

That’s right, and those WorldCat API’s are really great and in my opinion significantly increase the value of an OCLC full membership.  But OCLC’s going to have to compete on service and cost, they’re not (I predict, I hope) going to succeed by ‘trapping’ their customers into paying for services whether they like them or not, using a ‘lock-in’ model very reminiscent of the same methods we don’t like when our ILS vendors do it.

De-coupling, as with software, so with vendor services, so with cooperatives.

I think OCLC ought to not only allow holdings-sharing without record-buying, but ought to be aggressively getting OCLC numbers on other vendors records, to make it as efficient as possible for libraries to share their holdings with OCLC regardless of where they get their cataloging. (And it needs to be said again for repetition, that there are probably few OCLC members left who do no copycataloging from anywhere but OCLC).  That will keep OCLC’s holdings database the best there is, and keep their services built on that holdings database (ILL, worldcat, worldcat API’s) without any competetive peer — even if their cataloging service doesn’t remain so, as it already has not.

Filed under: General

Lynne over at Cataloging Aids has created a nice summary of the correct order of subfields for the 245 Marc tag.

Location aware services in a digital library world

This is the third post in a series of three

[1. Mainframe to mobile - 2. Mobile app or mobile web? - 3. Mobile library services]

While library systems technology and mobile apps architecture make up the technical and functional infrastructure of mobile web access, mobile library services are what it’s all about. What type of mobile services should libraries offer to their customers?

As stated before, the two main features that distinguish mobile, handheld devices from other devices are:

• web access any time anywhere
• location awareness

It seems obvious that libraries should take these two conditions into account when providing mobile services, not in the least the first one. I don’t think that mobile devices will completely replace other devices like pc’s and netbooks, like Google seems to think, but they will definitely be an important tool for lots of people, simply because they always carry a mobile phone with them. So in order to offer something extra, mobile applications should be focused on the situational circumstance of potential access to information any time anywhere, and make use of the location awareness of the device as much a possible. But does this also apply to services for library customers? That partly depends on the type of library (public, academic, special) and the physical and geographical structure of the library (one central location, branch locations).

As a starting point we can say that mobile library services should cover the total range of online library services already offered through traditional web interfaces. However, mobile users may not want to use certain library services on their mobile devices. For instance, from an analysis of usage statistics of EBSCO Mobile at the Library of Texas A&M University, generously provided by Bennett Ponsford, it appears that although the number of searches in EBSCO mobile is increasing, only 1% of mobile searches leads to a fulltext download, against 77% of regular EBSCO searches. These findings suggest that library customers, at least academic ones, are willing to search for books and articles on their mobile devices, but will postpone actually using them until they are in a more convenient environment. Apparently small screens and/or mobile PDF readers are not very reader friendly in academic settings. This may be different for public library customers and e-books.

So, libraries should concentrate on offering those mobile services that are wanted and will actually be used. In the beginning this may involve analysis of usage statistics and customer feedback to be able to determine the perfect mobile services suite for your library. Libraries should be prepared for “perpetual beta” and “agile development”.

There are two main areas of information in which libraries can offer mobile services:

• practical information
• bibliographical information

This is no different from other library information channels, like normal websites and printed guides and catalogues.

Practical information may consist of contact address, email and telephone information, opening hours, staff information, rules and regulations of any kind, etc. In most cases this is information that does not change very often, so static information pages will be sufficient. However, especially with mobile devices who’s owners are on the move, providing dynamic up to date information will give an advantage. For instance: today’s and tomorrow’s opening hours, number of currently available public workstations per location, etc.

The information provided will be even more precisely aimed at the user’s personal situation, if the “location awareness” feature is added to the “any time anywhere” feature, and up to date static and dynamic information for the locations in the immediate vicinity of the customer is shown first, using the device’s automatic geolocation properties. And all this gets better still if the library’s own information is mashed up with available online tools, like showing a location on Google Maps when selecting an address, and with the device’s tools, like making a phone call when clicking on a phone number.

Bibliographical information should be handled somewhat differently. Searching library catalogues or online databases is in essence not location dependent. Online digital bibliographical metadata is available “in the cloud” any time anywhere. It’s not the discovery but the delivery that makes the difference. We have already seen that mobile academic library customers do not download fulltext articles to their mobile devices. But mobile customers will definitely be interested in the possibility of requesting a print item to be delivered to them in the nearest location. WorldCat Mobile, like “normal” WorldCat, for instance offers the option to select a library manually from a list in order to find the nearest location to obtain an item from. It would of course be nice if the delivery location would be automatically determined by the mobile request service, using the device’s location awareness and the current opening hours of the library branches.

The funny thing here is that we have the paradoxical situation of state-of-the-art technology in a world of global online digital information being used to obtain “old fashioned” physical carriers of information (books) from the nearest physical location.

Augmented reality, as a link between the physical and virtual world, may be a valuable extension of mobile services. A frequently mentioned example is scanning a book cover or a barcode with the camera of a mobile phone and locating the item on Amazon. It would be helpful if your phone could automatically find and request the item in the nearest library branch. Personally I am not convinced that this is very valuable. Typing in ISBN or book title will do the job just as fast. Moreover, bookshop staff may not appreciate this behaviour.

A more common use of augmented reality would be to point the camera of your mobile device to a library building, after which a variety of information about the building is shown. The best known augmented reality app at the moment is Layar. This tool allows you to add a number of “layers”, with which you can for instance find the nearest ATM’s or museums, or Wikipedia information about physical objects or locations around you.

There is also a LibraryThing Local layer for Layar, with which you can find

information about all libraries, bookshops and book related events in the neighbourhood. It may even be possible to find a specific book in an open stack using this technology.

All these extended mobile applications suggest that users of apps may not just be a specific group of people (like library customers), but that mobile users will be interested in all kinds of useful information about their current location. Library information may be only a part of that. Maybe mobile apps should be targeted at a more general audience and include related information from other sources, making use of the linked data concept.

A search in a library catalog in this case may result in a list of books with links to related objects in a museum nearby or a historic location related to the subject of the book. Alternatively, an item in a museum website might have links to related literature in catalogs of nearby libraries. Anything is possible.

The question that remains is: should libraries take care of providing these generic location based services, or will others do that?

Today I received a copy of a letter written by Roman Kochan, Dean and Director of Library Services at the California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). It's the perfect day for this, because today is the national day of protest in support of education. This movement has blossomed (exploded?) over the deep cuts the California state legislature has made to the education budget in the state, cuts which are having a devastating effect on the CSU system, with the libraries extremely hard hit.

The letter is addressed to "Link+™ Member Libraries and ILL Partners." The subject line on Kochan's letter reads: Threat to CSULB Library's ILL Participation. He states that faced with budget cuts, not only this year but foreseeable for many years to come, CSULB decided to move to SkyRiver™ as their cataloging utility, with anticipated significant savings.

The next three paragraphs are worth quoting in their entirety:

"We notifed OCLC of this decision, while at the same time advising them of the Library's intent to continue membership in OCLC, to continue to make use of OCLC interlibrary loan services, and to contribute records for our current and future acquisitions to OCLC for batch upload. OCLC's charge for batch upload was (until recently) popsted on the OCLC website as 23¢ per record. That is the amount I referred to in my letter to the organization. I have subsequently learned that:

• The price schedule for batch downloading [sic, read: uploading] that contained the 23¢ charge has suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from the OCLC website
• Another academic library that chose to displace OCLC with SkyRiver reports that OCLC has quoted a revised charge for downloading their records that amounts to about $2.85 per record; it is a charge that they report would effectively (and one might not think coincidentally) offset the savings accrued from their change to SkyRiver.
  

The irony in all of this is that CSULB will still be able to have up-to-date ILL services using INN-Reach and Link+, the Innovative Interfaces (III) ILL service. It's ironic because SkyRiver was founded by Jerry Kline, the owner of III. Link+ is undoubtedly of smaller reach than OCLC's ILL services, but may in the long run grow if more III libraries move to SkyRiver.

Offsetting the cost of having a library move to another vendor may make some economic sense, but this is a matter that will need to get cleared up before other libraries move to SkyRiver thinking that they'll be able to upload their records to OCLC for $.23. MSU and CSULB were caught be surprise, which is very unfortunate.

The Record Use Policy Council has posted an announcement [http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/policy/council/update/default.htm] describing the current state of their work on drafting a new policy for the use of WorldCat records. More information on the Council, including its membership and historical background, can be found in the press release describing its creation: http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/200948.htm .

Some highlights:

• A draft of the policy will be circulated to OCLC's Board of Trustees in April, for the Board to distribute to OCLC's Global and Regional Councils.The member comment period will be in April and May. Member comments will be incorporated into a new policy at the end of May.
  

Please join us for the Dewey Breakfast/Update at the PLA National Conference 2010 on Thursday, March 25, 7:00–8:00 a.m., Doubletree Hotel Portland, Oregon Room.

To keep you up to date with all matters Dewey, we will have presentations on the new WebDewey 2.0 (the development of which is coming along nicely) and on applications of our linked data web service dewey.info (with an exciting real-live demo of how the service has been implemented using mobile devices to support multilingual access into a public library’s catalog). There will also be an open discussion period—bring those burning Dewey questions and suggestions!

If you haven’t done so already, please register for the Dewey Breakfast/Update here. See you soon in Portland!

Library Anywhere, our upcoming product that provides a mobile catalog (both mobile web and native apps) for any library, just got an excellent write-up on the ALA TechSource blog: LibraryThing Delivers Mobile Access to Library Catalogs.

The article, by Marshall Breeding, will also appear in the March 2010 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter.

Breeding says of Library Anywhere,

"With the high level of functionality and the low pricing, this competition will lower the threshold for mobile technology into the reach of almost any library."

We're certainly excited about Library Anywhere, and are busy at work on it. We'll have more to show off soon!

I was lucky enough to be included on a “behind the scenes” bibliographic services tour for fellow professionals at the City of London Libraries on Wednesday 24^th February 2010. This took place at the Guildhall library site, Aldermanbury, London.

A brief introduction explained that the City of London libraries are a public library service consisting of six different libraries (three lending and three reference libraries). The Archives have now been transferred to the London Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell but the acquisition and cataloguing of the bookstock for the LMA library still takes place at Guildhall. The bibliographic services team has five professional posts, two bibliographic support assistants, one principal library assistant, four and a half library assistants and a half general support role.

The City of London Libraries use the Talis library management suite system, AACR2, MARC21 and Dewey Decimal classification system. Their OPAC catalogue is available at

http://onlinecatalogue.cityoflondon.gov.uk

 The tour of the acquisitions and cataloguing sections took the form of “the journey of the book” where we followed a book through the various stages of ordering, accessioning, cataloguing and shelf preparation in real time. Each library orders it’s own stock, but all the cataloguing is done centrally in Bibliographic services. All non fiction is purchased through Askews who prepare the book with RFID tag, issue slip, plastic jacket and spine label before dispatch. The classification number is assigned by cataloguers before ordering so that Askews can pre label. Several other classification systems have been used in the past and there is an ongoing reclassification project to align all stock to DDC22 numbers.

The material catalogues a range of material from books, pamphlets, music scores, maps, electronic resources, rare books, DVDs to children’s toys for the Toy library. 

Diane Tough

March 1 Dublin Core turned 15. Seems just yesterday....

I saw this in the latest NISO Newsline, always worth reading.

I'll be in new Orleans this weekend. Any suggestions for family-friendly attractions to visit. It is for a wedding, so I don't expect we'll have lots of time, but an hour or two to see some sights should work. Does the Catholic church in Lafayette Jackson Square have a Sunday mass? Is the church worth seeing? Coffee-au-lait and begniees at that shop across the street Cafe du Monde after might make for a nice Sunday morn. Where best to see the River? Any nice parks along it? Thanks.

Thursday. The Saint Louis Cathedral has a 9 am mass on Sunday, still not sure if it is worth seeing inside, but that and then Cafe du Monde might make a nice Sunday morn. The Aquarium sounds good. There is a park from there along the River that might be a nice walk. All depends on how much free time we have. Thanks for the suggestions.

Our friends over at the Technical Issues Working Group of EDUG, the European DDC Users’ Group, have just let us know that they are conducting an online survey of applications of the DDC to help EDUG to plan its activities and determine priorities for technical development. The results will also be shared with OCLC and the DDC editorial team.

They would like to hear not only from European libraries, but from Dewey users all over the world. The survey questionnaire should only take a few minutes to complete and submit. So if your library uses the DDC in one way or the other, please let them know; your participation in the survey is greatly appreciated. The survey is available at http://www.slainte.org.uk/edugit/edugsurvey/survey.cfm.

We’ve all got a lot of data in MARC (that statement making sense shows that MARC is effectively a data vocabularly, not just a transmission standard, but anyway, moving on), that we need to sling around between applications, including for many of us “next generation” discovery tools that need to index it.

Marc21 binary format is the ‘native’ marc transmission format for our data. It’s got some benefits; it’s a ‘lowest common denominator’ that systems we work with are most likely to produce and consume; it’s fairly fast to de-serialize (I was going to say ‘parse’, but ‘deserialize’ is probably more accurate for a format like Marc21).

However binary Marc21 has got some significant problems too:

• If your programming language of choice doesn’t already have a robust, well-performing, free library for serializing/deserializing Marc21, it’s kind of a bear to write one. It’s a very weird format in some ways (offset data encoded as ascii numerals?), and an overly complex data format for contemporary standards.  Just because you think you have a library available doesn’t neccesarily mean that open source library is as robust or well-performing as you might hope.
• Just because an existing system (like an ILS) says it outputs Marc21 doesn’t neccesarily mean it outputs legal Marc21.  If some records are structurally illegal in certain ways, they may not be de-serializable on the other end, or may take more complex and less-well-performing de-serialization code on the other end.  The weirdness and complexity of the marc21 format (see above) contributes to this prevalence  of non-compliant output.
• Perhaps most significantly, binary Marc21 has a maximum length. A legal marc binary Marc21 record can’t be any larger than 99999 bytes (10k). While this must have seemed larger than you’d ever want in the 1960s, currently it’s often not large enough for us — especially when you try to include ‘item’ information in a marc bib record (which isn’t standard, but is often done for various reasons).

To get around these problems, many people choose to work with MarcXML instead of binary Marc21 when they can.  And MarcXML does get around the problems listed above pretty well, but involves a couple trade-offs which in some circumstances don’t matter, but in others do:

• A MarcXML file generally has a much larger file size than it’s equivalent Marc21.
• A MarcXML file is often significantly slower to deserialize than it’s equivalent Marc21.

In many cases, those issues don’t matter at all. But in some cases, they are unfortunate. (Like when you are exporting, re-indexing, and re-storing your entire multi-million-record Marc corpus).

So some people came up with the idea of marc in Json. If you can serialize marc in xml, why not do something very similar to serialize marc in Json in a standard way?  Json is much more compact than XML, and typically faster to parse. While still being a standard beyond the library world (meaning there are tools to support it and validate it). And without the issues of marc21 binary including length limits.

In fact, I know of a couple people who independently had this idea of marc-json, but Bill Dueber did a little proto- mini- spec for a standard way to do marc in json, so different people writing tools can do it can be inter-operable.

I encourage anyone dealing with these issues to consider marc-json per Bill’s proto-mini-spec.  I plan/hope to!

Filed under: General

Bram Stoker’s Dracula in FRBR Terms

From Melvin Yabut.

Dunsire on FRBR and RDF

In Re: FRBRer & FRAD in Registry Gordon Dunsire gives a good long answer on the DC-RDA mailing list about how FRBR, RDA and RDF are fitting together and where things are at.

Coyle asks about relations

On RDA-L, Karen Coyle asked a Question about RDA relationships (App. J):

I’m pondering the RDA relationships, as defined in Appendix J. I need clarification …

A relationship is between two “things”. FRBR has lists of Work-Work relationships, Expression-Work relationships, etc. Appendix J lists relationships as either Work, Expression, Manifestation or Item relationships. So…

1) are all relationships in Appendix J between equivalent entities? e.g. are they all Work-Work, Expression-Expression?

2) If not, how can one tell what the two “things” are that are being related?

3) I don’t find some relationships that seem to be key: Expression of; Manifestation of; Item of; Translation of (Expression as translation of Work)

I have other questions, but don’t want to muddy the waters … yet.

Lengthy and informative discussion ensued.

Hammond, Is FRBR the OSI for Web Architecture?

Following up on Does a CrossRef DOI identify a “work?” we have Tony Hammond’s Is FRBR the OSI for Web Architecture?

FRBR is a useful reference model to clarify some of these concepts. But not one that we are overly concerned with at this time. Nor even whether DOI maps one to one onto a given FRBR layer. What we are more concerned with on a pragmatic level is how DOI maps onto the Web architecture and especially how it plays along with Linked Data concepts.

(Aside: A propos FRBR we might be in danger of repeating the OSI mistake for standardizing the network layer model. Ultimately that was maintained as a reference model but dropped as a concrete model in favour of the TCP/IP stack. Could be that FRBR is our OSI and Linked Data is our TCP/IP stack? That is, we might have to settle on the coarser data model in order to get a coherent story out the door where all can agree.)

The OSI model is seven layers that describe networking from the most basic physical level up to protocols used by applications (such as HTTP). IP (Internet Protocol) is at layer three, and TCP (Transport Control Protocol) is at layer four. Together, as TCP/IP, they’re what make the Internet work. There’s a really interesting idea summarized in the penultimate line in my quote, but I don’t know enough about networking to expand on the comparison.

Chaudri et al, Towards a Toolkit for Implementing Application Profiles

Towards a Toolkit for Implementing Application Profiles, by Talat Chaudhri, Julian Cheal, Richard Jones, Mahendra Mahey and Emma Tonkin, in Ariadne 62 (January 2010). Lots of FRBR throughout.

Dublin Core Application Profiles are intended to be based upon an application model [8], which can be extremely simple. This article concentrates on the recent set of JISC-funded application profiles, which make use of application models based on variants of FRBR [9], and which follow the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles [10]. While application profiles are by no means limited to repositories and can for instance be implemented in such wide-ranging software environments as Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), Virtual Research Environments (VREs) and eAdmin, this paper focusses in the first instance on digital repositories [11]. However, these wider areas are within the broader scope of this study and it is intended that future work will address them more specifically.

Open Knowledge Foundation, “create FRBR model in RDF”

I’m not sure what this is: Ticket #41 (new task): create FRBR model in RDF. Something to do with a project at the Open Knowledge Foundation about works in the public domain?

LeGrow, RDA Is On the Way

Lynne LeGrow posted about a presentation she gave on 18 February: RDA Is On the Way. General overview of what’s going on, with some FRBR, of course, and a Jane Austen example.

Facts on File is offering MARC records for free for their databases.

Facts On File is pleased to provide our subscribers with free MARC records for its reference databases. Multiple records exist for each online resource to meet the different needs of schools, public libraries, and academic institutions.

The records have either LC, LC Annotated, or Sears subject headings.

For the past week or so, the cataloging discussion lists conversations have focused on publishers metadata, ONIX, and how to crosswalk it with MARC and RDA. So, it was timely to find this post on the importance of metadata from the publisher's viewpoint. 

Laura Dawson, publishing industry consultant, writes in Metadata! More Important Than Ever! about the expanding need for good, accurate metadata in the web environment and how the publishing industry has fallen short in the past.

h/t ResourceShelf

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After the success of cataloging the 1963 White House Library, we've made it into a monthly thing.

This month, starting at 12:00 noon EST Wednesday, March 3, and continuing for 24 hours, we're going to be cataloging the on-board library of the U.S.S. California, as it was in 1905.

This California's library catalog were written up and published by the Government Printing Office, and has been scanned by the Internet Archive. Designed to serve the California's 830-odd officers and men—the libraries were separate—it offers a unique view of the navy of the time, and of the country. The ship, then rechristened the San Diego, and its library, went to the bottom of the ocean in 1918, the victim of a German U-boat. Six sailors died.

• Check out the talk thread
• Jeremy has set up a wiki page
• All see the USSCalifornia library as it develops

The "Legacy Mob" is an amalgam of two LibraryThing inventions:

• The Legacy Library, where members catalog famous or notable past collections, like that of Jefferson, Hemingway or the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
• The Flash-Mob Cataloging, where members show up to catalog a small collection, like the Rhode Island Audubon or St. John's Church in Beverly, MA

As some of you know, I’ve been lobbying for quite a while for new ILS/catalog software for our  library. Lobbying hard, considering our current state. I feel like we’ve made some successful progress: we had a great library staff committee to evaluate potential commercial software packages, and once we decided on our top choice and presented it to the director and the administration, the response was positive. However, at approximately the same time, the world decided to have some sort of Giant Economic Crisis, and despite the fact that it may truly be an unnecessary precaution for our institution, all software budgets were frozen until the beginning of FY2010. Not to worry though—I’ve been assured it’s our #1 top priority the minute the 2010 budget opens up. But I’m not exactly holding my breath here. What can I say? I’m frustrated that this project—in the works for several years now, since shortly after I first began working here—might be put off yet again, not just because I’m annoyed by delays or buget frustrations, but because I can’t understand why something so intrinsic to improving patron experience and access success seems to be so inconsequential to the powers that be. So it goes.

While I’m perfectly satisfied with the out-of-the-box product we’ve chosen and I have no doubts it will more than fulfill our current needs, some part of my mind can’t help wonder what a catalog for our patrons might be like if we could design it ourselves, from scratch, to specifically meet our patrons’ unique needs, rather than settling for the best pre-made system that addresses most of them in a traditional library way. Because I’ve never quite been sold on the idea that a traditional “library catalog” interface would be the best discovery tool for our students.

I’ve thought about this on and off ever since the RFP was but a twinkle in my eye, but Karen Schneider’s post about the shift from the “librarian-centric” to “developer-centric” model brought it back to mind:

Librarians do bring terrific skills to the table. We have a strong service orientation. We are practical. We understand what these products must do, and we have a firm grasp on timelines and calendars. We also have an appreciation for order, governance, and transparency. But we simply don’t (yet) have the core competencies to do what we did one hundred years ago — design, build, and manage our own tools.  We lost our way several decades ago, and we need to acknowledge that we can’t get out of this forest on our own.

If I could sit down today and start from scratch, and not base the design on previous library catalogs, I have an idea for how I’d like our catalog to function. Instead of title/author/subject based searches and entries, I imagine a browseable subject hierarchy. The opening screen displays visual representations (i.e. images instead of and/or in addition to text) of maybe the top ten or so popular research subjects that hour, day, etc. There might be a Google-esque search box, not the focus of the screen but certainly available for those with more specific needs or interest in topics not readily apparent. But overall, a simple, clean, un-cluttered, uncomplicated design.

 

Clicking on a subject (either from the home screen or after a search) does not take the user directly to a list of materials, but rather an authority page for the subject. Not a library-jargoned authority file like an LC authority record, but more like a Wikipedia-esque page with some basic info about the subject. A basic biography, birth/death dates, what they are famous or known for if a personal subject (like, say, Christian Dior);  a brief definition or explanatory information for a topical subject, such as Art Deco. Beneath this brief info, the screen would offer materials results: books, articles, DVDs, images, and other references (links to designers’ websites, contact information for design companies, etc.).

I think the subject focus would appeal to our students, and a page design reminiscent of a familiar site like Wikipedia would ease use. I think it would be more in touch with our patron demographic, both in their information-seeking behavior and their technology literacy.

Apparently other people agree with me, too, because while I was spending time writing this entry and putting off sketching, I happened across this fantastic blog post about concept-oriented catalogs which shares some of the same ideas (right down to the Wikipedia analogy) as this post I’m writing now.

So why isn’t our library’s catalog like this?

Because I can’t build it. I’m a librarian, not a computer programmer. As many of us are, and, as Karen Schneider notes, to our own disadvantage. I can understand my patrons’ information needs and behavior, and I can figure out how to organize and present that information to them in a findable way. I know what to do, I just don’t know how to manifest it. How, then, can we take the next step, from concept to creation?

So Harvard Business School has approved an open access policy. (Thanks to Nicole Engard for the alert).

Under the HBS policy, Like the previous policies, faculty agree to provide copies of their scholarly articles for distribution from the university’s DASH repository and grant the university a waivable license to distribute the articles.

This may strike some business librarians as kind of ironic. The popular Harvard Business Review (and their Case Studies) is published by Harvard Business School Publishing, which I assume is associated with the Harvard Business School.

HBR (and especially HBR Case Studies) are known to be some of the (strictest) (publishers) (around) when it comes to controlling their intellectual property. They try not to allow any library to supply a case study via Inter-Library Loan, they try to make sure one copy of a case study is purchased for every student in a class using it (no sharing a hard-copy!), etc.

So it seems a safe guess that for a Harvard Business School faculty member to get an article published in their own school’s Harvard Business Review… they’re going to have to waive their school’s open access policy. No copies of those articles going in the repo, at least not publicly accessible.

Oh, actually, I should have read the actual policy. They did think of that. The policy actually does say:

Since the policy will apply only to articles prepared for peer review, it thus does not apply to Harvard Business School Cases and Notes, or to articles written for the Harvard Business Review or other publications that are not peer-reviewed. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the license for a particular article upon express direction by a Faculty member.

Earlier in their policy, they say “The Faculty of the Harvard Business School is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.”  Is it just me, or does it seem like there’s an “except when the school, not some other publisher, makes money from it” implicitly tagged on at the end?

I think that’s what’s called “irony”, but I always get that confused with “please remind me what these policies are meant to accomplish?”

[I am curious to hear from a business grad student, faculty member, or librarian... how often is formal peer review used for business scholarship in general?  If the HBR isn't peer reviewed, my guess is that most business scholarship isn't?]

Filed under: General

A recent blog entry on the abundance of snow received this winter in the eastern United States promised “a subsequent blog entry [to] explore various ramifications of the snow, including specific social services rendered in response to the storms.”  Having spent the past week at a conference in the mild climate of Rome (more on the ISKO conference in a blog entry to come—yet another IOU!) and finding on my return that there’s much less snow still hanging around than when I left, I can’t say that the ramifications of snowstorms are much on my mind.  But a promise is a promise.

The ramifications of the snowstorms have been many.  Social services rendered have included procuring 4-wheel-drive vehicles to offer emergency transportation to medical facilities and rescuing stranded drivers.  Snow removal consisted first of using snowplows to clear pathways by pushing snow to the sides of roads and subsequently of hauling snow away to out-of-the-way locations.  Events and services were cancelled:  airline flights, social events, sporting events, church services, school.   Downed trees often resulted in downed power lines, with subsequent power outages.   And the list could go on and on. 

Works on emergency transportation services provided in response to snowstorms are classed in 363.349258 Remedial measures, services, forms of assistance in snowstorms (built from 363.3492 Disasters caused by weather conditions plus notation 5 from the numbers following 551.55 in 551.555 Snowstorms, following the instructions at 363.34922–363.34926 Specific kinds of storms, plus notation 8 Remedial measures, services, forms of assistance from the add table under 362–363, also following the instructions at 363.34922–363.34926).  Works on rescuing stranded drivers are classed close by in 363.3492581 Rescue operations in snowstorms (built in like manner, except that the notation added from the add table at 362–363 is 81 Rescue operations).   Works on snow removal as a social service are classed in 363.349256 (built in like manner, except that the notation added from the add table at 362–363 is 6 Control, which is defined as “Elimination and reduction of hazards, of sources and causes of difficulty”).

However, snow removal is more often written about from some perspective other than as a social service.  For example, Traffic and parking control for snow emergencies: a recommended practice of the Institute of Transportation Engineers  and A routing methodology for snow plows and cindering trucks consider snow removal from the perspective of road transportation and are thus classed in 388.312 Highway services    Traffic control, with snow removal mentioned in its including note.  But a work like Let it snow: winter road maintenance products and technology considers snow removal from the perspective of road engineering and is to be classed in 625.763 [Roads, Maintenance and repair] Snow and ice control measures, which is indexed by Snow removal—road engineering.

Cancellations of events are classed with the event.  For example, the cancellation of church services is classed in 264 Public worship; the cancellation of school and the attendant extension of the school year are classed in 371.23 School year, with its note “Class here school calendar”;  airline flight cancellations are classed in 387.74 Air transportation activities and services; and the cancellation of parties is classed in 793.2 Parties and entertainments.

Do you have an interest in metadata and digital library projects?
Have you recently read a good article on the subject?
Have you developed a new project or workflow?
Have you attended a workshop or conference of interest to the community?
Would you like to connect and get your name out to other metadata librarians?

If so, become a contributor to the Metadata Blog: http://blogs.ala.org/nrmig.php. The official blog of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) Metadata Interest Group has traditionally been used to advertise and report on events at ALA conferences. We are expanding our focus to keep the metadata community informed throughout the year on related research, projects, and events. Contributions can include summaries of articles or research, links to educational opportunities, calls for papers, descriptions of interesting projects, conference reports, requests for assistance, or anything else of potential interest to the community. Posts may contain original content or link to existing content, as appropriate.

What are the requirements to become a contributor?
-Have knowledge, interest, or experience in metadata and/or digital library projects.
-Be willing to write at least one post for the Metadata Blog during 2010 (more are welcome!)
-LIS students and new librarians are encouraged to participate.

If you are interested, contact Kristin Martin, Blog Coordinator for the Metadata Blog at kmarti@uic.edu. Please provide some brief information on your background and ideas for contributions. Initial posts to the blog will be reviewed prior to posting. After that, contributors will be able to post directly to the blog as new information comes up to be shared.

Okay, confession.  I think about social catalogues more than is probably healthy.  During the day, at night, on weekends…in the car while I’m drinking my Tim Horton’s…  But, there are some days when you do wonder, just why am I doing this?  Is it worth the time and energy?  The stress?  But, then you receive a [...]

See the main blog. (Posted to the wrong blog and too many links to this to just delete it.)

I have in hand a letter from Clifford H. Haka, Director of the Michigan State University Libraries, addressed to "ILL Partners" and dated February 24, 2010. The letter is a response to Larry Alford's document in my previous post. I will try to represent the facts he presents here as accurately as possible, and to distinguish those from my own opinions.

FACTS (from the letter)

MSU libraries chose to move their cataloging from OCLC to SkyRiver in a cost saving effort. They expect to save about $80,000 per year. Because MSU uses OCLC for ILL, they intended to pay to have their records loaded into OCLC. The OCLC service charge list gives the price for this service as $0.23 per record.

However, when MSU requested the upload service, OCLC offered them a price of $54,000 for five months (presumably end of fiscal year?), which would amount to $74,000 per year for 26,000 records, or $2.85 per record. (Some of this would be offset by cataloging credits.)

MSU has decided that they cannot afford this, and therefore will not be uploading current cataloging into OCLC. Haka says: "While we will continue with OCLC for ILL, I regret that our newer holdings will not be available for others to consult."

Now My Take

I find it astonishing that any corporation would choose to punish customers rather than to work to win them back. I also find it astonishing that OCLC is willing to keep current customers through threats and fear. Essentially, MSU is being made an example: if you move your cataloging to a competitor, we'll cut you out of OCLC services. This is a lesson for anyone else thinking of moving to SkyRiver or some other service.

As Haka points out in his letter, the OCLC database has a huge number of records that were not created through OCLC cataloging services. When the RLIN cataloging service still existed, many libraries that did their cataloging in RLIN uploaded those records to OCLC so that they could use the OCLC ILL service. They paid an amount similar to the $0.23 that Haka quoted from the current price list. This ability to upload (economically, I should add) is directly in support of the stated goal of maintaining WorldCat's value as a union catalog. The more complete the catalog, the more value it has for services like ILL, resource sharing, and collection development. Yet it is OCLC's action that is devaluing WorldCat by deliberately setting an upload price that MSU obviously cannot support economically. This tells me that the real issue is not the "value of WorldCat" but the revenue that OCLC receives from cataloging.

Business 101 would tell you that the existence of a competitor brings prices down in the sector. If you can't meet your competitor's price, then you can try to keep your customers through a superior product and better services, but for some price will be the main factor. If someone else can provide the same service at a better price, your customers will go there.

It seems to me, and Haka alludes to this, that OCLC's reliance on cataloging revenue may be in trouble, not just because of SkyRiver but also because of the Internet: it is now very easy for anyone to store and move metadata on the public Internet. The number of sites dedicated to the same materials that one finds in libraries in increasing rapidly. We have Amazon, Google Books, LibraryThing, Open Library, IMDB, and on and on. They all have metadata describing the things in their focus. It's not the same as library metadata, but the library catalog is no longer, and not by any means, an exclusive source of description for books, films, or music.

What OCLC has that is unique is not just the quantity of metadata but the library holdings information. And they seem to be aware of this as they load in both records and holdings from many libraries that do not do their cataloging on OCLC. OCLC's value is in the whole package, but it still relies on cataloging as its primary revenue (although shrinking as a percentage of the total income, as you can see in their annual reports).

The services, like ILL, that OCLC provides for libraries are incredibly valuable and it would be a great detriment to the library community to lose them. It does appear, however, that there has been shift in the marketplace; a shift that has nothing to do with library loyalty to the OCLC collective, but one of changing technology and economics. OCLC is trying to push water upriver, when it should be seeking a new balance in its revenue stream. Instead, OCLC is making a real mess of its relationship with its members -- first with the horribly botched record use policy (which isn't going to solve this problem anyway), and now with acting punitively toward members who make the kinds of economic decisions that we all make every day. I believe the "collective" can be saved, but only if OCLC decides to work with, not against, its members.

More thoughts (added later)

I realize now that I have many other questions about record loading on OCLC. For example, many libraries get some of their records from their book vendors, and those do get loaded into OCLC. Is that charged as cataloging, or as record loading? Are there different fees for loading records if you are doing your cataloging on OCLC vs. if you are not? Are there "load only" libraries who load their records in order to participate in ILL and other services? If so, what are they charged for record loading?

I say this because it makes sense to me that libraries that do not do their cataloging on OCLC would be encouraged to load their records so that they can participate in other services. It also makes sense that the price for this would be commensurate with that of adding your holdings online (or maybe a bit cheaper if it's more economical for OCLC to batch load rather than provide cataloging online). In fact, what difference does it make how you get your records into OCLC? The most important thing is that your records are there as part of WorldCat.

What the MSU letter tells me is that the OCLC economics are such that cataloging on OCLC is paying for other services, like record uploads, which may be under-priced. A different upload charge for non-cataloging libraries makes sense, and if that's the case then OCLC needs to make that clear. However, it wouldn't surprise me if that wouldn't make alternative cataloging services unmarketable, because as the MSU case shows, the total for cataloging elsewhere plus loading on OCLC would favor doing cataloging on OCLC. This makes perfect sense to me, but it appears that members haven't been informed of this pricing practice. Really, a little more transparency about pricing could go a long way toward avoiding situations like the MSU one.

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I don’t quite remember why I had to re-classify our art books…but in doing so I found Art Cyclopedia to be helpful in determining what country the artist was associated with and their main medium. The information is very concise, fairly comprehensive and when authorized includes samples of the artist’s work.

“Recirculating aquaculture systems cut the pollution and disease that occur in current fish farming operations,” begins an article entitled “Recirculating aquaculture systems: The future of fish farming?”

The comprehensive technology number and interdisciplinary number for aquaculture is 639.8 Aquaculture.  Examples of works classed in 639.8 are Aquaculture: Principles and Practices, Cage Aquaculture, and Recirculating Aquaculture.

The entry 639.8 Aquaculture has the scatter note: “Class aquaculture of a specific kind of animal with the kind, e.g., aquaculture of fishes 639.3.”  Works on salmon farming, for example, are classed in 639.3756 Culture of salmon (built with 639.37 Culture of amphibians and specific kinds of fishes plus 56 from 597.56 Salmon, following instruction at 639.372–639.377 Culture of specific kinds of fishes), e.g., Handbook of Salmon Farming.  Works on aquaculture of tilapias are classed in 639.3774 Culture of Cichlidae (built with 639.37 plus 74 from 597.74 Cichlidae; 597.74 has “tilapias” in the including note,and the Relative Index entry “Tilapias”), e.g., Tilapia Culture.

Interesting article in today’s new york times on e-book pricing and publisher business models.

While the article doesn’t explicitly mention the recent Amazon/MacMillon kerfuffle, it does supply some context to understand what was going on there.

Amazon had previously been paying a wholesale price that was (probably) 50% off the publisher-set retail price of e-books. This is the standard business relationship between retailers and publishers for print books, with 50% being a typical ‘discount’ a large retailer could get (it’s possible giganto retailers like Amazon got a bigger discount, and small retailers definitely sometimes get a smaller one, can be as small as 30% or even less, or no discount at all for some titles from small publishers, making them effectively unavailable to small retailers.).

But then Amazon could actually sell the e-book for whatever price they wanted, the suggested retail price was only a suggestion. They could sell for less and reduce their own margin, or they could even sell for under their wholesale price as a “loss leader”. Again, this is all the way the traditional print book market works too.

MacMillan wanted to switch to an ‘agency’ model like the iTunes bookstore is/will use.  MacMillan wanted to be able to set the retail price themselves, and then Amazon as retailing “agent” would get a fixed percentage of the sale, probably less than 50% (I think iTunes is doing 30%).

Now, depending on what prices MacMillan ends up setting for e-books, MacMillan might end up even making less per copy under the model they wanted (and eventually got) than under what Amazon wanted.   All the press coverage indicated that this wasn’t really about per-unit profit for the publisher, it was about MacMillan being unhappy that Amazon was selling their e-books at too low a price, they wanted control over the retail pricing.

Why would MacMillan care about the retail price being too low, if MacMillan’s wholesale price remained the same regardless of the retail price Amazon set? Presumably they’re worried about establishing consumer expectations for the emerging e-book market.

But the NYT article cited above quotes another publisher with a slightly different concern, that might be more simpatico to the librarian book-loving set: They’re worried about cannibalizing their traditional print sales:

Another reason publishers want to avoid lower e-book prices is that print booksellers like Barnes & Noble, Borders and independents across the country would be unable to compete. As more consumers buy electronic readers and become comfortable with reading digitally, if the e-books are priced much lower than the print editions, no one but the aficionados and collectors will want to buy paper books.

“If you want bookstores to stay alive, then you want to slow down this movement to e-books,” said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, a consultant to publishers. “The simplest way to slow down e-books is not to make them too cheap.”

I don’t know how much this is just meant to sound good to the book-loving public (and to bookstores and libraries used to hating on publishers), and how much this is really anyone’s actual concern.  But it certainly could happen.  That scenario is predicated on the assumption that consumers will eventually switch en masse to e-books and e-readers for recreational reading, and/or that e-books being cheaper than print books will be sufficient to push them there, if hardware etc keeps going like we expect.

Many in the library and book-loving world are skeptical of this premise, but I suspect it is in fact true. (I don’t love that it’s true; I have an aesthetic relationship with print books too, and also concerns about the social/political effects of abandoning them for e-books.  But I suspect it’s true, love it or not.)

Now, interestingly, in the US, in many cases wholesalers “fixing” retail prices is an anti-trust problem. There are some cases where a wholesaler/manufacturer/publisher can get away with this, but in general it’s not allowed for a wholesaler to force a retailer to sell a product for a certain minimum price.  Which is pretty much exactly what MacMillan just did to Amazon.  I wonder if the FTC is considering it. If e-books really do continue increasing in market share to become a significant portion of the book market, we can expect the FTC will at least look into it, although I’m not a lawyer and can’t predict what they’d decide, there are some cases where a wholesaler can get away with that kind of “price fixing”.

Filed under: General

I just got back from the first ever OCLC EMEA Regional Council meeting in The Netherlands.  Much has been written and discussed regarding OCLC's governance changes, but that is not really what I wanted to address.  This meeting was the best I have ever seen for non-US participants and members for OCLC.  And I'm not just saying that because OCLC's Web-scale strategy was a central part of the discussion.  OK, that is why I'm saying it.

Cloud Computing is here to stay.  We can refine it's definitions, place it in historical context, and argue of libraries' place in the Cloud, but there is no stopping it.

Web Scale is vital in order for libraries to sustain their relevance and to create value for their staff and users.

We are technically, politically, legally, and emotionally ready to move management and end-user services to Web Scale.

The paradoxical challenge of Web-scale Management is how to effectively establish a platform on which libraries can do everything they're used to doing, while simultaneously building that platform so that libraries can change the way they do things, continually innovating to address the changing nature of their collections and the shifting expectations of their users.

This last part brings me to my biggest take-away, which we heard loud and clear from Erik and Jaap, the Shanachies.  In the end, our greatest strength is people.

I am sincere in my belief that OCLC is uniquely positioned to provide Web-scale services to its members and their end users, but more than that, we are obliged to do so.  But as Berndt pointed out so poignantly, OCLC needs libraries as much as libraries need OCLC.  It's through this symbiotic relationship that we can harness the collective innovation necessary to make library management and end-user platforms more than the sum of their parts.

There’s an article on Xerxes in the recent Ariadne. (Thanks to colleague Sue Woodson for alerting me to this).

Xerxes is the Metalib front-end that David Walker and I are the two main developers on.

David and I have tried to make Xerxes as easy to install and maintain as possible, keep the ‘TCO’ for people other than us as low as possible, and work with other installers to make sure their local customizations are kept as cleanly seperated as possible from common shared Xerxes code in order to make future upgrades go smoothly (this latter is one of my obsessions).

This takes a bit more work from the main developers, but David and I believe it’s important for building the Xerxes userbase and ultimate sustainability of the project, providing direct benefits to our own institutional users of Xerxes as well as helping the larger library community.

It’s gratifying to see that the folks at Royal Holloway, University of London appreciate the job we do of helping other Xerxes installers get started, and agree that we’ve successfully created a very low “total cost of ownership” for Xerxes.

(I wouldn’t have minded if they had mentioned me and David by name in their article though!  But appreciate the article nonetheless, thanks folks.)

I also found this quote from a Royal Holloway user entertaining and matching my experience (Ex Libris, are you listening?)

Feedback showed that many users found the interface less than satisfactory, with one user commenting that:

‘MetaLib is possibly the worst and most confusing library interface I have ever come across’

Royal Holloway, University of London

Of course, with Xerxes on top, I like to think that your federated search/database directory tool becomes one of the better library interfaces we offer!

Filed under: General

We now have over 400,000 reviews vetted and available for LibraryThing for Libraries. (Last June we hit 300,000, so over 100,000 reviews have been added in the past 8 months—not bad.)

400,000 is a lot of reviews. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, for example, has 117 reviews. Now you probably don't need to read over 100 reviews. But if a popular book gets that many, then the more obscure books in your catalog could have 20, 10, or 5 reviews. LTFL reviews cover the bestsellers but they also reach down the long tail.

The LTFL Reviews Enhancement also comes with blog widgets and a Facebook application allow your patrons to show off their reviews—and their love for your library—where they "live" online.

The Reviews Enhancement is currently available for Horizon, iBistro, Webvoyage, Voyager 7, Koha, Evergreen, WebPac, WebPac Pro, and Polaris 3.6. We're always expanding this list, so if your OPAC isn't one of these, email abby@librarything.com and we can work on adding support for it.

For more information, email me (abby@librarything.com). For ordering information, contact Peder Christensen at Bowker—877-340-2400 or Peder.Christensen@bowker.com.

News from NISO.

Please join NISO on its next FREE open teleconference call on Monday, March 8, 2010 from 3-4 p.m. (eastern). This month’s call will discuss the ERM Data Standards and Best Practices Review project to conduct a "gap analysis" regarding electronic resource management (ERM) related data, standards, and best practices. The analysis includes a review of the ERMI data dictionary as it presently exists, and a mapping of ERMI data elements to those within relevant standards-related projects. Hear from guest speaker Tim Jewell (Director, Information Resources and Scholarly Communication University of Washington), co-chair of the Working Group about the group's progress to date and how their analysis will determine future work in the ERM standards arena.

The call is free and anyone is welcome to participate in the conversation. To join, simply dial 877-375-2160 at 3:00 p.m. (Eastern) and enter the code: 17800743.

If Google can find something, that goes quite a way to making it discoverable. The NASA Astrophysics DATA Service, (ADS) is using metadata Google recognizes to enhance their service. They kindly provide a list of the fields Google will index.

Ruth’s diary is the new novel by Fiona Robyn, called Thaw. She has decided to blog the novel in its entirety over the next few months, so you can read it for free.

Ruth’s first entry is below, and you can continue reading tomorrow here.

*

These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.

So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I’ve had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.

I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for’, before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision. That’s it for today. It’s begun.

Continue reading tomorrow here…

Filed under: blogging, communications, social software Tagged: blogsplash, Fiona Robyn, Publishing 2.0, Thaw, Writing 2.0

Resource Shelf recently posted about a new website that focuses on metadata in repositories. The site is called Metadata in Repositories : An overview.

The site is more than just how metadata is used in repositories. It is a good introduction to metadata in general and in particular Dublin Core as seen in the table of contents below. The section on tips for repository managers was useful because it addressed issues of metadata in vendor applications, workflows, and specific metadata for local needs.

Filed under: cataloging Tagged: metadata

Via @psychemedia I saw this advert for a CIO at the Open University in the UK. I thought it was interesting for a couple of reasons. The first was the language which seemed more 'upbeat' than you normally see in academic institutions (but maybe I am just out of touch ;-). For example:

First-class communication skills must accompany a global mindset leveraging strategic skills but accompanying them with a real propensity to action. The obvious challenge of this role, in this organisation, will ignite your enthusiasms. [Job details - Chief Information Officer]

The second was the emphasis on being able to succeed in complex organizational settings, and the influencing skills required. As you would expect the job requests a focus on results, customer focus and a sense of strategic direction. But it was interesting to see how some of the organizational issues were discussed ...

This individual must be able to empathise with the differing demands of leadership where both commercial and social missions need to be clearly understood. They must possess a strong executive presence and be capable of engaging with, and, where appropriate, pushing back on business unit leaders in a way that is constructive and positive. They should not use the language of technology with their peers, but focus more on the implications for the University. They should naturally simplify the complex when they explain initiatives and projects.

And then the explicit mention of organizational boundaries:

Being prepared to break down existing organisational boundaries through collaboration and cross staffing by building strong relationships based on trust with peers. [Candidate brief - PDF]

I should note that I don't have any understanding of the internal specifics here.

A couple of obvious things. Getting things done in larger organizations - where an agreed direction may depend on buy-in from multiple stakeholders - is certainly very different than it is in smaller ones where decision-making ability may be more concentrated. At the same time, it seems to me that an ability to actually get things done, and to make organizations better able to get things done, are things that have come up more in the occasional discussions I have with recruiters.

The other day I heard and ad on the radio that caught my ear: apparently Emergen-C “makes you feel so good you’ll want to reinvent the Dewey Decimal System.” Wanna hear it, too?

1. Go here: http://www.emergenc.com/
2. Scratch your head and wonder why people still love to use Flash.
3. Click on “Good Ads” in the left side column.
4. Under where it says “Radio Spots,” click on “Librarians.”
5. Laugh!
6. Ponder a bit about how designing this site with Flash has all but eliminated any chances Emergen-C might have had for that ad to go viral because of the inability to access a direct link.
7. Laugh some more!

Can I get a round of Emergen-C for all the catalogers out there? It’s on me.

In preparation for my upcoming audio conference, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about RA work.  More specifically, I’ve been examining how RA services can be performed when we take readers away from the face-to-face interview that has traditionally defined the service.  In particular, if and how library catalogues can enhance RA services. (I [...]

N.B. This post is long overdue. I have written it into other posts for several months now but then never finished them.

This is for the possibly two of you who have not seen my wonderful news on facebook, friendfeed, Twitter or heard it in person or via email.

As of a mid-October 2009 evening I am engaged to the utterly amazing and beautiful Sara Thompson. I asked her to marry me on her birthday. [I had to do something! The complete hardcover Harry Potter boxed set I ordered for her from amazon UK hadn't arrived yet. OK, while true that was a joke.]

The legal proceedings will happen at the courthouse on 27 May 2010, the Full Flower Moon. The ceremony and celebration will take place on 29 May at the Izaak Walton Cabin at Lake of the Woods Forest Preserve in Champaign County. It is a lovely cabin overlooking the Sangamon River.

It will be small (perhaps 35-40 friends and family) and it will be fairly nontraditional.

At 7 PM on that Saturday we will repair to the mezzanine of Crane Alley for drinks and more food. If you are anywhere near Urbana-Champaign on the evening of 29 May this year please feel free to join us at Crane Alley.

To say that we are excited is, well, not saying much.

And for those who also want a nontraditional wedding, one that among other things does not simply take the customs and rites of marriage for granted [There will be no chattel giving or taking here, thank you very much!], we wish you well. The multi-billion $$ marriage industry works hard to prevent you from doing as you wish. But just remember, the only required aspect is whatever, usually minimal, requirements your state imposes on you. Everything else, and I do mean everything, is up to you. So make it meaningful for you! We are.

The What

Wednesday afternoon I posted the following to my facebook status:

I have recently instituted a personal goal of trying to catch up with at least 1 interesting person a week (or so) just to see what’s rockin’ their (LIS) world, whether there are any areas of overlapping interest, if we can challenge/cheer each other on in our research endeavors, etc. To do this I am asking people to lunch or coffee … so please don’t get freaky if I ask you. If not interested just say No thanks.

Not a perfect message, I agree, but facebook stati do have a character limit and I had hit it. The primary problem with it is that “interesting” word. It means pretty much anything and, thus, nothing. So it is a somewhat lazy but mostly space constrained shorthand for a lot more; including a lot more that I can’t even articulate yet.

The Context

Sometime last week I decided to ask a friend and once fellow student to lunch or coffee to catch up with her. We had taken a couple of classes together and we are both off doing our own CAS stuff now. I do get to see her now and again at the reference desk but if one can imagine how busy the reference desk at the main UIUC Library is then you can imagine that short amounts of small talk is all we can manage.

The classes we had together were all “upper-level” information organization classes and some of the projects she’s been involved in have been in areas like faceted classifications of folktales.

But she’s a reference librarian by bent. And desire. [That is, if I remember correctly from some of those disparate and short snatches of conversation at the reference desk.]

Of course reference librarians can be interested in the geeky, often esoteric intricacies of thesauri, faceted classification systems, indexing, and so on. I wish more were. But, in my own admittedly weak experience [10 12 years now], I have found few reference librarians, much less LIS students, who are interested in these sorts of things to any true depth.

So I wanted to take some quality time to catch up and see where she is in her studies, where she’s heading with her CAS project/paper, and all that stuff in the facebook message above. We were supposed to go to lunch this past Tuesday but she woke up ill so we rescheduled for next week.

Wednesday afternoon I thought of one of our Ph.D. students who I have met in person only once or so but we now follow each other on Twitter and facebook and I find her and what little I know of her work intriguing. So I invited her to lunch or coffee.

That’s when I realized I was onto something and posted the above status to facebook.

1st Lunch Date

We met at Bombay (Indian food) for the buffet and talk. She was already excited because she thinks my idea is a great one. We had a leisurely lunch and talked about my CAS paper and research, about the Library Student Journal, and about her coursework (last semester of) and teaching. We discussed Integrationism, language and communication, Symbolic Interactionism, Erving Goffman, differences between teaching undergrads and LIS students, and several other things. I’d say it was a success; not that I have any specific measures of success in mind.

Feedback in facebook

I got some good feedback shortly after posting the above status, such as several Likes, and a question or two. I found it extremely interesting that the 1st person to Like my status is the next person in my queue. Another Ph.D. student, she has taken some courses in GSLIS but is primarily in Rhetoric and Writing Studies [again, if remembering correctly]. I am going to wait a bit before trying to schedule this one as I still need to catch up with the original person I asked before I thought of this as a more sustained “program.”

One comment I received was whether I was paying or not. I am happy to do so in every case but will leave it up to the other whether we go Dutch or I pay. This is not a request for people to ask me to lunch so I will pay. I intend to still go to lunch with friends and such as I sometimes do. But if you are one of my closest friends here then, well, sorry but you don’t meet my criteria for this. I see you and talk to you anyway; I already have a good idea what you are up to.

Purpose, Goals

What am I up to? Do I have a purpose or goals for this. Well, yes, and no. It is a work in progress and I am leaving it wide open and flexible.

First, it is and can be a form of professional development. Normally we talk about keeping up with the literature but isn’t keeping up with fellow professionals also professional development? Especially if one is interacting directly with them, yes?

Second, it is networking.

But even more important to me, it is a way to develop better friendships and deeper acquaintances. It is about broadening my horizons. It will expose me to ongoing work and the interests of others in a relaxed environment. Overlapping areas of interest can be discerned and expanded. Efforts to support and challenge/cheer each other on in our separate research endeavors can be drawn up and implemented.  We can clue each other into conferences, journals, books, people, ideas, and so on that might be of interest and value to each other. And there are, no doubt, other benefits that I will discover.

And, yes, one of my primary goals is to be of equal value to my dates for whatever purposes they have in accepting.

The Future

I have another couple of individuals in mind (one mentioned above, and another GSLIS Ph.D. student) but no one in particular after that. But during our discussions yesterday I realized that there are several newer faculty in GSLIS who I do not know at all. So perhaps that is where I’ll start. There are also several 0% faculty appointments in GSLIS with folks from Communications and other departments; they’d be good candidates.

After that I don’t know. I wish I knew more students and faculty in other departments here at UIUC. At ISU I knew people from all across campus. I have been here at UIUC about the same amount of time I was there but there I was an undergrad and an at-large grad student so I took classes all over. As much as I wanted to wander into other departments here I kept focused on my own department and my LIS education.

Certainly there are plenty of librarians I could get to know better here. And I should.

Wrap-up

I’m not sure what will become of this but I intend to enjoy the company of some interesting people, learn more about the diversity of work and interests within our profession/discipline and in other disciplines.

If anyone has suggestions I am certainly happy to entertain them. If you are here and read my blog but we don’t really know each other and you’d like to change that then feel free to contact me.

Might this idea work for you? Only you can decide that. But I think that on a campus where everyone is busy and many come and go so quickly (Yes, 2-6 years is quickly) this may be a good corrective to that feeling of “I sure wish I could get to know so-and-so” or of “Boy, their research is really interesting; I wish I knew more about it” or any similar wistful desires.

If anyone else implements something similar I’d love to hear about how it is going/went, either here or directly via email, etc. Myself, I have no specific plans to blog about these dates. That will be on a case-by-case basis and only after I have cleared any such blog mentions with the affected party.

So, who have you had coffee with lately?

As authors are recognised as resources to be discovered, managed, ranked, and tracked, an interest in names and identifiers will continue to grow. A focus on research evaluation, reputation management, publication management drive this, as well as general information management issues in a web environment.

Historically, national libraries have managed names within their jurisdictions. The LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control recognized that this was a partial activity, partial in two ways. First, a national approach may not make sense in a networked world: national scale policies and coverage do not work very well at webscale. Individual files are incomplete, and there is overlap between files, sometimes with different versions of names being established and so on. And second, we are interested in many more names than are captured in the cataloging process: some researchers, for example, may only publish articles and not get captured in authority work.

Working with several national libraries we manage the VIAF project which is a response to the first of these issues. As part of the VIAF process we match and link names across national authority files. This resource is then made available in several ways.

The second issue represents a different sort of challenge. We have recently seen two initiatives of importance emerge in the name identifier space, ISNI and ORCID. How the relationship between these evolves remains to be seen: they involve different players and starting motivations. OCLC is participating in each and we look forward to working with VIAF data to further their goals, and in turn to see how VIAF data might be enriched or extended in the process.

My colleague Thom Hickey - who manages VIAF - has a brief article about the project in a recent issue of NextSpace.

According to a recent report from DEFF, Denmark’s Electronic Research Library:

There are three aspects of the functions of the research library that can be seen as providing potential scenarios. The library as a learning centre focusing on the provision of learning materials and support for learning processes. The library as a knowledge centre being a co-creator in the production of knowledge closely connected to active research groups. The library as a meta-knowledge institution working as a catalyst for knowledge synthesis, the organisation, evaluation and consolidation of knowledge.

As well as exploring this typology in greater detail, the report The future of research and the research library also describes a couple of more concrete and familiar scenarios.

Firstly, one that might have benefited from a deeper exploration in the report:

… up-to-date physical locations where the students can study with other students and in that way get a sense of a working day and a working community. In that way, the library will become more of a social zone, instead of the quiet room for lonely absorption which it is traditionally known for.

And secondly, one that is very much informed by the information literacy role of modern university libraries:

“’The touching library’, i.e. a research library which can touch and move its users through its competence to select and qualify knowledge, and which is touched and moved by its users in order to deliver the best possible product.”

What about the report itself?

It’s ambitious. Very ambitious. It’s also universal in its scope – only occasionally delving into Denmark-specific structures and scenarios. I can’t hope to do justice to the richness of its content in one single blog, so I can only present a subjective take.

Essentially, the report seeks to answer the following questions:

-          Does the research library have a future?

-          What future roles are open to the research library?

-          Would a roadmap be useful?

Instinctively I draw away from the idea of a roadmap. There are simply too many variables and broad forces over which we have so little control, notwithstanding the excellent framework that this report has provided. I’m unsure after reading the report twice whether it has answered these questions, Certainly no roadmap is forthcoming. Nevertheless, for those of us who spend time pondering over the future of the university library, it provides excellent food for thought.

Seismic change and disruption

It’s especially useful in terms of the material it presents for understanding the scale of disruption that the research library is undergoing.

Massive technological changes in the area of research, knowledge production, publishing and communication are influencing the way research is done and the functions of the research library in supporting and facilitating research and learning. Digital technology in its many forms is at the centre of the changes. The old functions of the research library are thus served in new ways. New forms of research emerge and new ways of learning too, and consequently not only new ways of serving old functions but also new functions serving new needs.

On the historical value of the research library, the report states:

The original form of value creation of the research library was based on minimising expenditure for acquisition and availability of books and journals. By having a central store it was possible to acquire fewer entities and by making these available it was possible to maximise their use. Books were expensive and few could afford large private libraries.

The report goes on to make the point that this cost-effectiveness is found today in licensing of e-journals and database, but the value is surely diminished where the number of users is factored into the cost of the licence, in a way that was not the case with a printed monograph.

There are also broader changes in terms of the research and educational systems, not least the expansion of higher education which is a global phenomenon, and the role that digital technology is perceived as a means of resolving the resultant problems and tensions. In research too there is much change – more collaborative styles and the ascendant trends towards interdisciplinary research being two obvious examples.

I know that one bright and joyous day I will pick up a report that talks about the impact of cultural relativism on an institution (the library) that has served as an absolutist custodian of authoritative artefacts. Sadly, that day is not today, and I just have to live with that (or write my own).

What history tells us

By and large, this isn’t an easy read. It’s highly theoretical and enormously broad as I’ve said. However, the report does present a very digestible history of the research library. Space constraints preclude even an attempt to do this justice, but what I will say is that it clarified in my mind many unanswered questions about how precisely the research library model has been disrupted. As is so often the case, it is not simply the case that the Internet has somehow thrown a deadly missile into a centuries-old static model, and instead should be seen as the latest and most disruptive change in the history of the research library, following on the heels of other catalysts such as the shift away from books in favour of scientific journals.

Research library and the innovation economy

The other interesting thing about the historical narrative of this report is that it presents a degree of historical continuum in the relationship between the research library and more focused problem-driven innovative activities in the broader economy. The report notes that a massive amount of research is being done in the knowledge-intensive private sector. It makes a very valid point that the limitations experienced in terms of access to digital resources (being mainly restricted to academia) is problematic, especially for SMEs.

What about curiosity driven research?

The report states that:

The British sociologist of science Steve Fuller has made a distinction between two ways in which research and universities create value. One is the direct creation of knowledge that can be used in making processes and products available in a market. This is the role of research in innovation. It contributes to the creation of financial capital. In this knowledge is seen as instrumental. The other way is through the creation of degree programmes and public education and making knowledge publicly available.

It wasn’t clear to me when reading the report where curiosity-driven research sits in this model, and indeed in the report as a whole. Yet it is surely of vital importance, even in today’s instrumental thinking around research and economic innovation. You could even argue that it assumes an even greater importance – we surely need to make huge leaps in our thinking to achieve the necessary scale of economic restructuring in most Western economies, and thinking needs to be as unrestrained as possible.

The central dilemma of the intermediary

The report provides some valuable pointers in terms of the role of the librarian and the competences that will be required. Our old friend disintermediation plays a major role in the discomfort that librarians have experienced for many years now:

New players are appearing as important and can take over some of the functions or parts of these. Publishers can provide access to journals on-line via their own servers, and universities and scientific groups or societies can provide access to digital repositories of papers and books.

As one interviewee said:

The dilemma is that you on one hand do something for the user and make yourself indispensable, and on the other hand you create the user in your own picture [sic] and thus make yourself dispensable.

This quotation surely goes to the heart of the pain of disintermediation, and reminded me forcibly of my days as a special librarian in the metals industry.

To my mind, the most optimistic statement in the whole report was this one:

Our belief about who we are does influence what we perceive as possible.

It really is true that even in adverse conditions, a little bit of self-belief can make a lot of difference, and this report has at least delivered some clarity to a highly complex landscape.

Each of these deserves a post of their own, but in the interests of getting them out there quickly …

Yay! Made the finals of the Research Blogging Awards in the category Best Blog – Philosophy, Research, or Scholarship. If you want to vote for me (or for fellow library blog Laika’s Med Lib Log), you need to register with Research Blogging before 4 March.

Found out I am a web ostrich (“social, fast-moving and specialised”) by doing the BBC Labs test, devised by CIBER, and explained by Ian Rowlands on the site.

Received notification that our paper (lead author: Claire Ross) has been accepted for Digital Humanities 2010.

Met some lovely people at Reading University Library, Archaeology Department and Typography Department. (Thanks, LinkSphere).

Agreed to take part in an evening salon in April for The Library of Babel / In and Out of Place, and bagged an invitation to the exhibition preview last night. (Thanks, 176 / Zabludowicz Collection).

Booked to attend the Centre for Digital Humanities’ first digital excursion to the Petrie Museum (and you can, too – it’s FREE).

And then tomorrow, there is the Feminist Library Open Day, promoting their Training For All scheme – press release here. It’s unlikely I’ll actually make it away from the computer (working on the book) to get down there, but if you’re interested in librarianship, particularly radical librarianship, come on down and find out what’s on offer.

Filed under: blogging, communications, diary, engagements, exhibitions, Feminist Library, informal talks, Information, linksphere, research blogging Tagged: 176 Zabludowicz Collection, BBC Labs, CIBER, digital collections, digital excursions, Feminist Library, Library of Babel exhibition, linksphere, research blogging awards, UCLDH

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The American Library Association, as co-publishers, recently delivered two webinars demonstrating the new RDA Toolkit, which you can find here: http://www.vimeo.com/9377816 and here: http://www.vimeo.com/9379154. 

The webinars last just under an hour and the demonstrations in each are substantially the same, but the Q&A sessions at the end are of course different on each.

Twice in the last week I have been disappeared from assorted campus directories.

Recently the Library debuted a new website for staff, including a new personnel directory. The personnel directory is available in 3 versions (that I noticed): Faculty by name, Staff by name, and by Department. I was in the old directory. I have been Visiting Faculty since Aug. 2008. Just completely disappeared from the new one.

This morning I discovered that I was no longer in the GSLIS directory. Not as a CAS student, which I still am. Nor, period. Now keep in mind this directory includes alums. Disappeared completely from it, I did.

No doubt these are coincidences. But I’m beginning to wonder.

If you want me gone UIUC then just have the cojones to tell me it’s time to go.

Here at the LPI we have a body of work, the abstracts for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It covers over 40 years of research, last year about 1,300 abstracts were accepted. They are on our website as PDFs. We would like to make these easily discovered and delivered and ensure their preservation, even if the LPI were to disappear. Where would be some places to include them to enhance discovery, delivery or ensure preservation?

So far CLOCKSS, GeoRef, Google Scholar, HathiTrust, LOCKSS, NASA Astrophysics Data Service, OAIster, Portico, Primo Central, and Summon have come to mind. Any place missing? Thanks.

Feb. 25. New publication about preservation, A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation edited by Katherine Skinner and Matt Schultz.

Someone slipped me Larry Alford's letter to OCLC members. This is the worst piece of "argument by innuendo" that I have ever seen. The members deserve better, much better.

I am pretty much unable to discern the message in these four pages of insinuations and scores of questions. The document is entirely devoid of facts or information. Still, I'm going to attempt to extract some sense out of it.

First, it's all about threats to WorldCat, in particular as libraries turn to other sources of bibliographic records. What these threats are should be easily quantifiable, but Alford doesn't provide us with any figures. Here's the information that is needed if one wants to make an assessment of the situation:

1. Are member libraries adding fewer records to WorldCat? How many fewer, and what is the actual loss of revenue to OCLC? Has anyone interviewed them to ask why?
   
2. Are former member libraries leaving WorldCat for other services? How many, and what is the actual loss of revenue to OCLC?
3. What does OCLC charge for its various services? There is no information on the web site, and I've heard it said that contracts between OCLC and libraries are confidential. This makes it very hard to have a discussion about costs and how costs are affecting OCLC's services in the market. Alford makes reference to "alternate service providers" (*cough* SkyRiver) but makes no comparison of costs or services.
   

There are, of course, a number of red herrings in the text. I say "of course" because it is in the nature of this kind of emotional plea to bring up unsupported statements. As an example, he states that he has asked a series of questions, like

Should the OCLC cooperative create and support software that provides quality control and the ability to make global changes as librarians create new subject headings and revise authority records?

and ends with

I am pleased to note that the response of almost everyone to whom I have posed these questions has been a universal and enthusiastic "yes."

But let's look at those questions. He asks about "supporting" CONSER, NACO and BIBCO without saying the nature or cost of that support. Maybe there is something to think about there. He asks if OCLC should continue maintaining the Dewey classification. Well, what does it cost OCLC, and what revenue does it bring in? And would there be another venue for the community to maintain DDC if members decide that it's not a good activity for OCLC?

He also asks, rhetorically, whether it is better to have a single database for bibliographic and holdings information or

... is it preferable to sequentially search dozens or even hundreds of catalogs around the world to try to find that particular book or article that a researcher needs?

He should know that there are other options, but this document is not about facts but persuasion.

Oftentimes I am unclear at what he is alluding to. On page three he says that there are libraries who are doing their cataloging elsewhere but "still want to participate in the resource sharing made possible by WorldCat." I don't know what resource sharing he means, but as far as I know anything beyond a search in the open WorldCat database is done for a fee. Is he complaining that some libraries do not contribute records to WorldCat but subscribe to other services? That sounds like a revenue stream to me. He refers to these libraries as consuming more value than they return, but I don't know what the unit of the "value" is. As a matter of fact, throughout the document there are references to value that sometimes seem to be about OCLC's revenue, and at other times seem to be about the completeness of WorldCat. Mixing these two up in the discussion is not helpful, not at all.

The purpose of the mailing that this document was attached to was to let OCLC members know that a new, revised policy will soon be sent to OCLC's Council and Board of Trustees, and eventually to all members. If the policy was developed in the same kind of information vacuum that this document exhibits, I have little hope that it will be any better than the original policy that began this round of member dissatisfaction.