Bibliographic Wilderness

Spurred by introduction of John Little’s open source planning project to create specs or strategic directions for a future ILS, I was talking “out of band” with someone about my vision for a library software infrastructure, sort or revisiting what I wrote as Notes on future directions of Library System, but hopefully even more clear this time.

Here’s some of what I said, combined into one redundant essay.

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I hadn’t even noticed Amazon was selling mp3s now. Not only that, but they seem to be selling mp3s of otherwise unavailable out of print albums. Check it out: http://www.amazon.com/Broadside-Ballads-Vol-9-Sundown/dp/B000S96RLE/ref=dm_ap_alb1?ie=UTF8&qid=1201460424&sr=1-2

Neat. Sort of the same effect as “print on demand” for books, but with an all-electronic product.

Anyone know if they are DRM’ed? Looks like not. ” Digital music downloads from Amazon MP3 are high-quality and free of DRM software, which means they’ll play on any player including iPods™.” http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?ie=UTF8&node=163856011

Nice. Although I should have previewed the album before I bought it, because I was hoping it would be accordion! No such luck.  Still good stuff.

So I had been operating under the incorrect assumption that OAISter only aggregated feeds which claimed to be of open access materials.

After embarrassingly sending them a letter (and cc’ing code4lib) asking for clarification I noticed their collection development policy page. (Embarrassing because I should have checked first).

http://www.oaister.org/restricted.html

• We harvest and retain all records that point to digital resources.
• This includes freely-available and restricted-access digital resources.

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An RDA-L post, more yet again on a topic I’ve been circling for some time, after Ed Jones usefully approaches it too.

Ed Jones wrote:

On a related question, as long as this collocating function is satisfied, I don’t know that it matters anymore whether a name is unique in its display form.

Yeah, this is something I’ve been talking about for a while too and trying to get people to think about.

If the collocating function is satisfied, then we can group works and show related works without any ambiguity, EVEN IF we have no unique display form. Now, it might result in a confusing display.

Ed Jones

• Work 1
• Work 2
• Work 3

Ed Jones

• Work A

Two different Ed Joneses, correctly grouped seperately, but both showing up as “Ed Jones”. So it might be going too far to say “it doesn’t matter”. It matters to some extent. We might prefer to have a display title that can disambiguate. On the other hand, we might not need one. Maybe the above display is sufficient. Maybe the works listed under each Ed Jones alone is enough to tell the user which is which! (A birth date isn’t neccesarily what the user needs). Maybe a calculation of most common LCSH strings assigned to Ed Jones(1)’s work would be helpful.

But regardless of how important you think display uniqueness is, or how you think it’s best accomplished, the important point is this: If we can just get collocation uniqueness (which we could call ‘identifier uniqueness’ too), is that better than nothing? Yeah it is! A lot better than nothing. Display uniqueness may just be icing on the cake.

This gets at the concepts I’ve been harping on for a while of conceptually separating the ideas of identifiers and display labels, because it makes it easier to think and talk about what we’re doing. Thanks Ed for explaining it very nicely.

(See my previous posts, The Purpose of Authority Control, Access Points as Identifiers, and
Two Meanings of ‘Identifier’)

Our current AACR2 headings serve both purposes. They serve the “identifier” purpose when they provide for collocation–but as Ed Notes this function could instead be served by a ‘dumb’ identifier. And they serve the “display label” purpose when they are used, well, as a display label—and this display label purpose could be served by something that is not unique, but could not be served by by a ‘dumb’ (say strictly numeric, like OCLC num; or a URI) identifier. Two different purposes.

One reason this matters regardless of how we change our own systems of control is that we will increasingly be interfacing with other people’s systems that DO separate these functions, or maybe provide only one but not both of them. To get these things to mesh with our systems, we’ve got to understand that they are two seperate functions. But I do think our systems of control can usefully be improved by separating these purposes to some extent too.

I keep meaning to write more about how the FRAD document totally misses the boat on this, but keep running into writer’s block. It’s unfortunate, because FRAD is the right place to try to get these things straight conceptually, but it totally confuses them instead.

 (The collocating function will be satisfied if its underlying identifier is unique.) In some ways, simply using an unadorned name in the display–even if this results in a series of
identical unadorned names–frees the catalog search engine for more interesting manipulations. At present, selecting my “John Smith” from pages and pages of the same name arranged and differentiated by birth year–not particularly useful–is a time-consuming task that will ultimately defeat me. If I can select my “John Smith” on a variety of useful criteria that I may be more likely to know–prolific author,
nationality, profession, affiliation–I can quickly reduce the mountain of “John Smiths” to a manageable few. And these useful differentiating criteria may have been added to the authority record from a variety of data sources.

Ed Jones
National University (San Diego, Calif.)

Premise for debate:  The contemporary library is an IT organization.

I tend to think that’s true, but I admit I’m not sure what the definition of an “IT organization” is that I’m operating with to think that. And “is” or “should be”?  Or is it not true at all, because too much of the library’s mission isn’t about IT at all?

Discuss. While you discuss, consider:

Strains and Joys Color Mergers Between Libraries and Tech Units
http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i19/19a00103.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Here at my place of work, we have deployed the Umlaut software package as a front-end to our SFX link resolver. Umlaut is an open source project originally developed by Ross Singer then at Georgia Tech, and subsequently worked on quite a bit by me. This has been the main thing I’ve been working on for the past 8 months or so, in the middle of all my regular duties. Umlaut is sometimes called a “link-resolver front end” or a “middle-tier link resolver”. In fact, the Umlaut is a link resolver, in the sense that it receives OpenURL requests–usually representing a citation for a scholarly work–and responds with information on services available related to that citation–most significantly, with electronic availability. However, unlike most typical link resolver products (such as SFX), the Umlaut does not manage it’s own “knowledge base” of information on what titles an institution possesses from what vendors, and how to link to them. Umlaut relies on SFX–accessed through the SFX API–for that information and service. (more…)

Check out Marshal Breeding’s survey results, from his survey which mostly focused from my reading on various kinds of ILS satisfaction.

Horizon is near the bottom of every satisfaction question, and Horizon libararies are near the top of “would your library consider open source”. Hmm, coincidence? And what’s up with only half of Horizon customers expressing interest in migrating to another system soon? Have they not gotten the news? Do the other believe that SD is going to extend support indefinitely, or plan on running without support (in either case, never getting a new version?). I am curious what’s up with those 50% of Horizon customers who do not plan on migrating to another system!

The very top of “would your libary consider open source” is Voyager customers; another ILS whose customers seem to believe that their product’s current owner will be abandoning it (despite the owner’s protestations to the contrary).

And what’s up with Polaris and Library Solutions customers having such high satisfaction? Neither are products most of us even consider. What do their respective customer bases look like? I wonder if they are products well-customized for particular niches that may not include most of us? I don’t think I know anyone that works at a library with Polaris or Library Solutions.

III’s relatively high satisfaction has me suspicious though. It doesn’t match my anecdotal knowledge. The folks I know who work at libraries with III are not especially satisfied compared to those of us who have other systems.