Bibliographic Wilderness

Annoying electoral plug (Don’t worry, I won’t mention Obama):

The more I think about it, the more I think Columbus is the best location
for Code4Lib conference 2009.

Yes, if I were picking a vacation destination, I’d pick Providence. And that’s certainly a part of picking a conference location, honestly. Although after my coast-to-coast flight to get to Portland, I got off the plane thinking the conf should always be in the middle of the country to spare anyone that awful experience.

But more than geographical/city location, I think the fact that Columbus has got FOUR sponsoring organizations is HUGE. In an all volunteer-run conference like this, that means we can count on that volunteer labor. And these are four big well-resourced organizations, which had letters of commitment from top-level management. To me, that means we can count on a great conference. I think that’s really huge, and for me makes Columbus without a doubt the most desirable location.

The one question I have after attending 07 and 08 conference that isn’t on the proposals–what kind of Big Room can you get us for our ‘plenary’ session, which is the heart of the conference? Last year in Athens the room was just perfect–we had both desks in front of us and a tiered floor which gave everyone a view. And captain’s chairs. The lecture-style seating this year where you have no desk in front of you, no view, and are elbow-to-elbow with your fellow attendees (which combined, is not good for my RSI) is pretty awful by comparison. So I propose for 2010 voting, proposers specifically talk about what the space for ‘plenary’ style meeting is. But I have more faith that the combined four organization power of a columbus sponsorship could find such a space.

So my campaign endorsement: Vote Columbus for Code4Lib 2009.

http://www.code4lib.org/node/241

PS: You know another REALLY GOOD reason to have it in Columbus? Imagine the impact of 200 Code4Libbers being present in person to tell OCLC what they think is required for OCLC to truly act in the interests of OCLC’s member/owners.  Huge. Perhaps the best reason yet in fact.

So, there’s some discussion going on about DCAM and RDF, based off of Stuart Wiebel’s blog here, here, and here. With some supplementary commentary by Peter Murray.

One fundamental question: Do both RDF and DCAM do the same thing? (I’m not sure if I mean RDF alone here, or RDF plus a ’suite’ of things specifically designed by the RDF development community to supplement RDF, like OWL, which I know nothing about!). Do they do different things? What is each ‘framework’ intended to do anyway? [Okay, I guess that wasn't just one question].

Stu Weibel suggests that they do not both do the same thing, although there may be some overlap, but they are generally compatible and complementary. And PeteJ (Pete Johnston I think) seems to disagree, and think that both RDA and DCAM have very similar roles, although he thinks that each does something the other doesn’t, but I’ still confused as to what that something is in his analysis–and if that something matters.

It has occurred to me before that there’s an astounding amount of difficulty over being able to put this stuff into words and know what we’re talking about: Over our mental models of metadata and metadata control, and the words we use to talk about it. (more…)

So rsinger creates some slides in Google Docs. He tries to send me an invitation to view those slides.

I get this login, which I’ve never seen before:

” Welcome to Johns Hopkins Universtiy documents and spreadsheets program, powered by Google.”

There’s some kind of Google Docs enterprise account? (Which spells “Universtiy” wrong?). [I don’t know if it’s recognizing me by IP, or by the fact that the email address I have associated with my google accounts, and which rsinger tried to invite, is @jhu.edu) But here’s the problem, it won’t recognize any of my existing Google accounts. None of them. So I note that it insists my username is “@jhu.edu”. I try my JHU Single Sign-On. No dice either. (And now feel like an idiot, because I just got ‘phished’ by Google—our SSO credentials should never be entered anywhere except the enterprise sign-on form). It offers me the ability to create a new account, which I’m scared to do, because having multiple Google accounts is _exactly_ what has led to this kind of headache for me in the past. (Google tools are continually torturing me with identity issues like this, this is not new).

Ah, but look, it offers a “forgot your username or password?” link (which sometimes showed up for me and sometimes didn’t). Maybe that will at least tell me what the heck account it’s looking for, and maybe even how to recover my credentials:

No such luck. Sometimes I hate computers. Anyone know what the heck is going on, and how i look at rsinger’s slides? Should I complain to someone at my central IT about this? (what the heck is up with the mispelling of university, man!). (At first I was worried they were taking this from my google scholar link resolver registration without telling me; since that kind of mis-spelling is the kind of thing I’d do! But checked my google scholar institution registration, no mis-spelling. So it’s not from my stuff.)

This also shows the dangers of relying for so much on a product which offers you no tech support whatsover (not even an open source communty which knows how the product works). There’s basically nothing I can do here. How frustrating!

From the LCCN permalink FAQ:

Are LCCN Permalinks available for Library of Congress authority records?
Not at this time, but the Library is exploring options for adding this functionality.

Now that would actually be huge. If my software can look up an authority LCCN, and get back MARCXML for the complete MARC authority, it would make it so much easier to do so much more with authorities in software that handles existing bib records.

Now, provide me a machine-actionable interface where I can keyword search the authorities too (including LCSH and NAF), and I’d be able to do so much.

“Library 2.0 Gang” is the name that Talis has given to their regular discussion podcast–or maybe just a name that Richard used for that particular episode? I was invited to be on the show once, but I am not in fact part of any “library 2.0 gang”, and certainly have not proclaimed myself to be! I don’t think there is any ‘library 2.0 gang’ outside of that one discussion. I think the phrase ‘library 2.0′ is kind of a silly phrase, and am a bit embarrassed to have it written that I’ve proclaimed myself to be a part of such a ‘gang’. Oh well. Let’s set the record straight though and say that if there was any proclaiming to be part of a ‘library 2.0 gang’, it was certainly not ’self-’proclaiming.

LCCN permalink. A pretty simple thing, but one that makes so much sense. That LC is providing it encourages one to hope such sensical but not quite as simple things may be in the pipeline too.

Also interesting to note that, as far as I’m aware, this means that LC has beat OCLC to having a persistent URI for a (approximated) manifestation that resolves to a publically accessible structured machine actionable bib record (in choice of formats). That LC did it first surely has as much or more to do with business models than it does with tech. It’s actually gratifying and surprising that LC has done it. Stuart Weibel has surely taken note.

Did you guys know that issn.org sold z39.50 access to the ISSN registry/portal? I didn’t.

What might you want to use this for? Well, if the “linking ISSN” is deployed succesfullly, and the information is successfully included in the information available from the ‘issn portal’, then this is a machine-actionable source of correspondences between ISSNs that really represent the same title in different formats. I trust that many of my readers can think of all sorts of uses they could make being able to embed that information in their various discovery applications.

OCLC xISSN also can potentially provide some of this data in machine actionable form. (Haven’t explored it yet myself). I assume that xISSN correspondences are currently algorithmically/heuristically generated from what information is available in a cataloging record, as opposed to the “linking ISSN” based metadata, which presumably will be manually controlled? But then an interesting question is the cost comparison of these two services licensed for the uses we’d want to put them to. Would be nice to have two competing metadata web services available for a change, instead of usually having NONE that do what we need.

I don’t usually post just pointers to other blogs, but I’m making an exception here. In the interesting new “Federated Search Blog” (Which I think is from someone who works for a vendor looking to get into the library federated search market?), is a great post that explains what goes into the quality of a federated search product’s search, and what might make one work better than another—in a really accessible and understandable way to the non-tech-geek.  This is a topic I’ve had to try to explain to non-technologists before, and one which it’s really good for non-technologist library workers who are using and training users in this technology every day to understand.  From now on, I’ll point them to this essay.

What the heck, I’m a controversial roll here, might as well keep it up. OCLC is fond of reminding us that they are not a “vendor”, because they are a cooperative. Now, I’d say that, well, OCLC is a vendor–they are an entity which is in the business of selling goods and services to libraries, and they therefore have many things in common with other entities in that business (and they sell products and services which compete with those of other vendors).

At the same time, it is a very important and unique thing that OCLC is a cooperative. What that means is that OCLC is in fact owned by it’s customers. Or at least a significant subset of it’s customers–it’s members, including many of our employers. OCLC was created by libraries to serve the collective interests of the library community (originally a regional community, but now a national or potentially even international one). Unlike a standard commercial entity who’s fundamental basic reason for existing is profit for it’s owners (whether shareholders, founders, private equity firms, whatever)—a cooperative like OCLC’s primary foundational mission is to it’s member-customers-owners interests, and profits are just a way of serving that basic mission. This is indeed an important thing, and I think the library community is well served to have an organization with the power and reach of OCLC which is owned by the collective library community.

But this is of course only true in reality to the extent that OCLC’s members actually do have the power to exersize their governance as owners of OCLC. Which is why I’m pretty disturbed by proposals in the recent OCLC governance study to reduce the number of OCLC board members elected by members from 6 to 4 on a 15 member board.   Is this in the interests of OCLC’s owners?  I confess I haven’t had time to read the entire study and their rational for this reccommendation, so I’m open to hearing an argument to the contrary–but my gut reaction is: no!  Would the owners (shareholders) of any ordinary company tolerate such a dilution of governance power?

I expect many of my readers will agree with me. But also share my lack of confidence that OCLC’s members–that is, our employers–that is our administrators who make such organization-level decisiosn for our employers–will make sure their governance power is not diluated. Which brings us to another issue.  Many of us think that OCLC sometimes (often?) does not act like the interests of us, it’s members, are a main purpose to which organizational profits can not take a priority.   I would submit that, if that’s true, much of the blame has to be laid at the feet of OCLC’s owners, the libraries. If our administrators agreed with us about what OCLC behavior was in the community’s interest, and believed it was important, and actively pushed OCLC to do what was in our interest–it would happen. We do own and control OCLC, right?  So if this is not happening, blame has to be laid at the feet of libraries, not OCLC.  This library-owned vendor starkly illustrates the point I was trying to make in my last post: That the change we need demands that libraries themselves take ownership of the strategic direction of libraries as a community.

Of course, this is only true so long as OCLC’s members really do govern OCLC. If and when this becomes no longer the case, then OCLC really will be just another vendor. And that would be a loss for libraries. I hope instead that libraries can step up in owning the strategic directions which they direct the vendor they own to follow.

So, in the past year or so I’ve noticed a pretty astounding number of innovative, capable library technologists move from libraries to vendors. [Just some examples. Roy Tennant to OCLC. Nicole Engard to LibLime. Ross Singer to Talis. Andrew Pace to OCLC. Casey Durfee to LibraryThing. Steve Toub to Bibliocommons. There are probably more I'm not thinking of. ]

Now, first let’s get this out of the way: There’s nothing inherently wrong with vendors or working for them. We do indeed need our vendors to have people who are smart and understand technology and have an idea of library futures working for them. Most of these folks have gone to work on interesting and useful projects. I understand (I think) some of the allure here, and suspect that at some point in a hopefully long library career I’ll end up working for a vendor for at least a little while.

Nonetheless,would it be safe to categorize this as a ‘brain drain’? A veritable ‘giant sucking sound’ (blast from presidential election seasons past)?

What does this mean about the library sector? What does this mean for the library sector?

Some people might assume that money is the motivating factor here. While vendors in general probably can pay higher salaries than libraries in general, I’m not sure this is mostly about money. Rather, I think people who realize the huge and potentially exciting changes that are possible and neccessary in the library environment want to work in change-oriented organizations with clear strategic directions, in environments that value innovation, value these people’s work, and let them work on interesting and important projects with other smart, capable, and future-oriented colleagues.[1]

I think most readers will sadly recognize that it is exceedingly difficult to find that kind of environment working for a library.

I’ve been saying for a while that in order to achieve the change that we all realize libraries need, libraries can’t just rely on the vendors delivering an ‘out of the box’ solution–no matter how much we’re willing to pay. It’s by relinquishing all responsibility for innovation to vendors that got us to where we are today, and it’s not a pretty place. Libraries need to participate in figuring out where we are going, and defining the strategic directions to get us there. To be sure, libraries still need vendors, of all kinds. But libraries need to step up and be partners in innovation with their vendors.

I think that without this, the prospects of change are dim. Vendors can’t do it alone, no matter how many smart people they hire. And, if libraries can’t hold on to smart future-oriented people who understand the role technology can play in creating an exciting future for us–the prospects of libraries accepting the mantle of innovation also seem dim.

When was the last time you heard about a brilliant library technology worker moving from a vendor to a library?

[1]: While already thinking about this topic, I happened to read an article in the nyt about yahoo/microsoft recruiting woes:

“Engineers here want to work on tomorrow’s technology, not yesterday’s,” said Bill Demas… “If it’s perceived that Yahoo or anyone else is not focused on the future, it’s going to be very difficult to recruit top people,”