For the past year and a half, Dennis and I have been working closely with a group of Research Library Partners and others to develop and test a method for registering print archives in WorldCat.  I’m pleased to say that the OCLC Print Archives Disclosure Pilot is now complete and a final report of our findings has been published. The report was jointly authored by Lizanne Payne (project director of the Western Regional Storage Trust), Emily Stambaugh (manager of  the California Digital Library’s Shared Print program), along with Dennis and myself.  Partners in this project included the Center for Research Libraries, (CRL), the California Digital Library (CDL), and the libraries of Indiana University; Stanford University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, San Diego; the University of Minnesota and the University of Oregon.

The report has actually been out for a few weeks now; it was published without fuss or fanfare at the end of April. Gary Price was kind enough to feature it in an InfoDocket post last month, and it’s been making the rounds on some of the specialized discussion lists devoted to print archiving and preservation activities.  The specifics of the report — guidance on how and where to register print preservation commitments — apply to a relatively small number of institutions, but the publication itself marks a milestone for library community as a whole.  It represents the culmination of several related efforts directed at redesigning the critical (and costly) business of  preserving print books and journals.

It’s been a long road.  Back in 2009, an OCLC Research working group undertook a review of shared print policy documents that revealed some significant gaps in existing guidance, particularly with respect to how and where print archiving commitments should be expressed or registered:

About half of the policies [examined in the report] stipulate that the special retention and/or shared access status of documents covered by the agreement should be systematically registered; less than 20% specify a location in the MARC21 bibliographic or local holdings record where this information is to be recorded. Only a quarter of the policies reviewed mandate disclosure of the retention or shared access status in regional, national or international union lists.

This last finding has important implications for collection-sharing efforts that seek to achieve significant scale or impact on system-wide economies. More effective and systematic disclosure of retention commitments, in particular, might produce significant network effects by enabling anonymous participation in collection-sharing initiatives, generating secondary benefits for the entire library community.

Predictably, the report closed with a set of recommendations (or admonitions) intended to address the policy gaps that we felt were most important:

Cooperative agreements that are intended to achieve or to enable truly transformative change in the way library print collections are managed should include:

• A business model that acknowledges the changing value of library print resources in the current information environment;
• An explicit acknowledgment that effective disclosure of library holdings and retention commitments is necessary to support distributed management of print archives; and
• A commitment to capture, retain and share item-level condition information so that the preservation quality of print archives may be better judged.

The working group that contributed to the policy review was disbanded in 2009, but several participants continued to work, more or less informally, on drafting a set of guidelines for print archives disclosure in WorldCat.  That effort was explicitly modeled on modeled on practices developed in the 1990s for recording preservation microfilming information.  At the time, NEH was funding a large-scale brittle books preservation program and, to reduce duplicative effort, participating libraries needed a mechanism for identifying the titles and volumes that were already queued for filming.  Nancy Elkington was a prime mover in developing standard practices for recording this information in bibliographic union catalogs, using the MARC 583 Preservation Action Note.

Along with Deb McKern, a preservation officer at the Library of Congress, Nancy encouraged us to extend use of the 583 Action Note to print archiving activities.  Since 2005, use of the 583 had already been extended to registration of digital archives in the Registry of Digital Masters, a joint effort of the Digital Library Federation and OCLC.  It seemed sensible to build upon this past work in developing guidelines for registering print archiving commitments.  However, our initial effort to define guidelines for print archives disclosure foundered when it became clear that the bibliographic record was not an appropriate vehicle for recording item-level condition or retention statements.  For journal archiving efforts in particular, it was difficult to convey in a title-level record how much of a given journal run was actually preserved.  And, in a master-record union catalog like WorldCat, it was even harder to see how archiving commitments from multiple institutions could be adequately represented.

For a year or more, our efforts to define descriptive metadata guidelines for print archiving lay fallow.  Other projects were taken up.  But by 2010, with the emergence of several large-scale print journal archiving efforts and increasing public awareness of the importance of distributed preservation, it was clear that common approach to identifying shared print collections was urgently needed.  As anticipated in our 2009 report, the largest archiving efforts were finding it impossible to “scale up” without some shared infrastructure.  Happily, in the intervening years, support for item-level holdings information in WorldCat had increased substantially and it was possible to design and test a disclosure strategy that was better adapted to journals.  With the support of OCLC product management, the Print Archives Disclosure Pilot project was launched.  And as a result we are now — collectively — in a better place to design and implement scalable strategies for print preservation.

One of the contributions made by OCLC Research to its Museum Data Exchange project was the OAICatMuseum OAI-PMH repository software. OAICatMuseum is an extension to OCLC’s OAICat software that included support for delivering records in the CDWA Lite XML schema.

Since that project completed in 2009, work has continued within the cultural materials community towards improving the ways in which object descriptions can be conveyed in machine-readable form. One result of that work is the LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) schema. Version 1 of the schema was announced at the ICOM/CIDOC conference in November 2010. LIDO was built upon the success of CDWA Lite, the German Museum Association’s museumdat, and input from the community and technology professionals.

Though a relatively recent descriptive standard, LIDO is already seeing increasing use, particularly in Europe. To facilitate its use, over the past few months we worked closely with David Parsell of the Yale Center for British Art and with Ben Rubenstein and colleagues at Cognitive Applications to extend OAICatMuseum to support LIDO XML output.

The updated version of OAICatMuseum (version 1.1) is now available from the OCLC Research website.

A while back, I blogged about our Wikipedian in Residence position. I’m pleased to announce that until the end of August, Max Klein will be serving as OCLC Research’s Wikipedian in Residence.

Max will work with OCLC Research as a community coordinator. In this role, he will explore and pursue mutually beneficial projects between OCLC, library stakeholders, and the Wikipedia community. Initial points of entry will target two goals. First, he will work with OCLC staff and libraries to help foster a broader understanding of Wikipedia’s practices. And secondly, he will launch an inquiry into what technological integration is possible both technically and politically.

Max has a BA in Mathematics from University of California Berkeley. While a student, he lead and facilitated a student-run course on the Politics of Piracy which incorporated editing on Wikipedia. He also served, recruited and lectured, as a Regional Ambassador as part of Wikipedia’s Education Program.

We are all very excited about our work with Max and about opportunities between libraries and Wikipedia. In putting together this position, and while interviewing candidates, I have met so many wonderful and passionate people who are involved with Wikipedia. I’m excited by all the possibilities.

If you work at a library, and have had either positive or negative experiences with Wikipedia, we’d love to build on your experience, so please get in touch.

Max will be blogging about his work here, so stay tuned!

Discoverability of special collections has long been a top concern of the OCLC Research Library Partnership.  What works? Break out of the OPAC? Beyond MARC? End run around EAD?

Constance recently started a conversation here in the office about “catablogs.”  She’d seen that NYU’s Chela Weber taught a workshop in New York about how to use a blog as a low-overhead collection management system.  A “catablog” can create searchable, browseable online presentations of collections.

Today the Atlantic posted a short article about the impact of blogging rare books. At St Andrews, Daryl Green’s blog played an unusual role in what are otherwise standard special collections procedures – identifying new acquisitions and raising scholarly and financial support. (Book-nerd disclosure: I’ve been following Daryls’ blog for his 52 weeks of fantastic bindings, but Constance sent me the Atlantic article this morning.)

Ellen’s blogging about collections in ArchiveGrid is driving a healthy amount of traffic to ArchiveGrid itself. This is exactly the kind of research question we wanted to pursue with ArchiveGrid. Bruce has wondered if commentary and interpretation wouldn’t improve discovery and make it easier for a researcher to decide what to pursue.

This has prompted me to revisit The Metadata IS the Interface and user studies of relationships between description and discovery or use. Archivists and librarians contribute to discovery when they discard illusions of neutrality and express their excitement for the materials and their opinions about their significance. MARC and EAD have enhanced our management of collections, but don’t necessarily serve all the needs of our users these days.

Over on the RBMS-ish (rare books and manuscripts) side of our profession, considerable thought has been given recently to more rich description – “records more like sonnets,” as the Beinecke’s Ellen Elickson put it. I might borrow a term from the anthropologist Cliff Geertz and call it “thick description.” Michelle Light and Tom Hyry have advocated post-modern colophons and annotations. One of the RBMS hipsters has been arguing it is time to bust out of “the coldness of our description.” Mark Dimunation (Library of Congress) and others have imagined meaty and flexible descriptions of special collections like a wheel: hub and spoke. Merrilee blogged about Mark’s talk:

“Dimunation has been intrigued by James Asher’s call for progressive bibliography in which catalog records are viewed as hubs where information can be linked in, or hung on the core record as necessary. In this way, additional information can accrue over time, and doesn’t necessarily need to be contained in the catalog. Links to information that lives outside the catalog form a virtual vertical file that can document unique characteristics, and help form the fingerprint of an item.”

When I first joined OCLC Research, in the days of Shifting Gears, I thought that I’d wasted the past 10 years of my career building curated web exhibits of boutique collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives. In 2007 we needed to scale up digitization. Now my thinking is coming full circle. Curated blogs and exhibits, combined with the voice of the librarian/archivist, accomplish exactly what we’ve always wanted – to make collections visible and increase their impact.

PS: Merrilee credits Rob Cox at UMass Amherst with the first “catablog,” UMarmot. Chela started the “catablog” Emma at the Brooklyn Historical Society, before she moved to NYU’s Tamiment Collection. At the highly-interesting/highly-usable end of the scale, Bruce likes the New England Chowder Compendium. Come to think of it, one of the principles we learned during the Missing Materials experiment was to “blog your thefts” to make them discoverable.

Academic librarians are coming to terms with the likelihood that institutional repositories and disciplinary repositories will coexist into the future. In order to provide good support to researchers, librarians should be able to assess the reliability of disciplinary repositories as part of their role in furthering scholarly discourse. [And even more important if the library is involved in operating a disciplinary repository!]

In the report Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories, OCLC Research provides an overview of disciplinary repositories, profiles seven with different business models, and offers ways to assess or improve the sustainability of disciplinary repositories.

As part of our ArchiveGrid experiments, we’re conducting a survey to find out how researchers find resources that will help them locate materials in archives and special collections and how they share information about those resources with others. Not only are we interested in the answer to this question, but we bet you are interested as well.

Here’s how you can help. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are probably in a position where you work directly with researchers (we do not). You could ask your researchers to take the survey (which is very painless — there are only 14 questions, mostly multiple choice). As an incentive we are offering a chance (for those who are over 18 and live in the US) to win a $50 Amazon gift card.

We will also share our findings with you. We’ll be presenting results at the upcoming RBMS Preconference, and will also summarize our findings elsewhere (say, in this blog).

To make this really easy for you, here’s some text you could include in an email to researchers:

OCLC Research wants to know how researchers (you) use special collections. Complete this survey and be entered in a chance to win an Amazon Gift Card!

Please visit http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W8MKXP9 to answer some questions about how you find – and find out about – websites and other research resources. The information you provide will help OCLC Research make it easier to discover materials in special collections.

Getting the word out to researchers is one of our challenges, so thanks for your help.

Into the flow.

Today the Harvard University Libraries released their library catalog of more than 12 million bibliographic records. This release furthers the mandate from their Library Board and Faculty to make as much of their metadata as possible available through open access in order to support learning and research, to disseminate knowledge and to foster innovation and aligns with the very public and established commitment that Harvard has made to open access for scholarly communication. I’m pleased to say that they worked with OCLC as they thought about the terms under which the release would be made. Although Harvard Libraries did not ultimately accept our recommendation about the ODC-BY license, the approach chosen by the Harvard Libraries takes into account some of the primary aspects of OCLC’s recommendation.

Specifically, our discussions acknowledged the Harvard mandate as well as what was most important to the OCLC cooperative – receiving attribution and making others aware of the cooperative’s norms and expectations of one another in regards to data derived from WorldCat. And again I’m pleased to say that our Harvard colleagues took the cooperative’s desires into account. The dataset is being released subject to the Creative Commons Public Domain designation (CC0) but Harvard requests that subsequent use provide attribution to Harvard, OCLC and the Library of Congress. They also request that users be aware of and act in a manner consistent with the OCLC cooperative community norms and provide a link to those norms. We think this is a well-intentioned and executed compromise.

It’s true we don’t think that public domain dedications for data derived from WorldCat are consistent with the OCLC cooperative’s norms as expressed in the WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities (WCRR) statement, particularly at Section 3.B.5. We also recognize that the WCRR statement is not a legally binding document and that interpretations of these community norms within the cooperative may differ. Releasing data is ultimately the choice of the OCLC member institution as are the terms. Would other members of the cooperative consider the release of the Harvard dataset under these terms and conditions bad acting and a risk to the long-term viability and sustainability of WorldCat? Probably not, particularly with attribution, and awareness and responsible treatment of WorldCat-derived data being requested so prominently.

Our discussions and this outcome are evidence that interpretations of community norms within the cooperative may differ. The mandates of institutional mission, the imperatives of emerging local policy, national and supra-national structures may all contribute to a differing view and legitimately demand precedence. In our discussions with Harvard we acknowledged that their direction was their choice. Their mandates took precedence. They acknowledged the cooperative’s concerns and responded as a responsible cooperative citizen by requesting attribution, and awareness of and adherence to the community norms of the OCLC cooperative. The discussion was frank and mutually supportive. After all, OCLC like its member institutions is in the early stages of large shifts in data technology and policy. There are inevitable tensions and conflicting goods that will need to be reconciled over time. The process in which we are engaged will if we continue to work together with good will, ultimately lead to a new suite of best practices that balance the common good and institutional sustainability.

Image: Member of the Charles River Basin Community Sailing Club Enjoy an Evening Sail

Today we released Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Part 3: Recommendations and Readings. This is the last in a series of three reports a 21-member Social Metadata Working Group from five countries produced as the result of our research in 2009 and 2010.

The cultural heritage organizations in the OCLC Research Library Partnership have been eager to expand their reach into user communities and to take advantage of users’ expertise to enrich their descriptive metadata. Social metadata—content contributed by users—is evolving as a way to both augment and recontexutalize the content and metadata created by LAMs.

Our first report, Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Part 1: Site Reviews, provides an environmental scan of sites and third-party hosted social media sites relevant to libraries, archives, and museums. We noted which social media features each site supported, such as tagging, comments, reviews, images, videos, ratings, recommendations, lists, links to related articles, etc.

Our second report, Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Part 2: Survey Analysis, analyzed the results from a social metadata survey of site managers conducted from October to November 2009. Forty percent of the responses came from outside the United States. More than 70 percent had been offering social media features for two years or less. The vast majority of respondents considered their sites to be successful.

This third report provides eighteen recommendations and an annotated list of all the resources the working group consulted. The key message: “We believe it is riskier to do nothing and become irrelevant to your user communities than to start using social media features.” Among our recommendations:

• Establish clear objectives and determine what metrics you need to measure success.
• Leverage the enthusiasm of your user communities to contribute.
• Look at other sites similar to your own that are already using social media features successfully before you start.
• Consider using third-party hosted social media sites rather than creating your own.

All three reports total over 300 pages, so we’ve also prepared a much shorter Executive Summary with the highlights from all three reports.

The reports and the recording of our 9 March 2012 Webinar are all available here. We look forward to hearing your feedback – perhaps on our Social Metadata for LAMs Facebook page?

As with many OCLC Research publications, this report was written to help meet the needs of the OCLC Research Library Partnership. The Partnership not only inspires but also underwrites this type of work, so many thanks to the institutions who both contribute to and support our work!

One of the top accomplishments of 2012 so far is putting together a summary of our 2011 activities! It’s worth a look to be reminded of the breadth of the work we do and the many ways our partners contribute to those achievements. Let’s not spend too much time looking backwards, though. We’ve got a lot of new activities underway and welcome your ideas and involvement! We hope you have a moment to check it out, but we won’t be resting on our laurels.

I’d like to put in a plug for the next event for those who are in the OCLC Research Libraries Partnership, which is
Libraries Rebound: Embracing Mission, Maximizing Impact (June 5-6, Philadelphia). We are still confirming speakers but so far we’ve got a great line up of speakers — we’re also adding reactor panels, so check out the program now and in a week or two to see how it’s shaping up.

The meeting will focus on how libraries can more closely tie services and collections to the university’s (or parent institution’s) mission. In the midst of static or decreasing budgets, being able to demonstrate impact in the pursuit of the institution’s research and teaching goals is paramount.

The day and a half meeting will focus on three themes:

We’re fortunate to have some smart people from forward-looking institutions who will share their knowledge and experiences with us. And the conversation and discussion will definitely spill into areas beyond the three themes I’ve outlined above. Which is where you come in — we need you to come and talk about what you have planned (as well as to learn from your peers). Register now! Always free for those in the partnership.

Questions? Let us know. We always love to hear from you.