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Cataloging Matters Podcast #12: A Conversation Between a Patron and the Library Catalog

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 04:55:30 PDT

Cataloging Matters Podcast #12:

A Conversation Between
a Patron
and the
Library Catalog

A Conversation Between a Patron and the Library Catalog
by: j.weinheimer

Link to version without commentary

TRANSCRIPT
Hello everyone. My name is Jim Weinheimer and welcome to Cataloging Matters, a series of podcasts about the future of libraries and cataloging, coming to you from the most beautiful, and the most romantic city in the world, Rome, Italy.

In this episode, I have decided to embark upon a little experiment. I found a tool on the internet and decided to use it for an imaginary conversation that takes place between a library patron and the library catalog, who appears in the guise of a generic librarian. What does the average person think about the library catalog? What goes through their minds as they work with it?

By the way, there are a few limitations with file sizes using this tool, so some of the audio may be of a slighly lower quality than I would like and I think there may be a few bizarre animations.

Patron: Hello. I would like a copy of Huckleberry Finn.

Librarian: Of course! Which one would you like?

Patron: What do you mean?

Librarian: We have many items of many manifestations of the various expressions of the work of Huckleberry Finn. Which would you prefer: an audiofile, a video, or something else?

Patron: I just want a copy of the book.

Librarian: Certainly, which expression do you want? In Arabic or Russian or Greek?

Patron: I just want a copy in English.

Librarian: Sure. Which manifestation would you like?

Patron: What do you mean?

Librarian: We have many manifestations published in different years and by different publishers. Which one would you like?

Patron: What are the differences?

Librarian: Well, here's one published by American Publishing Company in 1899 with 375 pages, and here's another published by Modern Library with a copyright date of opening bracket nineteen fifty hyphen question mark closing bracket with 591 pages. Here's one published by Harcourt Brace and World in 1962 with 247 pages. Here is another one published by Harper and Brothers in 1918 with paging, xix pages, 1 page, 3 leaves, 404 pages, 1 page. Another one was published...

Patron: Wait! I don't care about that. You are telling me about the publication details. What are the differences in the novel itself from one published in 1962 and the one in 1918?

Librarian: What do you mean?

Patron: What are the differences from the one in 1962 from the one in 1918?

Librarian: Well, the one published by Harcourt Brace and World in 1962 had 247 pages. The other published by Harper and Brothers in 1918 had paging, xix pages, 1 page, 3 leaves, 404 pages, 1 page.

Patron: But you're still talking about the differences in the physical books when I am interested in the novel that Mark Twain wrote, not the differences in the physical books. What are the differences in the text from one to the other?

Librarian: This one has 247 pages while in this other one it is 325 pages and in this book the paging is, xix pages, 1 page, 3 leaves, 404...

Patron: Stop! Differences like these can be from type size or margins or chapter illustrations, or lots of other things could explain those differences. The texts may be exactly the same. What are the differences in the texts?

Librarian: You mean in the words themselves?

Patron: Yes.

Librarian: I don't know. That isn't recorded. Is that information important to you?

Patron: No, not really. But it's more important than what you are telling me. I just want a copy of the novel.

Librarian: Certainly. Which one would you like? We have many items of many manifestations...

Patron: I don't care. Just a copy in English. Any one will do. Just pick one for me.

Librarian: But I am a librarian and it would be unethical for me to select someone else's reading material. We believe in freedom of choice, freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of...

Patron: OK. OK. I'll take the one published by Harper's in 1918.

Librarian: Certainly, Which copy would you like? We have two copies.

Patron: What are the differences?

Librarian: There are no differences. These are duplicates of each other. One has a different barcode from the other.

Patron: So, are you telling me that the text in both of these is exactly the same? How do you know that the text is the same here, but not in the other books with different dates and paging?

Librarian: Well, it's the publication information that is the same. We assume that the rest is the same too. We don't compare the copies word for word, so we don't know if the actual text is exactly the same or not. Does it matter to you?

Patron: No, not right now. Still, you have some strange ideas about what is or is not a copy, it is all based on the differences in the books and not differences in the text, which is what interests me. I have a question--

Librarian: Certainly.

Patron: Why does the catalog work this way?

Librarian: Because these are the tasks that users want and they need to be able to do them.

Patron: Which users?

Librarian: All users.

Patron: Who determined that this is what users want?

Librarian: Those needs were determined long ago and were codified by Charles Cutter in a sacred document from 1876 where he listed the objectives of the catalog. His declarations were later transferred into the world of the internet through another sacred document called the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, or ferber, although I personally find that word repulsive and prefer FRBR. It was declared that the tasks of the users are to find, identify, select and obtain, works, expressions, manifestations, and items, by their authors, titles, and subjects.

Patron: Well, I'm a user too and I need something else. In full-text databases, I can do all kinds of searches and analyze the texts themselves and make decisions. I guess I can understand that if you don't have any full text and that you cannot examine the items immediately, somebody will need to make a choice among similar resources. But if I am to make a meaningful choice, I need meaningful information. Giving me publication dates and page numbers doesn't help me make a decent decision. If I can look at a thing directly, I can decide which one I want, so if I am able to examine the versions, I can decide that one is easier to read or one has pages falling out, or I just choose any one I want. Otherwise, I am being forced to choose texts based on information that means nothing to me at all. How am I supposed to decide I want something published in 1923 or another from 1962 without knowing what the differences are? Why is this information supposed to have meaning for me?

Librarian: I don't know. You can always browse the shelves and choose a text there.

Patron: But that's not using the catalog records to select the items. It actually just points me to the right shelves to browse and that is where I select the actual item I want after examining what you have to offer. So, the questions you are asking me remind me of the question my little daughter constantly asks me: Would you rather die of thirst in the desert or freeze to death in the snow? How is anybody supposed to answer that kind of question? But my daughter keeps it up until I give her an answer, so I say, I'd rather freeze to death in the snow, and then she starts asking: Why!?

Librarian: Oh! But according to the library's sacred documents, the library catalog is still designed to fulfill the needs of the users, which is to let them find, identify, select and obtain, works, expressions...

Patron: Stop! All I know is that with the information you are giving me, the answers are: I don't care!

Librarian: All right. You can go into the stacks and make your own choice by browsing the books. Would you still like the one published by Harper's in 1918?

Patron: Yes. Or no. I don't care. That one is as good as any.

Librarian: Would you like copy 1?

Patron: OK.

Librarian: I'm sorry. That one is checked out and will be returned in a month. Would you like to place a hold on it?

Patron: I'll take copy 2.

Librarian: Certainly. Here is the call number where you can find it in the stacks.

Patron goes into the stacks and returns 20 minutes later

Patron: I can't find it.

Librarian: Let me take a look myself.

Library goes into the stacks and returns 20 minutes later

Librarian: I can't find it either. It must either be misshelved or stolen. I'm terribly sorry. We will have to put a search on it and we may have to buy a new copy. If you leave your contact information, I can get back to you as soon as we have finished the search.

Patron: Maybe I'll just go to Border's.

Librarian: I'm sorry but they have gone bankrupt.

This is Jim Weinheimer. The man in this dialog pretty much embodies “the library catalog” instead of a generic librarian. Of course today, a librarian could tell the patron that there are lots of very nice free copies available at the click of the button: in the Internet Archive, Google Books, Project Gutenberg and many, many, many other places on the web. In fact, there are so many that our current catalogs and traditional methods break down when each library attempts to add—and just as important, to maintain—separate records in all of those library catalogs. It's just too much duplicated work. As a result, people cannot use our catalogs to access the materials that are actually available to them, even including classic texts like Huckleberry Finn but the same goes for movies, maps, recordings and almost everything else.

If the purpose is to fulfill the needs of the users perhaps best would be for the catalog itself to tell the truth of what is actually available to people today by starting with tools such as Google Books, the Internet Archive, or even better: some kind of tool created by librarians, and only then point people into the materials on our own shelves.

This does not end the argument at all however, since the needs of librarians are just as important as the needs of the users. In a future Cataloging Matters, I will speak in more depth about the needs of librarians, who need highly specialized tools in order to do their jobs. I believe FRBR has confused librarian needs with the needs of users, but to be fair, this has been going on for a long time.

The music for this episode really is genuine Italian music: this is the theme music from the movie The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, composed by Enrico Morricone. It seems that every Italian has at least one cell phone, and the music from Morricone is on a huge proportion of them, so some of his spaghetti western music is playing somewhere almost constantly. For those who have not seen this movie from the 1960's, and you like westerns, I can recommend this movie and for those who haven't seen it for awhile, I think you'll enjoy it once again. It is one of my favorite westerns, and the music is a major part of the experience.

That’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed this episode and thank you for listening to Cataloging Matters with Jim Weinheimer, coming to you from Rome, Italy, the most beautiful, and the most romantic city in the world.

Cataloging Matters #11: “Open Archives, pt. 2”

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:18:08 PDT

See also: Open Archives pt. 1

Cataloging Matters #11:
Open Archives, pt. 2

http://www.archive.org/details/CatalogingMatters11OpenArchivesPt.2

Hello everyone. My name is Jim Weinheimer and welcome to Cataloging Matters, a series of podcasts about the future of libraries and cataloging, coming to you from the most beautiful, and the most romantic city in the world, Rome, Italy.

In this episode, I want to continue with part two of my discussion about Open Archives. I intend here to concentrate on some of the technical aspects of how to get these materials under control, primarily from the cataloger’s viewpoint.

In the first part of my discussion on Open Archives, I spoke in more general terms and perhaps most people already knew much of that, but I believe it is necessary to emphasize the importance of the materials in the open archives, and although the materials in open archives are different in the sense that many of them have not gone through pre-peer review or they may differ in several other ways, these facts still do not detract from their importance. Once we accept that these materials really are highly important to our communities, as after all, they are by definition since they have been created and stored by scholarly institutions, some of them great and often including our own home institutions, all at great trouble and expense, then libraries cannot afford to ignore them. As I have said elsewhere, if libraries ignore the materials produced by their own communities, it should not be so surprising when those same communities begin to ignore libraries.

In an article Academic Libraries and the Struggle to Remain Relevant: Why Research is Conducted Elsewhere by John Law of Proquest, the author discusses the results of a project researching how academic patrons search. After discussing library catalogs, the myriad of databases, each with its searching peculiarities, and the real problems of Google Scholar, he writes: “Clearly, the desire among academic researchers is exceptionally high for credible, relevant results that can be refined to show only full-text resources.” This seems to me to be precisely what the open archive initiative is supposed to supply. http://www.serialssolutions.com/assets/publications/Sydney-Online-2009-John-Law.pdf

This is why I consider that, in library terms, the materials placed in open archives have already gone through the process of selection by their respective communities; there is no need to order anything, so the next step in the process that everyone is waiting for is description and organization, otherwise called cataloging.

So, how do we catalog these materials? For those who listened to part one and remember, I used the terms “exponential growth” when describing open archives and mentioned that already open archives hold around 9 million items. While I’ve seen some pretty big backlogs, I’ve never seen anything nearly that big! Of course, these are only the open archives that are registered, and not all are registered, plus there are many wonderful sites floating around on the web that are not in open archives, but I’m not dealing with those at the moment, only those materials in open archives.

In many ways, I think the open archive initiative has taken us all back in time to the beginnings of journals. The librarians and publishers of long ago understood as well as we do today that most people want individual articles out of journals, and not the journals themselves. Back then, a journal would sometimes provide an index in their final issue of the year, so that people wouldn’t have to go through each and every issue, and then to make it easier to find articles, some began to cumulate these annual indexes every 5 years or so, and eventually some even cumulated the cumulations. It turned out however that even with all of these cumulations, people still complained about doing all that work for each journal.

What did the librarians do? They too, quickly learned that, although it was what their patrons wanted, cataloging each article of each journal was an impossible task. William Poole got the brilliant idea of creating an index of the articles from a bunch of journals, printing it, and selling the publication to libraries. In the transcript I use the miracle of the internet to give a link to an early edition from 1853. That edition has a preface where Poole very clearly describes the situation of the mid-19th century, and it mirrors today’s reality almost exactly. Others may find his comments useful. http://books.google.com/books?id=yO9GGjPbPjYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

It turned out that Poole’s solution made everybody happy: he and his publishers made money; the librarians could buy the index, and a nice addition was that librarians had a general guideline of which journals to buy since if a journal happened to be in Poole’s index, it was a good reason for them to buy that journal. Based on that fact, journal publishers naturally wanted records of their articles in Poole’s index. The index made the catalogers happy since they had, in effect, outsourced one of the most difficult parts of the collection, and the patrons were happy, that is, once they learned that if they wanted an article, they had to look in several places: first, they had to find Poole’s index: they could then see which issue of which journal the article appeared, then go over to the library catalog and see if the library had the journal issue and where it was shelved, then finally into the stacks. Some patrons never learned this vital skill, and even the ones that did nevertheless did not like it much. Many never really understood why they had to look in so many different places and why it couldn’t just all be in the catalog.

Today with open archives, as we have seen, there are a huge number of articles and repositories, while their numbers are growing all the time. Just as before, there are not enough librarians to catalog them all, and the work will have to be outsourced in some way, as indeed, it already has been. But now we run straight into the biggest problem: nobody wants to pay anyone to index these materials. As I mentioned in part one, the idea of open archives is not to make money, but to save money. So far, we have lacked the genius of a modern William Poole who, if he were with us today, may have figured out by now how to make money indexing those open archive materials. The remarkable Faculty of 1000 site I mentioned in part one may prove to be a starting point. But however that turns out, it’s clear that our traditional methods and solutions are broken. Therefore, we must consider matters anew, and seriously: do we have any advantages today that our predecessors didn’t have before?

As I already mentioned, open archives include a requirement for an associated metadata record created by the authors (or whoever it is that adds the item to the open archive). These records are then made available in such a way that bigger databases can “harvest” them, i.e. take copies of the records into their own databases so the searcher doesn’t have to search the thousands of open archives separately.

Metadata harvesting
The process of harvesting metadata from open archives is normally not much of a problem. There are various tools you can use, for instance, MarcEdit will do it http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/index.php, but there are other tools as well, http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/tools/tools.php; even your web browser will do it, although it’s not the most efficient tool. You just need the link, then select the format you want to take, sometimes you can change the query in various ways, by date or subject, and just start in.

For those who want an example, you can do your own harvesting for a series of records in An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals, ca. 1490-1920, comprising around 200 records in American Memory. In the transcript, I provide links for harvesting these records using the formats OAI-DC (a special form of Dublin Core), MODS and MARC21, and you can do it yourselves. It takes a moment, remember, you’re downloading over 200 records, so have some patience!
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/oamh/books.html
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=musdibib (OAI-dc)
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=mods&set=musdibib (mods)
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=marc21&set=musdibib (marcxml)

If you examine the links, they are all the same except for the “metadataPrefix”, which defines the format of the record you want the computer to serve you; oai_dc, mods, or marc21.

Naturally, once you get the records, you then need some kind of repository to place them. There are lots of options for that too, many of them “free” open source options such as Drupal, but I won’t talk about any of that here.

There are problems with metadata harvesting however: since you are taking copies of the records, somehow those records should be coordinated. The moment a record in the original database is updated, yours becomes obsolete. New records made in the original repositories need to wait until you harvest them and put them into your repository. With harvesting, your database will always be behind. In practice, conversions are often unavoidable. Information may be lost in the process, and many times, the outside archive will have additional powers for search and display that your repository does not have. We’ll discuss an example at some length later in this program.

Harvesting is not the only option if you want to work with open archives; there are tools such as APIs which query the live database, and often allows searchers the option to work with the original database in various ways. There is also my own method which I also won’t discuss right now. There are many, many options available.

My current thinking is that open archives eventually will become specialized by topic, instead of the generalized ones we have now, based primarily on individual organizations. Specialized open archives will be much like the high-energy physics archive at Cornell and the E-LIS archive I mentioned in part one.

Open archives specialized by topic would mirror the history of web site creation. For those who can remember the early days of the World Wide Web when every institution was frantically creating its own web pages, it turned out that the websites of those organizations almost always mirrored the internal bureaucratic hierarchy within an institution. This happened because the websites were made by internal staff with the purpose of ensuring a “web presence” of the specific division or department. Some overall webmaster then collected the links to all of the divisions and departments into a single, overall page. Search engines were highly rudimentary at that time, and therefore, to find information, a searcher had to navigate the internal bureaucracy of an organization, through the divisions, departments, projects, and so on.

I can say that this really did seem logical at the time, but slowly, it dawned on website creators that the true logic of a site on the World Wide Web is to appeal to the greatest portion of the public as possible, and this meant people who had no idea of the internal workings of your organization. This kind of website was compared to a closed intranet, a distinction took me some time to understand. Lacking this internal knowledge, outside patrons could almost never find the information they wanted, no matter how hard they tried.

As a result of this change in focus, today the information architect concentrates on the person who doesn’t know anything about the internal peculiarities of an organization, and so organizes the site to help those people find the information they want. In a similar way, it seems to me that this could easily be the direction that open archives could evolve: open archives specializing by topic would seem to be what most people want, and the totality of what an individual institution creates is much less useful. This would also be similar to people wanting journal articles over journals. All of this would probably make searching easier, but it may very well turn out that I am proven wrong, since after all, that is the nature of prediction.

Another, much more serious problem is: there are almost no standards for the metadata records in the open archives. One obvious problem is with formats. There was a great solution--I thought it was anyway--in the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~chan/oaindia/presentations/OAI_PMH.pdf. I won’t discuss it here, but I provide a link in the transcript. What happened was that Google unfortunately decided not to use it, in favor of the much simpler site maps. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/retiring-support-for-oai-pmh-in.html. If Google had accepted OAI-PMH, it would have been a great shot in the arm for the format. What will be the impact of Google’s decision remains to be seen.

In this program, I do not want to focus on formats. While they are a very important issue, I do not believe formats are where the underlying problems lie; I prefer to discuss the quality of the information within the metadata record. This is where I have heard the quality described as I mentioned before: “Pretty good.”

Problems with Harvesting
Havesting metadata records, if it is to be useful, must be considered in the context mentioned earlier. I like to visualize it as being in a large office building with hundreds of offices, each with a separate file cabinet. To do a thorough search of the documents in the office building, people have always had to go to every office and look through all of those hundreds of file cabinets. If we are to make the searchers’ task easier, one solution is to bring all of the file cabinets into one room so that they can be searched together. But after you do this, you find that this is not enough because you still have to search hundreds of separate file cabinets--all that has changed is that you no longer have to walk all over the building. While your feet may have it easier, the searching itself is not any easier at all since you still have to search each file cabinet separately. To make searching easier, it would need to be one search, and that means merging all of the files in all of the file cabinets into a single file. That’s a lot more work than just getting a few workmen to drag a bunch of file cabinets into one big room!

It means in turn, that all of the idiosyncracies that each person used in his or her own file cabinet have to be ironed out so that people can find materials by UN, ONU, United Nations, non-Roman materials, and all of the other details that I am very happy I do not need to explain here because my audience is catalogers and they understand these matters very well.

Whatever methods you decide to employ to solve this situation, everything will also need to be maintained.

Therefore, although metadata harvesting is very important, it is only one step toward a solution. We can imagine everything in one location (that is, one room or one database), but the searching itself is just as difficult as it has ever been, if there is no standardization. Without standardization, at least on some level, whenever we create an open archive repository, we wind up creating our own little Google, where we are simply hoping that full-text algorithms of the Google-type will solve the problems in deus ex machina fashion. I do not share that faith and believe we need some kind of standardization.

Lacking a miraculous solution, it isn’t as if we are left with nothing at all: there are still all those metadata records for each item, and the question becomes: how can that metadata be standardized?

Before we discuss possible solutions we need to get some idea of the nature of the beast. Let’s examine a practical example in one of the biggest Open Archive harvesters: OAIster.

A very incomplete analysis of OAIster
Before I begin my analysis, please believe me since I am being very sincere: it is not my purpose here to criticize any initiative; I am a big fan of all of them. My purpose here is to try to show how important is the task of cataloging, and to show how well-trained, professional catalogers could help identify and solve some of the problems.

Here is a document I found at random:

Consumption inequality and partial insurance / by Richard Blundell, Luigi Pistaferri, and Ian Preston.

To sum up what follows, after an examination, I discovered there are different versions of this document, at least from 2003 through 2008, when it was published in The American Economic Review, and available in JSTOR for those with a subscription. Let me describe in more detail what I found.

http://oaister.worldcat.org/search?q=Consumption+inequality+and+partial+insurance&qt=notfound_page&search=Search

When I did a search in OAIster for this document I find what appear to be duplicate records but on further analysis, it turns out that these are records for different versions, and only some of the records allow access to the actual document. (I ask myself: What happened to the Open part of the Open Archives?) As I examine the metadata in these records, I find that most give the authors’ names in citation format, i.e. surname plus initial, but one record has their names as they appear in the document.

It turns out that all the authors are in the NAF. The forms of the first two, Blundell and Pistaferri, match their NAF forms but the third lacks dates, since the NAF form is Preston, Ian, 1964-. I conclude that no one consulted the NAF. The match of the first two names with the NAF is purely coincidental since their NAF forms are the same as in the document. http://oaister.worldcat.org/title/consumption-inequality-and-partial-insurance/oclc/2390295190605&referer=brief_results

When we begin to examine the documents themselves, matters become more complex. In the 2003 version of the document, that is, one of the versions that is open, the authors mention in a note that it is a version of an earlier paper “Partial insurance, information and consumption dynamics”, also available in the open archive. This is not mentioned in any of the records. (http://oaister.worldcat.org/oclc/2390295663776)

Further examining the documents, we find abstracts along with the keywords: consumption, inequality, and insurance that is, words that are rather useless for searching purposes since they are taken directly from the title “Consumption inequality and partial insurance”. I conclude these keywords were assigned either by the authors or someone who had no interest in subject analysis. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/2854/1/2854.pdf

I discover that these records came from the open archive at the University College London and decide to search that archive separately. I find some interesting details, http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/cgi/search/advanced?screen=Public%3A%3AEPrintSearch&_action_search=Search&_fulltext__merge=ALL&_fulltext_=&title_merge=ALL&title=Consumption+inequality+and+partial+insurance&creators_name_merge=ALL&creators_name=&editors_name_merge=ALL&editors_name=&abstract_merge=ALL&abstract=&divisions_merge=ALL&date=&satisfyall=ALL&order=-date%2Fcreators_name%2Ftitle. While there is no consistency among the records, we see that they contain additional information not in OAIster: none of the OAIster records for these documents have any subjects but in UCL, some records have subjects, yet once again, there is no consistency: some have no subjects, and others have differing subjects. One of the records has what appears to be real subject descriptors: http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/15896/: LIFE-CYCLE EARNINGS, COVARIANCE STRUCTURE, TAX-REFORM, PANEL DATA, INCOME, HETEROGENEITY, DYNAMICS, WELFARE, UNCERTAINTY, VARIANCE. These terms appear to be authorized forms but I don’t know where these terms come from. Perhaps the EconLit thesaurus would be a good bet.

Again, none of the OAIster records concerning this document have any subjects at all and it appears that OAIster has decided not to harvest the keywords, probably because of the consistency concerns mentioned earlier. See how all of this recreates the scenario I described before? Bringing together hundreds of file cabinets into a single room saves the leather on your shoes, but it doesn’t make the searching itself any easier because you still have to make lots of separate searches.

This doesn’t end our analysis and in fact, it may actually just be starting. When you discuss searching today, everything naturally must be compared with Google, and in our present case, we find the same article in Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Consumption+inequality+and+partial+insurance+blundell&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_ylo=2007&as_vis=1. This has the normal link going to the restricted version at JSTOR, but in the right hand column, there is a link that goes to one of the free versions hosted at the University College London, the one dated Sept. 2003. This is very nice and handy for the patrons but I do not know why this version is singled out.

Yet the Google “metadata record” has something more that I find very impressive: a link going to different versions. If you click on the link labelled “All 46 versions”, you find many, many, many more versions of this article, including the one published in 2008 http://www.econ.upenn.edu/system/files/Blundell.pdf. Is this a legal copy? I don’t know; I don’t care. It’s available and that’s all that matters to me right now.

I confess that I have not looked at all 46 records, so I don’t know what else may be hiding there, but in any case, after this simple examination, the situation seems to this experienced cataloger at least, to be a bit chaotic. Don’t get me wrong: the materials are all great, it’s just very confusing to understand what exists, and if it’s confusing to me, I must assume that it would be just as confusing to non-specialists.

I did not go out of my way to find this example; it seems to be a normal record, and a normal level of metadata quality in a normal open archive. Can and should professional catalogers conclude that such a level of quality is “pretty good”?

As an aside, I can imagine that if anyone has been listening to my podcasts, they could be thinking at this point, “But with all these versions and the chaos you describe, you are actually talking about how we need FRBR! You’ve gone into long tirades over how you don’t agree with FRBR! How do you get out of that one?”

In my defense, what I have said in the past is that FRBR does nothing more than restate the traditional operations of the catalog--it just uses other terminology and posits a different structure by eliminating the unit record. It provides nothing new in the way of searching. The only “innovations” it introduces are in display based on works-expressions-manifestations-items, and even those displays are based on 19th-century models. I maintain that what FRBR intends is designed for librarians over our patrons, and thus is no real change from our current library catalogs. Therefore, I say that what FRBR calls “User tasks” are actually “Librarian tasks”. Librarians have to know exactly what exists so they can organize it for later retrieval--I don’t question that. My stance is that the catalog as it stands today allows all of this right now for librarians and the FRBR “user tasks” are not what the public either wants or needs. Consequently, creating catalogs with FRBR in mind ignores what the public wants.

In the case we have just examined, what would patrons want? Would they want a detailed browsable listing of the 46 or so variants at their disposal, or would that just be too confusing and too big of a pain? My own opinion--and it is an opinion although based on experience--is that patrons would probably be happy with almost any version they could get, and if given the choice, most probably would simply opt for the latest one they could have for free.

As I said earlier, it is not my intention here to point out faults; my purpose is much more positive: I want to demonstrate that harvesting is only one part of the solution, in some ways, the easiest part, and there are other options besides harvesting. All the while, it is important to keep in mind the traditional cataloging concepts, which remain completely valid today, although the traditional practices or techniques used by catalogers may end up in the garbage can.

Are there solutions toward improving this situation? I believe there are, but I think it is clear that solutions should focus not on creating quality in these metadata records, but on managing the quality. The unavoidable fact is that there will not be enough catalogers to create quality, therefore we can only try to manage it as best we can. Accepting this would represent a major shift in the viewpoint of the traditional cataloger. There are many ways to include cataloger-type controls in open archives as metadata managers, and the only limit is our imaginations.

I suggest thinking in terms of creating new tools with the purpose of providing help to catalogers: a useful tool could be one that included items from a local open archive into the main cataloging workflow automatically; tools that allow catalogers to upgrade records en masse; tools to find items that exhibit inconsistencies or other inadequacies in metadata, perhaps through statistical analyses that can be viewed graphically, so that inconsistencies could show as stray dots on a graph, or to point out where subject terms are absent or simply repeat what is in the title. Ontologies need to be built so that when patrons see a subject heading or descriptor in one open archive, they can be led to similar materials in other databases that use different thesauri or subject systems. How about a tool that allows corrections and updates by members of the public, while everything would be done under the watchful eyes of the catalogers. Perhaps a difference in procedures would help: additional descriptive work could be done retrospectively depending on whether a new item is a version of something already in the database. Perhaps if there are no versions, less work can be done originally.

The watchword should be as before: to help our patrons navigate in the information universe, not to expect everything to be in a single standard: that standard being that “we” use, whoever the “we” happens to be. That would be an impossible task leading us to disaster.

The biggest change of all however, would come when librarians honestly consider the whole of the materials in the open archives as fundamental parts of their own collections, just as important as the books on their shelves or the databases to which they subscribe. After all, that’s how our patrons consider them. No single library can control all of those materials; it must be done on a truly cooperative basis.

Librarians must make something that people can use, and I think it should be done soon, since expecting our patrons to wait longer and longer will be tantamount to self-obsolesence and suicide, especially in times such as these. In his Preface to the 1853 edition of the Index to Periodical Literature that I mentioned earlier, William Poole wrote:

“To persons who have given but little reflection to the subject, there are few things which appear simpler than the compilation of a Catalogue or an Index; while those who have had experience in such labor well know that the undertaking is full of difficulties. If the preparation of this work had been delayed until a plan had been fixed upon that reconciled all objections, it would never have been commenced; or, if the labor had been continued until the work was satisfactory to myself, it would never have been presented to the public. My endeavor was to bring the contents of some fifteen hundred volumes into as narrow a space as possible. The ordinary plan of indexing periodicals was, under the circumstances, wholly impracticable.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=yO9GGjPbPjYC&pg=PP13#v=onepage&q&f=false

Poole’s remarks describe very well the situation we are facing today. We also have to create something that will help our patrons and it doesn’t have to be perfect, we just need to make tools that are better than what people have today--just today! That’s all. Everyone understands that whatever we make will improve. Nobody expects perfection, but they do expect improvements. Poole improved his index, others took up his baton later, and libraries should follow his example.

And with this we come to the end of my discussion of Open Archives, so no one need worry that it will go on and on like my personal journey with FRBR. I hope you enjoyed it or at least found it interesting. If you have any suggestions for future podcasts, please let me know.

The music I have chosen to end this programme is Pandolfi Mealli’s evocative Violin Sonata Op.4 No.1 called "La Bernabea" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYsbdlyAAMU. Pandolfi Mealli lived in the mid-17th century and very little of his music remains, just two sets of violin sonatas numbered provocatively 3 and 4. This is an excerpt with Andrew Manze on the Baroque violin and Richard Egarr, harpsichord.

That’s it for now. Thank you for listening to Cataloging Matters with Jim Weinheimer, coming to you from Rome, Italy, the most beautiful, and the most romantic city in the world.

Cataloging Matters #10: “Open Archives”

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:19:25 PDT

Cataloging Matters #10:

“Open Archives”

http://www.archive.org/details/CatalogingMatters10openArchives

Hello everyone. My name is Jim Weinheimer and welcome to Cataloging Matters, a series of podcasts about the future of libraries and cataloging, coming to you from the most beautiful, and the most romantic city in the world, Rome, Italy.

In this program, I would like to discuss Open Archives, what they are, and are they important; in short: what should we do with those things?

For those who aren’t sure what an open archive is: it is nothing really special, it’s just a computer database created and maintained by an organization, probably academic or professional, that aims to provide digital resources to the public for free. This database very possibly will conform to some standards from the Open Archives Initiative. http://www.openarchives.org/ Although the saying, “Information wants to be free” is not true since somewhere, somebody has to pay something, with open archives, the people who use the materials are not the ones who pay. This is the essence of open access, which is a method of publishing. Open archives are not public in the sense that anyone can place materials in them, like anyone can upload a video into Youtube, http://www.youtube.com or a document into Scribd http://www.scribd.com/ An open archive accepts materials only from members of the community it belongs to, for example, a university open archive allows their local faculty and/or students to add their materials, or the high-energy physics one at Cornell http://arxiv.org/, allows only recognized physicists to add their materials. E-LIS is an open archive for the profession of librarianship http://eprints.rclis.org/. I have added some of my own articles there myself. (By the way, links to all of these sites, as well as to everything else, are in the transcript) Finally, an open archive should have some kind of organization behind it, since a project of a single person can easily disappear if that person can no longer afford it, becomes ill, or just gets tired of it.

What makes open archives open is that anyone is supposed to be able to access the materials inside the archive without payment. So, we see that open archives are one way of promoting open access. Naturally, this is not taken to very kindly by many publishers, who believe that they are losing out on a lot of cash, or at least they claim that they do. The authors of scholarly materials however, who get no financial return from the publishers, or at the very most a pittance, are beginning to discover the advantages of this open access regime, since they have learned that when they place their materials into an open archive, they can increase their citation rates significantly. Of course, being cited is the main way that scholars get their rewards, through promotions or they may even get head-hunted by another institution.

It’s important to note that not everyone agrees that materials in open archives are cited more often. In the transcript, I provide links to some of those articles. I’m not going to discuss them here, but to be honest, these disagreements are based on statistical technicalities and fail to convince me. We should not be comparing long-established, respected peer-reviewed journals to an article placed here or there in a random open archive, since I see that as a completely different argument. To me, it only makes sense that an article available for free online with a click has a much better chance of getting cited than those that make people unlucky enough to have a library without a subscription, pay $30 or $40 for it, or go through the hassle of an ILL. Arguing against something that seems so obvious should be backed up exceptionally well. Peer-review enters into this debate and we’ll discuss it later in this program. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/01/07/citation-advantage-for-mandated-open-access-articles/; http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/02/08/oa-citations-spurious-relationship/]

The business model for open archives is a little different: instead of being designed for organizations to make money, it is aimed at saving money. For open archives to work, everyone involved is required to share their materials as widely as possible. In this sense, the model is same as copy cataloging: a significant number of institutions must be willing to create and share their catalog records, otherwise if nobody shares their records, the model will obviously fall apart. Creating and maintaining an open archive costs a significant amount of money, and if only one or two people, or only a handful of organizations make their resources available, it will not justify the costs. The more that everyone makes their resources available through open archives, the more everyone will benefit. Naturally, there are serious concerns about all the different aspects of quality and we’ll discuss these issues in depth later as well.

But imagine for a moment an ideal situation, where all scholarly resources were placed into open archives. In such a world institutions could save untold scads of money because the budget that would normally go to buying materials from publishers could be switched to maintaining the local open archive, which has costs but would be far cheaper. Such a level of cooperation and openness will probably not happen anytime soon, if ever, but the main idea is to understand how much could be saved by freeing each institution from the necessity of buying their own copies of the same journals, the same books and the same everything else, while at the same time, we could provide everyone with many more resources than ever before.

This kind of model could never have worked in a physical, printed information environment, but it can work in the virtual environment. For example, all that would be needed(!) to make the the open access movement complete right now, is for the Elseviers and Ebscos and Springers and all the other publishers to simply remove the controls on their information and let everyone access the materials there for free! It would actually be a lot easier for them, but I’m not holding my breath since I don’t think they will do that anytime soon!

Growth of Open Archives
When I first learned about open archives, I was very skeptical of them, yet it seemed safe to assume that these materials would grow. Gradually, it dawned on me that the number of materials available to our patrons was growing at what appeared to be an exponential rate, and therefore, the pressure on cataloging and our catalogs would necessarily grow in similar fashion. It seemed to me that if library catalogs did not rise to this challenge by not including these materials, our patrons would find our catalogs less and less useful because library catalogs would then be giving access to a rapidly decreasing percentage of the information that was really available to them. That seemed to be a path to oblivion, and it still does, at least to me.

Moving ahead a few years, there were some tremendously important decisions: first, came Elsevier’s decision to allow authors to upload copies of their articles published by Elsevier into an open archive, (when I read the news, I couldn’t believe it at first!) http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/editorsinfo.editors/editors_update/issue8, then came the declaration by Harvard http://hul.harvard.edu/news/2009_0901.html, and other universities that their faculties should place a copy of every article they publish into a local open archive. Then, university presses began to put their backlists into open archives. Just to mention a couple of the biggest are the presses of the University of Michigan and the University of California. [University of Michigan, http://www.press.umich.edu/digital/hathi/ and University of California http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/]. If properly followed up, I believe such decisions could prove to be game changers. The financial disaster that we have all been dealing with for a few years now, plus the statistical trends of open archives seem to suggest that I was correct in my assessment that they will continue to grow, perhaps at an exponential pace. Significant amounts of money must be saved and this is one way it can be done.

In the transcript are some statistics from ROAR (the Registry of Open Access Repositories) and OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories). I’ll summarize the results.

ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) Database
(Growth: http://roar.eprints.org/cgi/roar_graphic?cache=426449 [the graphic must be generated].

ROAR shows a growth from 2003 of the number of repositories from around 250 to over 2000 today, while the number of records has gone from around 200000 in 2003 to over 9 million today!

OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) Database

http://www.opendoar.org/onechart.php?cID=&ctID=&rtID=&clID=&lID=&potID=&rSoftWareName=&search=&groupby=r.rDateAdded&orderby=&charttype=growth&width=600&height=350&caption=Growth%20of%20the%20OpenDOAR%20Database%20-%20Worldwide)]

A similar growth rate can be seen in OpenDOAR, which shows less dramatic growth than ROAR, but still, from mid-2006, there were around 400 repositories while today there are almost 2000. Not all open archives are listed in these initiatives, but it seems safe to conclude that open archives are popular to create.

Problems with Open Archives: Aspects of Quality
Peer Review
Of course, not all is sunny with Open Archives and they do pose many challenges. I mentioned the various types of quality earlier, and one concern is the quality of the information found in open archives. Often, the materials in the open archives have not gone through peer-review but I would like to point out that this is not necessarily such a bad thing. (I assume that everyone understands what peer review is here, but just in case, I provide a link to a wiki page I made for students http://aurlibrary.wetpaint.com/page/Scholarly+Publication+Process)

I would like to relate a story that could be described as either famous or infamous, depending on your point of view. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Steven Walt of Harvard University, co-wrote a paper for the Atlantic magazine titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy". The article was turned down by that magazine, so the authors decided to place it into the Harvard open archive, where everyone could download and read it. http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/3082/israel_lobby_and_us_foreign_policy.html

The topic of their article was highly controversial and it began to get noticed; it was formally published in journals such as the London Review of Books and Middle East Policy; it wound up being published as a book, all the while provoking a major dispute in the general press. Here we can see how useful open archives can be when dealing with highly controversial topics and we can also see that there can be definite problems with traditional peer review which can occasionally act as a censor. As this incident shows very clearly, there is a post-peer review process and it is carried out all over the “information universe”. Post-peer review can be much more effective and far more interesting for everyone concerned than pre-peer review. [http://futureofscipub.wordpress.com/open-post-publication-peer-review/]

A post-peer review system can work in various ways: it can be embedded within the open archive much as the talk section works in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Foreign_Policy. In the transcript I provide a link to an example article available at the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which has post-publication comments and ratings. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001030

A post-peer review system can also exist separately; especially worthy of note is the remarkable site Faculty of 1000 http://f1000.com/, where experts evaluate medical articles, provide reviews and some controls, and rank them anywhere from “Must read” to something less. Apparently, people like the selection and ease of this site very much since they must purchase subscriptions--and please note--not for the content of the papers, but for the expert selection and reviews.

One of the main criticisms of post-peer review is that it has been demonstrated scholars normally don’t participate: most never rate or review anything at all, and the question is: Why don’t they? One of the answers suggested has been that there are no incentives to participate, but I reply that scholars have never received any payment for peer review. My suspicion is that in the normal peer review system, when someone asks you to do a review, you are rewarded automatically: after all, you have received recognition from colleagues who have taken the trouble to single you out from other possible candidates, and all they want is your opinion. That can be quite flattering. This important type of reward does not happen with the post peer review systems that I have seen, and something else needs to be devised, perhaps a more tangible reward system, including being able to put the reviews on your resume, general recognition in your profession for good reviewing, or something similar.

Systems can be built that make it clear that an article has not been reviewed at all and therefore needs reviewing, or has received primarily negative reviews. I personally believe that the so-called “double blind” system where the author is not supposed to know the reviewers, and the reviewers are not supposed to know the author, does not work and reviews should be both signed and open. This could also be incorporated into a system that would give prominence to articles with signed reviews over anonymous ones. There really are many, many options.

Still, no matter how people feel about post-peer review, the genie truly is out of the bottle: no matter how people feel, articles, books and other resources will be placed in open archives, many will be consulted and commented upon somewhere, and there either will be a system that collects these subsequent comments and reviews, or there will not be a system. Of course, some articles and resources will never be read or commented upon but the more important materials will be discussed and those discussions can appear anywhere. The existence of a system to collect the discussions in some way would benefit everyone. For me, the question is not whether post-peer review works or not--it’s going on right now and has been going on for millennia--the task is to make a system that works the way scholars and librarians need it to work. For instance, if I came across that article by Mearsheimer and Walt in the London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby, I would want to know about the criticisms and responses; not only those few within the London Review, but in all kinds of other sites as well.

No matter what is decided, in my opinion an open archive needs to include some kind of peer review mechanism, whether it is pre or post. Versioning is also important so that authors can add updated versions of their papers based on comments they receive.

Finding Materials in Open Archives and Metadata
After all these preliminaries, I finally get around to cataloging. Although this has been rather roundabout until now, I thought it was just as important to discuss the quality of the materials housed in an open archive as the quality of document description and retrieval.

It has been much more difficult to find OA resources than so-called “regular” resources because they fall outside the normal bibliographic workflows (you won’t find them in Ebscohost or Elsevier). Publishers don’t make ONIX records for them because nobody makes any money at it. After all as I mentioned earlier, publishers are businesses with the purpose of making money, while an open archive is not designed to make money. But aside from this, it is important to emphasize that the problem is not a lack of metadata: whenever authors place a resource into an open archive, they must provide a “metadata record” for it, which normally includes the authors’ name or names, the title of the resource, some keywords perhaps, and so on, but mostly this information is not standardized in any way. How does this turn out?

Whenever I have heard repository managers discuss their open archives, of which they were very proud, the question of metadata invariably comes up but there are precious few details that you get as to the quality of that metadata. I have found a question of the sort: “What is the quality of the metadata in your repository?” most often meets with the reply, “Pretty good”.

What does that mean?

To be fair, for non-specialists in the field, it is very difficult to understand the need for shared standards or that shared standards even exist. In fact, I was once discussing this very problem with the head of a repository and mentioned that in library catalogs, maintaining consistency is the overriding factor because that is the only way of providing a reliable result. This means that whether or not you happen to agree with a certain practice, such as the way a name heading has been set up, you cannot just make up a form you like better and stop there. You either must follow what has been done before, or you are forced to change all previous occurrences of the former name to the new name heading, which can be very difficult, and practically impossible in a networked environment. He did actually come to understand the importance of consistency, and when he did, he mentioned something I thought very perceptive. He said that in his opinion, when scholars create metadata for their own articles, they view it in one of two ways: either as completely boring and unimportant, or as extensions of their own creativity. He saw that both approaches are incorrect for the purpose of ensuring reliable search results.

I personally think that it is just as unfair to expect untrained persons to create metadata records that follow shared standards as it is to expect people who have never worked as mechanics to change a radiator on their car or replace a windshield. Non-experts do not have the training, the tools, or in many cases, the interest to do a competent job, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But is there a solution?

From this point on, I plan to do some analysis of metadata and the complexity of this discussion will go up, so perhaps I have gone on long enough at this point and shall stop for now. In the next episode, I shall analyze what “pretty good” means in practice, if it actually is “pretty good”, and what role catalogers could play in the task of getting these materials under control.

The music I have chosen to end this programme is the Second movement, the Adagio, of Albinoni’s Oboe Concerto in D minor, Op. 9, No. 2 published in 1722. This was performed by the Sarre Radio Chamber Orchestra and I think is a wonderful performance of this famous piece, although unfortunately, it’s from a vinyl record and you can hear a scratch for a few seconds. For fans of library history, most of Albinoni’s unpublished music was held in the Dresden State Library when that city was destroyed in the firebombing of 1945, therefore much of his work is gone. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSAJ1yuBozA

That’s it for now. Thank you for listening to Cataloging Matters with Jim Weinheimer, coming to you from Rome, Italy, the most beautiful, and the most romantic city in the world.

See also: Open Archives pt. 2

Cataloging Matters Podcast no. 9: Standards, Perfection, and Good Enough

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 09:45:44 PDT

Cataloging Podcast no. 9:

Standards, Perfection, and Good Enough

http://www.archive.org/details/StandardsPerfectionAndGoodEnough&reCache=1

Hello everyone. My name is Jim Weinheimer and welcome to Cataloging Matters, a series of podcasts about the future of libraries and catalogs, coming to you from the most beautiful, and the most romantic city in the world, Rome, Italy.

In this installment, I want to explore the idea expressed more and more often that catalog records need to be Good Enough. What in the world does that really mean and what are the consequences when and if we accept it? Have people already done so?

===============================

Even though the debate is as old as libraries and their catalogs, it seems that more and more often in the library literature and blogs, I run across the idea that the quality of catalog records only needs to be “good enough” but there is little discussion about what this “good enough” actually consists of. If you do a Google search with the keywords “cataloging good enough” the result is quite interesting: at least in the results I get, the term “good enough” is almost always juxtaposed with the term “perfection”. This is shown very nicely in the number 1 result for me (which does not mean it is number 1 for everyone), which is the interesting article “An Essay on Cataloging” by Daniel CannCasciato in Library Philosophy and Practice, November 1, 2010 http://www.faqs.org/periodicals/201011/2249165571.html (There are links to this article and everything I mention from the Transcript)

This article offers some excellent quotes:

'The biggest question we have to ask ourselves,' [Jay] Schafer said, is 'What's good enough?' Is a nearly perfect catalog record worth the cost of achieving that goal?' Or, as a different speaker put it, … "At the root of these processes are two powerful beliefs. One: the cult of perfection. And two: cataloging is about how print books are arranged on the shelf..."

In his article, Daniel goes on to say that the question itself is wrong: that cataloging can now be an ongoing process, i.e. the catalog record is no longer a printed catalog card that disappears into a drawer, but modern catalog records are in a publically accessible database that, if everything is set up correctly, can be accessed later and updated on a cooperative basis, even automatically or semi-automatically. This can happen because modern systems allow people to work together to build resources up gradually to the benefit of all. The author also mentions Michael Gorman:

“To accept the "good enough" rallying cry relegates patrons of today and the future to a lesser status than previous generations, a slight that, as Gorman wrote, might not be noticed for years.”

I would also like to quote from the report “Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California” The University of California Libraries, 2005 [available at http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/BSTF/Final.pdf. p. 25], where, under the section “Automate metadata creation” the authors write:

“We must adapt and recognize that “good enough is good enough”, we can no longer invest in “perfect” bibliographic records for all materials.”

While I honestly sympathize and mostly agree with all of these ideas, there seem to be several assumptions hidden. For those who do not accept the idea of “good enough”, the assumption is that what came before the implementation of “good enough” was “better” and that if we do things substantially differently, the results will be for the worse. Yet, those who argue in favor of “good enough”, normally pair “good enough” against “perfection”. As the first article points out, comparing “good enough” with “perfection” is not the only possibility; I will go on to state that it is not even a normal sort of comparison, and ultimately it is not fair. In fact, “good enough” has nothing at all to do with perfection. Yet, what is this idea of “good enough”?

In this installment of Cataloging Matters, I would like to discuss “good enough” a bit more thoroughly to determine what it can mean and what it does mean in other contexts. Obviously, “good enough” has completely different meanings to the various people quoted before, so what is going on? Does “good enough” really mean nothing in particular, or can it mean something much, much more specific?

It isn’t like the concept of “good enough” does not exist in our society; in fact, it exists everywhere we turn. Our society could not exist without “good enough”. But what does “good enough” really mean in this wider sense?

It turns out that it means exactly what it says: that with the specific item, process, or whatever you are talking about, you can be assured that it will indeed rise to a certain level of quality, or in other words, it literally is “good enough”. “Good enough” in this sense, which is also a more normal sense, means standardization, and standardization in turn means reliability, which provides everyone concerned with levels of quality that all can count on.

Seen in this way, standards are a type of guarantee. “Good enough” or anything that follows minimally-accepted standards does not mean that everyone has no choice but to accept whatever the producer feels like throwing at them; it means exactly the contrary: you don’t have to accept it. In fact, there are many options when goods or services come to people that do not meet the minimal agreed-upon standards, but standards also have nothing to do with some vague ideal of perfection.

So, if a manager in charge of a public water plant says that the water quality meets the standards, or in other words, is “good enough”, that manager means something very specific and is saying nothing negative at all. Here “good enough” is not some insider code for “nobody cares” or that whoever wants to use the water from this plant should be aware and are expected either to hold their noses and take their chances, or to filter out whatever yuck goes through the pipes and throw in chlorine tablets before they drink it. It means that the water that goes out of the plant literally is guaranteed to be “good enough” for people to use reliably and safely, as determined by experts in the field.

Why? Because the management at the water plant in essence guarantees that the water conforms to highly specific technical standards. For example, in the transcript you can find a link to the standards about water quality issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/index.cfm. I won’t quote anything from these standards because I don’t even know how to pronounce most of the words! Still, if the water quality does not conform to these standards, it is considered a highly serious matter. While the actual quality of the water may rise and fall from day to day or hour to hour, there is a limit below which the water quality cannot be allowed to fall.

It also doesn’t mean that all the experts agree with all the standards. Nor do the non-experts all agree. Both of these groups--the experts and non-experts--have all sorts of motivations for their opinions, from professional to ethical to monetary to political to who knows what else. As a result, some of the minimal levels may be highly contentious. Right now, there is a lot of discussion in the press about the safe levels of radioactivity in the drinking water and food produced in Japan. Some experts maintain that there “is no safe level” since DNA can mutate with any level of radioactivity. http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/20114219250664111.html On the other hand, the U.S. conservative pundit Ann Coulter said that there is a growing body of evidence that radiation in excess of what the government says are the maximum amounts we should be exposed to, are actually good for us and can reduce cases of cancer. http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/03/ann-coulter-tells-oreilly-radiation-is-good-for-you/ Although both sides seem rather extreme to me, I am no expert and realize that there is probably a difference of opinion, and in view of the Japanese crisis, these differences may flare up again. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that those responsible for running nuclear plants should just stop caring about the amount of radioactivity being released and give up trying to follow the current standards that are in place. If they did, I hope they would be punished, and punished very severely.

There are different methods of enforcement and punishment when standards are not followed, for example, if the quality of the water falls too low. The managers of that water plant I mentioned will be very interested in keeping the water quality “good enough” because otherwise, they may wind up fired or find themselves in prison for several years!

Modern society would disintegrate without this level of reliability. I am sure we all want to be able to light our stoves without them blowing up in our faces, to drive our cars without the steering wheels coming off in our hands, or to open a can of corn and not find ourselves in the hospital for the next few weeks with ptomaine poisoning. If any of those things happened to us, we would want to see whoever was responsible punished in some way because the product obviously was not “good enough”.

The number and types of standards are truly amazing. Just considering the standards from one organization: ISO, there are over 18,000 standards! http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue.htm. But there are lots of standards organizations, e.g. Wikipedia lists hundreds but there are many more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Standards_organizations.

In the library literature however, the words “good enough” have meant something quite different from this use, depending on who is discussing them. For the traditional cataloger (including myself, I confess), “good enough” in librarian-speak actually means “inferior and not good enough”, i.e. precisely the opposite of what it proclaims to be, while for others who are often more administrative or IT based, it seems to mean, “I really don’t care.”

To be honest, I can’t fault those who don’t care. After all, the moment you do care, you automatically find yourself surrounded by an almost impenetrable thicket of hair-raising technical information and jargon that in just a few minutes will force all but the most stalwart screaming from the room. Imagine for a moment that you really cared about the standards for water quality from the EPA I mentioned earlier. How much time would it take you to learn enough just so that you could begin to understand what those standards describe? Then, how much more would you have to learn to have an informed opinion about how good the standards are?

Who wants to get involved in all of that? Yet, if our society cares about the quality of our water, somebody has to get involved, and that is the price of expertise. This is because the final product must be reliable for everyone concerned but the general public should not have to immerse themselves in the details. So, while I expect the welds in the buildings I enter to be “good enough” so that bits don’t start breaking off and falling on my head, and I want the welders themselves to be able to work safely with their equipment, I have absolutely no interest in reading their standards.

But I sure want the welders themselves to know the standards very well and more importantly, to follow them to the letter. If it turns out that a company does a bad job at welding and their welds break, I actually want that company punished in some way because if there is no enforcement, then it means that companies and welders can do anything they feel like and consequently, whether or not a weld is secure would become a matter of sheer luck. While I have a lot of respect for welders and builders and electricians and mechanics, I do not think it is wise for society to rely solely on their “higher ethical sense of professional responsibility” for the quality of their work. I am sure that many welders indeed have a very high ethical sense; I am just as sure that many others do not. This is why standards exist in the first place: to replace personal trust with genuine, enforceable guarantees. If everyone could see that welders could get away with inferior work and do just as well as the competent welders, the result would be to teach the competent welders that their “higher ethical sense” is useless. If we take away the enforcement, some very important standards that each and every one of us relies on every single day, would all become jokes.

In the case of welding, would I prefer those welds to be “perfect”? Sure, but I don’t even know what a perfect weld would look like, and in any case, I think most of us will settle for welds that are “good enough”, that is, so long as they really are good enough.

Therefore, it seems obvious that if libraries want the general public to use their catalogs and catalog records, they must provide some level of reliability. The words “good enough” must therefore mean something just as precise as they do in other professions and should not be compared with some unreachable “perfection”.

Now, I would like to change tack and ask: does this mean that the records catalogers have been creating for the last few decades should be considered as the minimal standard, or in other words, defines what is “good enough”? In addition, the information universe is changing radically, and when practically everything is digitized, which may happen much sooner than we think, what does this portend for the very purpose of the catalog itself, a tool that is becoming less and less understandable to our patrons? The controlled terminology, although people tend to like it when they understand it, is less understood, and in any case, people have to fight with it to make it work since it was designed for a completely different environment. As a result, if people do indeed come across controlled terminology that is useful to them, they do it more by happenstance than anything else. Therefore, isn’t it logical to conclude that it would better serve the needs of the patrons if we were to move the resources away from creating a semi-obsolete catalog record and toward digitizing our resources?

I think this is what is really behind the administrative/IT plaint of “good enough” and I admit it’s a very good question. This is where I think the discussion becomes genuinely interesting.

There is no doubt that what catalogers create must change; it must change not out of some sort of “inherent need” for change, but as adaptations to the fundamental changes taking place in the information environment. If we were living in 1965, there would be no need for any real changes except for normal managerial efficiencies, as occurred with the adoption of ISBD. The pace of change in libraries was much slower back then, and if a specific change took a few years, maybe it was unfortunate, but it was still OK. This was because the only way to get at information during those days was through the catalog, and if people couldn’t find things because of backlogs or whatever, although there might be a little huffing and puffing from a couple of researchers, it was not that big of a problem since people had no choice except to wait until the library got around to it.

This has been completely turned around today since there are other, very attractive choices for our patrons through Google, Yahoo, and many other databases where they can easily find and use some wonderful websites that are not in the library’s catalog. I am sure this must be very confusing for the public and I can imagine they could easily conclude: I just found this wonderful resource on the web using Yahoo and there is no record in the library’s catalog for it. If no record at all in the catalog is “good enough” for these excellent sites, then there seems to be no reason for catalog records for anything digital at all. Besides, using a library catalog today is just plain weird. Conclusion: resources should be devoted to digitizing what is not already digitized; then we would have a real, lasting solution, while creating catalog records is just continuing the practices of the past.

Such thinking is very logical and is accepted by many.

Are there standards in libraries currently? Of course: there are standards for the construction and wiring of the library building; for shelving and how much weight a floor can handle. There are standards for binding, for storage and disposal of chemicals used in conservation departments; standards for accounting and on and on. But these are different from the bibliographic standards those same libraries claim to follow. How are they different? In quite a number of ways, actually.

I have tried to demonstrate that normal standards create a series of technically-defined minimal levels of quality that experts consider to be “good enough”. Of course, there is nothing to prevent any organization from devising products or processes that are almost totally different from all other similar products, so long as what they create meets those minimum levels, or they may rise far above any or all of the minimal levels, but the standards remain in place as guarantees both for the producer and the consumer; the producers can be assured that their products represent a quality product and/or can work with other items, so a producer of television sets does not have to produce electrical cords, but can buy them reliably and safely; while the consumer can rest easily knowing they are buying a reliable product.

Library-bibliographic standards are quite different however: they seek to create records that are as identical as possible; in essence library bibliographic standards seek to define a template that defines what final product will be. True, there are different bibliographic levels, e.g. full, core, minimal, conser and so on, but even here, each level is in essence, a template, defined by what they will and will not contain.

How could a standard from the normal world, based on guaranteed minimums, work in the bibliographic world? What would such a standard look like? To imagine one, we can consider the current AACR2 rule of three for authors, which in short, says to create entries for the first three authors of a resource and if there are four or more, make an entry only for the first one. This is very specific. Compare this with the proposed RDA rule that says to make an entry only for the first author, and then curiously enough, then RDA singles out translators, and illustrators of children’s books! The rest are up to “cataloger’s judgement”.

If we relate this to the earlier discussion about normal standards, we can see that this RDA rule defines a minimum level of quality and that a book with three authors and an editor only needs an entry for the first author to be fully compliant with RDA. In effect, the RDA standard says that one author is “good enough”. It is difficult to figure out what else such a rule means. Relying on “catalogers’ judgement” is the same as relying on the “higher ethical sense of professional responsibility” of mechanics and welders. It doesn’t work in the real world; why should it work in the library world?

To make this more like regular standards, the rule could rather say something like, “make entries for at least the first three authors of any resource”. This would allow for a better minimal level of quality, while allowing for all different kinds of variations and additions that any organization would want to add.

How would the idea of minimal levels work in other areas of the record? With subjects, perhaps we could guarantee a certain number of headings for certain types of materials. With description, I would think that ISBD offers lots of areas for minimum levels. Setting up real standards takes work, discussion and compromise. I confess that right now I’m not really sure on many of the specifics, but I have no doubt it can be done since there are standards in place for all kinds of processes, and what’s more: it must be done. In today’s shared information environment, if library rules become more like normal standards and focus on creating minimal levels of quality instead of defining everything that goes in and is left out of a record, I believe the tasks catalogers are facing and their solutions will become clearer.

Therefore, neither AACR2’s maxims of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not”, which strive to create records that are as similar as possible and where any deviation is seen as a flaw, nor RDA’s rather naive assumption that if you leave as much as possible to a notoriously fickle “cataloger’s judgment”, offer a real solution. Normal standards would allow matters to become simultaneously more flexible, while allowing for a level of genuine reliability.

The other major difference of normal standards vs. library bibliographic standards is something less pleasant to discuss: the matter of enforcement. Obviously, few people will agree that catalogers should be led off to jail for messing up a publication date or doing superficial subject analysis (OK. I’ll admit that there have been a few times when I saw the thoroughly lousy copy records of some libraries and I thought..., but I won’t go there!) Still, there are options that other professions use: for example, there is the process of certification and the need to renew that certification. Certification can be applied in a few ways: to the product, i.e. where each bibliographic record would get some kind of label of guarantee that it reaches specific standards, or there can be professional certification, where individuals are certified and their certification is not forever, but needs to be renewed.

Of course, this would mean a radical change from what exists today. A lot would need to happen before something like this could take place, including getting support from our institutions to help catalogers get and maintain their certification. Still, if we are to change from the empty library concept of “good enough”, which has meanings that range anywhere from ”uncaring” to “not at all good enough”, toward the more normal idea of standardization that “good enough” really is good enough, something has to change, and minimum levels of reliability need to be guaranteed in some way for our records.

Finally, if standards are to succeed, they have to be realistic, that is, they cannot be based on wishes. A standard that would mandate all automobiles get a minimum of 250 miles to the gallon would be currently impossible, so standards must be based on what is genuinely achievable.

In this sense, I suspect that even AACR2 may not provide a realistic standard since there have been so many complaints and problems of record quality (I am a highly vocal critic), the difficulty of training and so on. Of course, RDA is not any simpler than AACR2 so if RDA is accepted, exactly the same difficulties will remain.

How have libraries dealt with the problems of records that fall below the accepted level of quality? With the incredibly inefficient method of spending time upgrading the records locally and complaining among themselves. Yet, nothing happens to the offenders and they just keep making the same sub-standard records that everyone is supposed to upgrade. It turns out that anybody can make records, from a student with an hour’s training to a paraprofessional to a master cataloger of 20 years experience. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a tremendous number of substandard records needing upgrading. Years of this practice, and now the economic crisis, have forced many libraries to just give up and accept anything they get. Obviously, this is not good for record quality, and the standards we claim to follow become a joke.

One final point: for standards to make any difference, they also have to be aimed at products that people really want. If somebody created detailed standards for the creation of feather pens or wagon wheels, they would have absolutely no importance today.

If libraries are to come up with enforceable standards, they must be aimed at something that people want and need. And now comes the huge question where there is very little agreement: what is the public doing in this new information universe? Does the public find our bibliographical records today useful? If yes, that’s great, but if no, what parts of the record are the most useful and how can they be improved?

In short, it should be clear from what I have said, that I think that the issue of library bibliographic standards is a problem with a very long history that has been mostly ignored, and it is not possible to ignore it any longer. It doesn’t matter if we accept RDA or not, if we decide to stay with AACR2 or even go back to AACR1 or take Cutter’s or Panizzi’s rules. None of it makes any difference if record creators are always able to ignore any standards that exist. In my own opinion, some kind of certification will be necessary sooner or later if there is to be any hope that library catalogers, and their records, will be taken seriously.

It is truly unfortunate though, that these concerns are coming to a head now, when we are facing the serious economic crisis plus the need to fit ourselves into the greater metadata universe. Big changes are coming (as if we haven’t gone through enough change already!) but I feel that something has got to give: either we take the issues of real, genuine, useful, enforceable standards seriously, and just as seriously as they are taken in other professions, or our standards may be headed for the trash can.

Even this does not end the discussion however. There is also the question of creating standards for an “expert system”, that is, a system not primarily for use by untrained people, but for experts. Experts of all kinds need standards for their own tools as well. For example, there was a recent article in the Globe and Mail about the New York publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin, “Mike Shatzkin in Montreal: Libraries don't make sense anymore” http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/in-other-words/mike-shatzkin-in-montreal-libraries-dont-make-sense-anymore/article1974860/ Mr. Shatzkin maintains that although libraries make no sense in the future, “there will be an ongoing need for librarians, however; their skills will continue to be in demand, as will those of editors.” Of course, librarians are no different from any other profession: in order to be effective, they need specialized tools. A dentist armed only with a toothbrush, toothpaste and a pair of pliers would not be very effective as a dentist. Librarians are just as reliant on their specialized tools, that allow them to “do their miracles” of finding information and resources that the untrained cannot. When a librarian is stuck only with the Google interface, with no controlled vocabulary or structures, they are just as helpless as anyone else... almost.

I would like to discuss this, but I have gone on long enough. Perhaps in a future installment, I will talk about the need to create an expert system not aimed for the general public, but by “information experts” of all kinds.

It has been a bit of time since my previous podcast. There are two reasons for this: I have had some health problems that are now pretty much over, but more significant is the fact that I am no longer Director of the Library at the American University of Rome. I resigned that position to take advantage of some other opportunities. Right now, I have been taken on with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as an information specialist, attached to FAOStat in the Statistics Division. After that we’ll see what happens. In any case, I have lots of ideas!

I have decided to close this segment with Palestrina’s Agnus Dei, or Lamb of God. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina worked here in Rome, primarily at St. Peter’s during the 16th century. This is a wonderful example of Renaissance polyphonic choir music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pp0XUU6Rmk

Incidentally, I can’t resist saying that I think it’s too bad that the Google Books-Publisher agreement fell through, yet I still realize that all of those books will be made available sooner or later; all that has changed is that now we know it will be later. These are the sorts of technological innovations that cannot be stopped forever.

That’s it for now. Thank you for listening to Cataloging Matters with Jim Weinheimer, coming to you from Rome, Italy, the most beautiful and the most romantic city in the world

[See also: The Truth about Standards (European Committee for Standardization) http://www.cen.eu/cen/NTS/Truth/Pages/default.aspx].

Cataloging Matters, podcast #8

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 02:55:41 PST

Cataloging Matters, podcast #8

RDA: the Wrong Solution
for the Wrong Problem
a paper given at the
RDA@yourlibrary online conference
hosted by the Amigos Consortium
February 4, 2011

LISTEN TO PODCAST

I believe the title of this talk pretty well sums up what I intend to discuss. Libraries and their catalogs are in great distress, but although in distress, I remain optimistic since I believe there are many solutions possible. Unfortunately, RDA goes in the wrong direction: it will not help the public use our catalogs any better, and more importantly, RDA ignores the real problems that libraries, librarians, and catalogers, are facing. Above all, for catalogers: they need help. And lots of it.

What are these problems? I want to discuss a few of them, but remember that this is *not* an exhaustive list!

Today, with the exponential growth of the Internet, libraries are faced with a huge and ever growing number of resources that need description and organization; we are also experiencing the apparently paradoxical situation of an increasing number of variants of resources, along with fewer of them at the same time. By this I mean that instead of hundreds or thousands of more-or-less exact physical copies of a single resource, such as we see with multiple copies of a single book, these new resources are truly unique, single websites (i.e. each website equals a single copy) but this single copy can be viewed simultaneously by any number of people wherever they are on the web. At the same time, there are an increasing number of variants of resources as they are reworked in all kinds of novel ways. We have never seen these types of resources before. There are many examples, such as the “Star Wars Kid” video on YouTube that went viral and multiple versions of that one video came out.

[The best discussion of the many facets of Star Wars Kid is in Chapter 16 of the lecture Jonathan Zittrain: The Future of the Internet http://fora.tv/2008/05/15/Jonathan_Zittrain_The_Future_of_the_Internet#chapter_16 and the many videos are at http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=star+wars+kid&aq=f. You must see the original first, though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQibs3albtM]

There are also “mashups” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29], i.e. webpages that bring together bits and pieces of other webpages. All of these resources change constantly and sometimes there is a new version every few minutes or even seconds, while the older versions are not saved, and consequently, they disappear forever. Back when I saw the first examples of these resources, I thought they were the very definition of “ephemera” and therefore, out of the scope of library catalogs. That was a simple and satisfactory solution for me, but too bad: I was wrong. These kinds of resources turn out to be very important.

Articles are written about all of these new resources in scholarly journals. Online social networks are providing completely new ways to find information. One such is Aardvark http://vark.com/ that bypasses searching altogether and links you to “someone” who can answer your question! There is little doubt that developments using these, and still more innovative tools, will continue into the future. These are some of the consequences of the changing nature of modern information.

Then, once people have found the resources they want, they can use citation management software [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software] that not only manages their documents and citations, but also hooks them into collegial networks where they can collaborate in various ways, and this software will even search for new documents automatically, using semantic analysis tools that ferret out your needs, without the necessity for anybody to consciously search for anything at all, not even a subject or a name heading! http://blogs.nature.com/mfenner/2008/09/05/interview-with-victor-henning-from-mendeley We can all take it for granted that these tools will become increasingly sophisticated as they develop.

None of this is science fiction and is happening as I speak. As a consequence, there are: 1) resources that never could have existed before the Internet; 2) there are entirely new methods to find resources; 3) people are using these resources in unprecedented ways, reworking them for their own purposes and as a result, I think it is safe to conclude that: 4) the general populace has completely different expectations and needs than ever before.

And yet, we need to realize that many of the changes libraries are facing are not really focused on us, but what we are experiencing is primarily a side effect of the sweeping changes going on in the traditional publishing industry. As a result, all libraries, from the local public library to the research library, are facing more-or-less the same pressures, or will be very soon. The changes that are roiling the traditional physical publication industries find their end point in the library.

The different publishing industries are dealing with the changes in various ways. The music publishers have been reduced to using threats and are despised by many throughout the world. In the traditional print industries, newspapers are in the vanguard, and their demise gives us a glimpse of the future of the entire print publishing industry. It is clear that the old ways are changing. So, the changes I am discussing in libraries are not necessarily focused on us: they represent a sea change in the centuries-old patterns of publication, of how people communicate among themselves, and libraries have been the end point of that process; but this too, may be coming to an end, or at least changing in fundamental ways.

Perhaps none of this is new to anyone listening; I think it shouldn’t be. Something else that shouldn’t be new is the fact that almost every library is facing major budget cuts. And nothing I have read has predicted that the “good old days” of those big, fat library budgets are going to be restored any time soon. (When were those good old days anyway?)

Oh yes, there is also this little thing called Google Books that already has more texts available at the click of a button than in many of our entire libraries! Much of this is publically available now, but once the full text of the entire collection is made available, and it would be wise to assume that it will happen sooner rather than later--and possibly very, very soon, like next week?--it will be highly difficult to stand in the way of our patrons’ demands, and libraries will be forced into subscribing to all of this magnificent full text. Our patrons will be able to search these materials with tools that have no library input whatsoever. This too, will develop in ways that are unpredictable. No one can convince me that this will *not* have tremendous effects on the use of library resources.

From all of this, it is obvious that the library community as a whole is facing serious difficulties, but we must admit that traditional cataloging and the local catalog are in absolute crisis. While catalogers are under greater stress than ever before because the numbers of resources are higher than ever, and potentially growing at exponential rates, the number of catalogers is not increasing or, in many cases, going down. All this is occurring while their final product, i.e. the catalog record, is becoming less and less understandable to the public, who now have far more experience of full-text retrieval tools than traditional library tools. Of course, in the march toward the future, eventually *everyone* will be members of the “Google generation”. If the result is that even the idea of “surname [comma] forename” is being forgotten, what does that portend for the far more complex concept of authority control?

The methods used in the library catalog are based on centuries of trial and error using technologies appropriate to an earlier time. For instance, our current procedures for creating cross-references for various forms of personal and corporate names, as well as subject heading access, are based on left-anchored textual strings and are founded on how people browsed card catalogs, which hasn’t been the case in most libraries for over 20 or 25 years. That has been quite some time now.

I am not aware of any studies that have shown that our public *today*--not the public of 100 years ago but the public of today--actually wants what RDA is designed to give them. Remember, RDA is based on FRBR, and the purpose is to allow the user to “find, identify, select, obtain (what?) works, expressions, manifestations, items (how?) by their authors, titles, subjects”. In other words--and this is very important--RDA allows *nothing new* at all, because FRBR explicitly restates the same user needs that have been the underlying purpose of the catalog since at least the early 1840s at the British Museum under Antonio Panizzi. So, if we institute RDA and FRBR, our users will not be able to do anything--and I repeat *anything at all*--that they cannot do today. This at the same time as the very nature of the resources, how the resources are found, and what people can do with them, have changed in ways that have been unpredictable, and these changes are continuing at an incredible pace.

What are the actual changes our users will see with RDA? They are the type that almost no one will even notice. For instance, I am sure almost no one will notice the spelled out cataloging abbreviations or changing the dates on personal names from, e.g. 1943- to “born 1943”, or the elimination of N.T. and O.T. in the books of the Bible. Also, if RDA is implemented fully--and this requires that there be even further changes than what are considered now--the display of the works, expressions, manifestations, and items *can* be different, if libraries want, and these views will probably look very similar to displays in printed book catalogs, although they will probably be somewhat more interactive. Or they can look more or less the same as today. But it is important to understand that with RDA, patrons will find no change in searching. For example, we will not institute a “methodology” access point for scientific materials, long asked for by many, or anything substantially different because the basic purpose of RDA and FRBR are exactly the same as what exists now.

Consequently, when I compare RDA to the tremendous changes in the universe of information that I outlined earlier, I do not see how it has any relevance at all.

RDA does not address the fact that people have definite problems using our subject headings, that people almost never browse lists of names arranged alphabetically, that full-text searching and various types of sorting, such as relevance ranking, are by far the most popular types of searching that people do--even though very few people understand what relevance ranking actually means. RDA does not address how to incorporate related, non-library metadata projects on the web and how catalogers can cooperate with other creators of metadata to get the help they so desperately need. Considering higher quality records, we all know that many libraries are not able to follow the AACR2 rules today and nothing happens to them, so why wouldn’t they just decide not to follow RDA as well?

At the same time, I ask: is it morally justified for libraries, who are facing major budget cuts, to spend significant amounts on training catalogers to learn RDA at the expense of.... what? The simple fact is there will not be new funding, so there absolutely must be tradeoffs: will there be less spending on materials and resources for our patrons? Will more staff be laid off? Will more library branches close? Will more pay raises be deferred, or will more paychecks be reduced? Our British colleagues are facing some of the most draconian budget cuts I have ever heard of. Is it in their interests to cobble together the funding for training for RDA somehow? What are they supposed to give up? Other libraries, such as my own, simply do not have the budget at all for this, period.

Therefore, we see that an unavoidable corollary of RDA implementation will be a split in the library bibliographic world at a highly inopportune moment.

No one has suggested that publishers will provide us with better quality records in RDA than they do now with AACR2. Creating RDA records will not take less time than AACR2, therefore, it is difficult to even imagine how productivity could increase. It seems to me that sooner or later, someone must demonstrate a sound business case in favor of adopting RDA. I have yet to see one.

As a result, trying to force FRBR’s 19th century view of information onto our new information universe is like those people long ago who continued to insist, while ignoring all the evidence, that the earth is the center of the universe. And also, now that new tools such as Google and Google Books exist that allow each individual to experience this new universe of information for him or herself, and to use it in very personal ways, then to insist that FRBR is “what people need” when any individual can see it is not, is similar to those groups who fervently believe that the U.S. did not really land a man on the moon and that NASA has been involved in a tremendous hoax from that time!

It is important to keep in mind that obtaining the funds for a subscription to the entire full text of Google Books, when it becomes available, will undoubtedly be much easier than for RDA training, even though additional funds will most probably be required, but the benefits of the full text of millions of books will be crystal clear immediately to each and every one of our administrators as well as to our patrons. In contrast, demonstrating the advantages of RDA to administrators and patrons will be next to impossible because the business case has not yet been made.

Why does the cataloging community insist on a drastic change in their rules that will have serious backroom impacts on workflow, training and productivity, but that no one will notice in the final product? I have a few theories, one of which I mentioned in my very first podcast where I discussed “change for change’s sake,” [http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/2010/08/cataloging-matters-podcast-1.html] but on further reflection, I realized there is another possibility: the Black Box of Bruno Latour. [One of the best discussions was in an old Lingua Franca issue http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9410/latour.html]

Bruno Latour is a French philosopher who has a unique, and *highly controversial*, method of studying scientists. He studies them as if they were a tribe of primitive people in the South Pacific, and concentrates not on the products of what they make, but how they do it and how they relate to one another, or what he calls “science in action”. [Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.] So, he asks: what is this “thing called science” when it is being done? How are scientific theories made?

He describes that while a theory is in flux, there is a huge amount of effort, ego, money, hope, energy, and everything else you can think of, poured into proving one’s own theory, but naturally there are competing theories, and just as much effort, ego and so on is thrown into those counter theories. When one of these theories finally “wins” and becomes accepted by the general scientific community, it turns into what is essentially a “black box” where information is input on one end, and from the other end, a solution comes out. Everyone agrees that the black box works correctly and whatever it produces is “correct”.

It turns out that the longer a black box is in place, the more people have invested in maintaining that black box. This includes companies that produce and sell scientific instruments and publish information, along with various scientific departments with their individual scientists all focused on getting grant money and interested in the advancement of their careers. Therefore, those who seek to “open” that black box do so at their own peril because they will be facing many established layers of powerful vested interests.

At certain points however, when the black box simply stops working, it nevertheless must be opened. In the case of libraries, I suggest that the black box is the traditional library catalog, and it has already been opened up for quite some time. It was not the librarians who opened it initially, but computer specialists who built their own tools, such as the arXiv.org plasma physics site, the entire open access publishing movement and even ingenious kids who built sites such as Facebook.

It is my position that since this is the situation we are facing, librarians too must--and I mean absolutely must--open that black box that has been handed down to us and protected by our predecessors since at least the days of Panizzi, if not before. We must open it for ourselves so that we can reconsider *everything* in it, its purposes, how it functions, and which parts serve the needs of our patrons. For those parts that do not serve our patrons’ needs, are they necessary for librarians, or can they be repurposed in some way? We must include in our deliberations all kinds of other groups such as interested members of the public and scholars and many, many others.

Latour mentions that doing this is like opening Pandora’s box: it will be messy; it will be disheartening; it will be humiliating in many ways, and yet we have no choice except to do it because the black box of the library catalog no longer functions as it should and other groups who are far more powerful and important than librarians are reconsidering matters right now without us. I am a cataloger and such an idea is very disturbing to me. Nevertheless, we must involve ourselves or risk remaining completely ignored. I believe that doing this will be a major step in the further advance of our profession.

A lot has been done already by the general information science community and while their findings should be considered, their conclusions should *not* necessarily be accepted.

I think there is a great deal the library cataloging community can do that will have far greater advantages for the public than the cosmetic changes of RDA, while being much less disruptive for us. To take only one example, we can face up to the fact that our traditional system of subject headings simply *do not work* in the online environment. But it doesn’t follow that people do not want the *control* that the subject headings allow and therefore should be abandoned. This would be an incorrect conclusion. In fact, this is one of those areas where the public has already opened the black box and come up with something called “The Semantic Web” which in essence, seeks to provide many of the same controls as our traditional subject headings and authority controls. An example of such a project is dbpedia [http://wiki.dbpedia.org/About]. See also, the project subj3ct.com [https://subj3ct.com/] which attempts something similar to what librarians have always done through authority control. These projects are far from perfect and just a few moments of a skilled cataloger’s time skimming over some of these projects will show how much help they need.

This is merely one area where catalogers could make important contributions to a huge, collaborative project that others can readily see and perhaps, even come to appreciate, at least appreciate far more than typing out a few abbreviations in local catalogs.

Above all, our creaky old MARC format needs to change into something more modern, plus our records need to be liberated from our local catalogs, to begin to make their own way in the world outside of library catalogs, to be reused in all kinds of ways by the public, but these records can still retain their ties to the library world through means of linked data.

As I mentioned before, many of these suggestions make me highly uncomfortable. I am sure they will make many other catalogers uncomfortable as well, along with the organizations they work for, but I feel something like this is imperative.

I think an anecdote from my own family history may be appropriate. This comes to me second hand, by way of my father. He told me a story that he had been told about his great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, Joel Akers, who passed away before my father was born. Here is a picture of him and his family.

This took place in a little farming town in Kansas, and my father told me how the townspeople told him that “Grandpa Akers” absolutely hated the new automobiles. People had fun remembering that whenever a car drove into town, Grandpa Akers would hobble out into the street, stamp his feet, shake his cane and cuss and yell all the time he could see the car. Folks compared him to a banty rooster. Of course, all of his anger and threats didn’t stop anything, but it gave others something to laugh about.

Although I would have liked to meet my Grandpa Akers, I confess that I don’t want to be like him. There is no use fighting these kinds of changes because it is wholly unrealistic to imagine how they could vanish so that some previous time that you happen to prefer will return. The fact is: this new world is not going away, and once this revelation is genuinely accepted, the task becomes very simple: Darwinian survival. How do we survive in such a future?

If I followed my instincts, I could let my “Grandpa Akers side” come out. I could cuss everybody and yell out: “I love books! They aren’t going away! Look how many are being published right now! These website things are crazy since anybody can put any blamed thing out there they want! And since you can’t believe what you see there, any fool who believes in those things is crazy too! Aardvark? What kind of a stupid name is that? And it links me up to some idiot out there who I don’t know, but he’s supposed to answer my questions?! What is this insanity? MARC format was good enough for my pappy, so it’s good enough for me!” While I yell this at the top of my voice, I can stamp my feet and shake my fist at anybody who is unlucky enough to come anywhere near me.

Yet, if I actually did this, what would happen today as opposed to the year 1900? Of course, there would be a very good chance that someone around me would have a cell phone. They could record my outburst, and upload it to Youtube. A video like that could easily go viral and I could become just as well known as the Dramatic Chipmunk, the Star Wars Kid, or the Dancing Baby, with people laughing at me, not just in the same town, but all over the world, and for a long time to come!

[The Dramatic Chipmunk http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dramatic+chipmunk, Dancing Baby http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_baby. Yes, the Dramatic Chipmunk actually did meet the Star Wars Kid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEO_PAeRFfc]

When I saw so many videos of myself, accompanied by homemade voice-overs and sound effects, each varying in its level of hilarity or obscenity, it just might turn out that I would learn something very special about myself.

Catalogers need a new attitude. We can see this attitude in the id.loc.gov example where the Library of Congress finally let out the subject headings in a format I did not know: SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System). I applauded, and still applaud this project because making the subject headings generally available has been overdue for many years. It is a great learning project, but as I myself learned to my own dismay, for several reasons, the subfield codes could not be transferred into SKOS. [http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/intro] As a result, a subject heading there is the entire text string with each subdivision separated only by double dashes! While I realize this is only a beginning and I certainly hope it will be developed further, I find it totally ironic that the way id.loc.gov has implemented the subject headings is essentially a replica of the catalog card itself in pre-MARC form! Still, what is so bad about it?

The power of the system of subject headings was not only with authorized forms, but even more important--I think, in the subdivisions that refine the main topic in various ways. Of course, there were always tremendous problems with library subject headings but the resulting benefits were enormous and could easily be seen by everyone who knew how they worked. Still, people faced the problem of finding the authorized form of the main heading, which necessitated (and still requires) a whole slew of cross-references. But this was only part of the problem: if you were to use the subject headings effectively, it was essential to get an *overview of the subdivisions* used under that heading, because when you did this, you discovered how the system of subdivisions actually opened up your mind to new possibilities you could not have suspected before. For instance, someone interested in horses could find by browsing
“Horses--Behavior--United States--Anecdotes”
or someone interested in Dr. Johnson could find
“Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784--Knowledge--Manners and customs”

In other words, *when used correctly* the system of subject headings not only helped you find what was in the collection, but it also revealed new ideas you would never have thought of and actively searched for on your own.

In James Burke’s excellent documentary series “The Day the Universe Changed”, in one episode he described the development of catalogs and indexes. He demonstrated the powers available through indexing that brought disparate bits of information together in novel ways and how it helped people to think. He concluded that the result from indexing achieved “1+1=3”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZC-abOGRug I cannot think of a better way to describe it.

It was too difficult to get such an overview from examining hundreds or thousands of cards however, and so you had to consult the LCSH red books separately to get a coherent overview of the subject heading structure, which we must admit very few people did, and anyway, this method also had its own problems. Transferring such a complex system into online library catalogs has been a complete disaster, leading to general incomprehension among the public of a tool that is potentially incredibly useful.

We need to spend our time making this system where “1+1=3” function once again using today’s tools and for today’s populace. Since it has been a failure in our online catalogs, we need other options. It is absolutely vital to retain subject subdivisions. SKOS doesn’t allow it. OK, use something else. If nothing out there works and we have to create it ourselves from scratch, that is just fine, we should do it; we *must* do it even though it may not be “perfect”. I compare this to the Ferrari racing team: if the team decided it needed something and their mechanic said, “Well, I can’t find anything like that in the car parts store”, he would be fired on the spot. That is not how you win Formula 1 races. You yourselves, create the conditions for your own successes. The Ferrari team knows this very well. Catalogers too, need to adopt this kind of attitude in their work. Otherwise, they will come in dead last.

To calm our minds, we can keep telling ourselves that *we* didn’t open that box, others did, but it’s open now. All we can do is the same thing Pandora did.

How do we do this? I would like to close with a quote from Latour:

“Now that [the black box] has been opened, with plagues and curses, sins and ills whirling around, there is only one thing to do, and that is to go even deeper, all the way down into the almost-empty box, in order to retrieve what, according to the venerable legend, has been left at the bottom–yes, hope. It is much too deep for me on my own; are you willing to help me reach it? May I give you a hand?”http://www.bruno-latour.fr/livres/vii_tdm.html

Thank you very much for your attention. It really is a great time to be a librarian.

Consider joining the Cooperative Cataloging Rules Wiki! [http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/]

Cataloging Matters Podcast no. 7: Search

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 12:32:09 PST

Cataloging Matters #7:

“Search”

http://www.archive.org/details/CatalogingMattersPodcastNo.7Search

Hello everyone. My name is Jim Weinheimer and welcome to Cataloging Matters, a series of podcasts about the future of libraries and cataloging, coming to you from the most beautiful, and the most romantic city in the world, Rome, Italy. The topic of this installment? Search!

What is Search? Is it really so different from what everybody has always done, or is it just another example of serving up new wine in old bottles?

Before I begin, I would like to spend just a moment on a couple of grammatical peculiarities I have noted. If you do some research on this topic, you will soon discover that the term “search” is used without an article: not “a search”, not “the search”, just “search”. Also, authors rarely use the gerund form (i.e. “search-ing”) for this concept.

So, once again: what is search?

From the library point of view, there would seem to be clear parallels between this newer concept of “Search” and the traditional library/FRBR user task of “Find” from Find/Identify/Select/Obtain, nevertheless it is Search that is getting an increasing amount of attention in our society. Yet, it is vital--for librarians especially--to understand that the two are quite different in their methods and in their goals. A lot of this difference has to do with user expectations, how they are changing and it may give us some insight into how these expectations will change in the future. Personally, I believe that search, if it becomes widespread, as I think it will, may very well become an important political and even moral issue.

So what is search and what makes it so different from what people have always done?

Modern computer technology has made child’s play of some tasks that had been incredibly complex not so long ago. As only one example, Bing Travel http://www.bing.com/travel/ allows someone to search for airline tickets in multiple databases at once, and will even give you a prediction for the price you are paying, whether it will most probably go up or down in the future. [There is a link to this, plus everything else I discuss, from the transcript] At one time, this would have demanded a highly-experienced and well-trained travel agent but today, all of this can be done in just a couple of seconds by a layperson, who has had absolutely no training in how to do any of it. The obvious question is: How good of a job does Bing Travel do? Only an expert travel agent could make an accurate determination, but from what I have read, Bing Travel appears to be not all that bad.

Another example that I find simply amazing is the Google Public Data site. http://www.google.com/publicdata/home Google has partnered with various agencies such as the World Bank, the OECD, Eurostat, and others, to use the power of Google’s tools to create something genuinely new using data that remains on each agency’s site. Today, anybody in the world with an internet connection can do their own statistical analyses in vital areas of concern, using some of the most powerful computers that exist. Of course here, the obvious question is: do people know how to interpret this information? That is another issue, but the fact remains that everyone can actually work with the same data.

Even though these kinds of projects take advantage of some of the power of modern computing, they do not deal with search and many see options that are even more subtle and far more intrusive. Depending on who you are, such options can be viewed in either a positive or a negative light. In essence, this newer concept of search foresees a time when the computer will automatically look for things that even you, yourself are not looking for consciously. In other words, search will do all of the work. Isn’t that bizarre? How could something like that function in reality?

Let’s consider an example based on something we can all understand: a library catalog. Someone uses a catalog to find books on how money is divided among the population of the U.S. This person knows how to use a library catalog, goes to Worldcat, finds the subject heading “Income distribution -- United States” and is led by this subject to the record for Lisa Dodson’s book The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy. New York: The New Press, 2009. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/320803437

Of course, using the traditional tools, this book can be found by other subjects that the cataloger has added, by searching the author’s name, by the title of the book, and if it is part of a series, by that title as well. These “access points” represent the FRBR user tasks of finding by author, title, and subject. This is also where FRBR pretty much stops, and if searchers want to continue, they are expected to repeat those same FRBR user tasks over and over again. But the alternate concept of search works quite differently. We can see one, very minor part of this new idea of search in the Worldcat record mentioned earlier, where, if we scroll to the bottom, we can see various “User lists” that have been created by individuals, and we can click on them. For example, this book is part of a list called “New Economics Books” created by someone named Joyline http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/Joyline/lists/636954, and this list includes several other books on the same topic that may be of interest to the searcher.

It is important to note that finding these books in this way definitely falls outside the FRBR user tasks, since these materials most probably have different authors, titles, and subjects than what the searcher originally utilized. But we need to admit that even this represents nothing fundamentally new since people from time immemorial have been recommending books and articles to one another. Normally however, people have known at least something of the person recommending a book: they may be a friend, a relative, a teacher, a journalist of a newspaper or magazine, or maybe even a person talking on Oprah Winfrey that you can see and hear.

In the case we are examining, we know nothing of Joyline since this person’s profile is private. Joyline may be an economics professor, a high school teacher, a librarian, a truckdriver, a dentist, or even a teenage girl from Japan. Even if this profile were public, it could be completely falsified. The anonymity of Joyline as a book recommender is something rather new, and this anonymity may or may not be of much importance for a searcher to decide to read a book on these list, but this remains to be seen.

I can’t resist a bit of self-advertisement at this point and I’ll mention the Extend Search that I have instituted in my own catalog at the AUR Library. In some of my postings, I have mentioned that I believe the information universe is composed of separate “intellectual microcosms”. These microcosms are defined when you choose a resource and then become aware of other resources related to your resource: perhaps books on similar topics, but there may be reviews, critical blog postings, public lectures and all kinds of resources surrounding this item you are looking at. My Extend Search is an attempt to make it easier for the public to find and enter those “intellectual microcosms”. An advantage of this is seen by the book by Lisa Dodson mentioned earlier: that book is not in my library, but my searchers can nevertheless get into the “intellectual microcosm” and find all kinds of other resources related to it; in this specific case, these resources include a 75 minute public lecture the author gave on her book. The methods I employ differ somewhat from the traditional library searching methods, but nevertheless, I want to make clear that the Extend Search methods I employ are also not a part of this new concept of search.

OK, end of advertisement.

Although these tools are useful and allow some new options, none have much to do with the new concept of search. Search is built on metadata, but not necessarily the library-bibliographic type of metadata that librarians think of: titles, authors, series statements and so on; it is built on metadata about you, and your interests such as what websites you go to, what kind of documents you download, what you buy, what you spend time reading and all kinds of extremely subtle bits of information about you. It is also built on similar metadata about your friends, as well as about me and my friends, about everyone else and their friends, and relating it all together. Search attempts to figure out what you want by indexing your documents, following your movements on your computer, and doing a semantic analysis to determine your interests. Not only that, but it links all of your metadata to similar metadata taken from your friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other projects to build an overall profile of you, your needs and your wants.

Based on this deep and profound profile of you that the computer now has at its command, when you look for something in a tool that utilizes this information, e.g. on Google, the result can be tailored much more finely to what you actually want. So, if I am logged in to my Google account and look for “cat” in Google, it would know immediately that I am looking for the animal, whereas if a construction worker were looking, it would know he or she wanted heavy machinery. Or if I enter chess, that I am primarily interested in the board game, but another person would be interested in the record label.

Once again, these computers will have an extensive profile not only of me, but of everyone who is linked to me because it is building a web of everyone. But this is far from the end.

There is a site called Aardvark [http://vark.com], (why people insist on using these ridiculous names is beyond me!) and I still do not fully understand this site, but it apparently relies completely on the power of these personal profiles, so that when you type in a question, it will link you to a specific expert who can provide an answer. It does this by doing a semantic analysis of your search terms, also looking for your “friends” in tools such as Facebook or LinkedIn, using that information to find their friends, to find the friends of those friends, and so on, to finally link to profiles of those who can answer your question. The site claims that you will get an answer in a few minutes, although I have never tried it.

But wait! Did I say the word “search”? What I have outlined so far is only the palest vision of what many want. The latest ideas are to get rid of search-ing (not search) completely! Well, not completely; of course, it’s more subtle than that. It’s just that you won’t have to do any search-ing anymore.

One example of this is the popularity of the new applications, such as what you can find at the Apple Apps store. I do not own a phone that allows applications, so I only know this through reading articles, but if you own an iPhone for example, you can download special applications that will do all kinds of things, from keeping up with the latest news on topics of your choice such as movies or sports scores, to maps and directions, to social interaction, and on and on. This way, you can keep up with everything of your choice with practically no effort and without searching anything. If you decide you need some kind of information and are lacking it, you will just download a new app. How would this work? I could imagine someone could download a Fine Arts app, which would bring you the information on fine arts, or a Music app, which would bring you the information on music, or a French Renaissance music app, each of greater or lesser specific needs, and which could allow you to configure them to your needs, as expert, undergraduate, high school, interested layperson, or whatever.

But even this is not the end. There is also the idea of persistent, implicit search. This means that in the background, the computer will be running, searching, and analyzing constantly, using your profile, which is being constantly updated and refined, and in this way, the computer can actually interpret your needs. Let’s imagine that you have spent the last few days searching for a new refrigerator. The computer has logged everything you have done, analysed the kind of refrigerators you happened to like by noting how long you looked at each one, and compared the similarities of the majority you looked at, or something like this. Then, it continues to seek out information for you even though you may have never asked it to, but that is how your profile works. The goal of persistent, implicit search, is when you are walking or driving down a street, using a GPS system through your automobile or cell phone, this entire system would alert you that a few blocks away, a refrigerator you would like is on for sale at the best price within a 500 mile radius, and here are the directions.

Although many of the examples are presented in a marketing or shopping sense, it is pretty easy to imagine uses in more educational and informational settings. In fact, the future is here today, right now, and even, for free! Today, everybody can download their very own copy of Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/, which purports to do exactly what I outlined before except it is in the field of scholarship. After installing Mendeley, you add your documents to it and Mendeley does the work of semantic analysis to figure out what your interests are. Of course, in the process it will dig out the citations from your documents, and if it can’t find the citations within the documents, Mendeley will go out on the web and find them for you. You can then go online to share by joining groups of similarly-minded people, but none of this is all that new.

The new part is that while you are searching for information you want, Mendeley is learning all the while and will search all kinds of databases for you automatically, using the profile it has created and is constantly updating, to find resources it considers relevant to your needs, and it will even show you the latest trends in research! It does this by analysing you, creating your profile and comparing it to other researchers’ profiles, to better figure out what you want. Of course, Mendeley is as yet very new and still has a long way to go.

So in this way, the goal is that you won’t even have to search anymore because the computer will do it all for you automatically, silently, persistently and implicitly. I mean, people can and will continue to do searching, but the idea is that they won’t have to anymore because the computer will have done it for them already, and will have done an even better job. You will do a search only when you think the computer hasn’t worked well enough.

For those who have read some of my postings where I have discussed “find” in the FRBR user tasks, and have mentioned that I am not sure if “find/identify/select/obtain” is what people are doing now, and what they will be doing, this is primarily what I have had in mind. With search, a tremendous amount of “search-ing” will still be going on behind the scenes, in fact there is so much “search-ing” that I believe it really does turn into something new and consequently, justifies the separate term “search” without the article “a” or “the”, as I pointed out at the beginning of this podcast. But it remains to be seen how much similarity there will be with “find” in the traditional library/FRBR sense; that is, if there will remain any similarity at all. I am not sure how to answer this, but in any case, it is clear that the future of “search” is only very remotely connected with the library ideas of “find/identify/select/obtain” or with “authors/titles/subjects”. Search goes far beyond these traditions.

Will “search” become predominant as the new information environment develops? Of course, it is impossible to tell since even newer capabilities may become available, but search is one of the only really serious attempts I have read about that tries to deal with information overload, which is a serious problem already and can only get much worse in the future. Its promise of incredible simplicity and ease is also a point in its favor of being adopted by the general populace.

It is difficult to imagine that anyone, least of all any librarian, who comes into contact with a profound change such as this will not have at least some opinion about it, and I am no exception. Personally, I do like the idea of getting away from a lot of the drudgery of research. I also like the idea of having more chances to come into contact with other scholars who share interests and communicate with them because this can often be very difficult.

Yet, the idea of a machine that silently collects all of this information about me, collates it, summarizes me to extract my “needs” that perhaps even I myself may not realize consciously, and then to search--persistently and implicitly--in a whole variety of places, makes me very uncomfortable. Perhaps this is because of the way I was raised; or perhaps I am just of another generation and those who are more comfortable with the Facebook-type “let it all hang out” mentality will have fewer qualms about it, I don’t know. Machines are storing vast amounts of information now, no matter how we may feel about it. For those who have Google accounts, take a look at your Web history if you haven’t yet. If you have never seen it, you might find it quite enlightening and perhaps even highly alarming. “They” (whoever “they” are) have a lot of information on you!

But another problem I have is that by making everything so incredibly easy, with all of this information simply falling into your lap with little or no effort at all, would seem to be terribly numbing, and reminds me of the story of the Land of the Lotus Eaters. For those who do not remember, this event takes place in Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus and his men are coming home to Ithaca. Just before he meets the Cyclops, he discovers a land where people eat flowers. I quote from Robert Fagle’s translation:

“...on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships. When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.”

What was actually a death sentence seemed to those sailors bedazzled by the lotus, to be everything they could ever want, and all they had to do was reach out and eat the lotus. But those under its influence couldn’t even be aware of the dangers it held.

It seems to me that reliance on such a “computerized-lotus” to search for what it determines you need before you even know it, and presents the results to you before you have even thought about any of it, and very possibly in overwhelming quantities and complexity, this would seem to be the very prescription for how to kill curiosity. Of course, it is easy to expand such a scenario and imagine the spectre of some silent, ruling cabal behind everything, leading everyone to the resources they want people to see, and we can picture ghoulish visions from the film “The Matrix”. Although such images are exaggerated, I believe dangers are looming even without them, and in any case, it demonstrates that the management of information really does have the potential to become a powerful political tool, especially in a world such as ours is becoming.

So to be frank, I am personally horrified by many of these possibilities and remain profoundly skeptical. For instance, although I have installed Mendeley on my computer, I still haven’t added any of my documents to it! Perhaps that is silly, yet I realize that skepticism, fear and even repugnance are natural reactions when someone confronts profound change. During the early days of printing, good Catholic folks were deeply shocked by some of the publications coming off the new-fangled presses. Although we may laugh and mock them today, such reactions are natural and easy to understand. Today we are witnessing similar reactions on the part of individuals, organizations, and even governments, to what they are seeing on the Internet.

I just hope that I can learn from the struggles of those people from the early days of printing as they tried to come to terms with what they saw, and let their experiences help me discover where the real problems lie. One point I am trying to learn: it is useless to get angry and try to clamp down on the changes we fear and perhaps even abhor. Stopping the changes doesn’t work and history takes a very dim view of you and your reactions.

At the same time, I admit I may be completely wrong and it may turn out that innovations such as search may actually free the human mind from milennia of unnecessary mindless toil and allow humanity to experience a new Renaissance and Enlightenment all at once. Let us hope so.

It seems to me, that search may very well represent a Darwinian challenge in the information environment that will force such deep and lasting change that it will prove to be evolutionary. I don’t think there is the slightest possibility of rolling things back to a former time, which I think most will agree was not really “better” at all, so there remains little to do but adapt to the new circumstances or die. Will a change toward a universal acceptance of search have an impact on libraries? Of course it will! I believe libraries are feeling the lightest initial impacts of search already, but of course, search itself is still in its infancy. Libraries will have to adapt to this in some way as well, or I think they will be fated to be discarded as anachronisms.

I wish I could offer some useful suggestions, but with new capabilities such as search--which will continue to develop in ways that are unpredictable--it seems everyone is entering virgin territory, whether they want to or not. All I can possibly suggest for librarians is to keep in mind the ALA Code of Ethics, especially those parts about trying to uphold “intellectual freedom” and not advancing “private interests at the expense of library users.” http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics.cfm

For those who are interested in some philosophical reflections, I suggest a thought-provoking talk by the journalist Frank Shirrmacher from Germany available on the Edge website, where, among other things, he discusses these concerns in relation to free will or determinism and possible political ramifications. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schirrmacher09/schirrmacher09_index.html

I would like to close with a wonderful piece by Andrea Falconieri, his Ciaccona, performed by the group Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca from Treviso, a town in northern Italy. Falconieri worked around Italy and Spain in the early 1600s before dying from the plague. One episode from his life I found curious was that he lost his job at the Santa Brigida convent in Genoa, because the Mother Superior decided that his music was too unsettling for the nuns! Perhaps you’ll understand from this piece. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3SrHzY0d8Q

That’s it for now. Thank you for listening to Cataloging Matters with Jim Weinheimer, coming to you from Rome, Italy, the most beautiful, and the most romantic city in the world.

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, a personal journey Part 4

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:02:44 PST

Cataloging Matters No. 6

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records,

a personal journey

Part 4

Direct Link
Part 1

TRANSCRIPT

Hello everyone. My name is Jim Weinheimer and welcome to Cataloging Matters, a series of podcasts about the future of libraries and cataloging, coming to you from the most beautiful, and the most romantic city in the world, Rome, Italy.

This installment continues my personal journey with the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (or FRBR). Will I finish it at last? Stay tuned!

This series has gone on for three previous podcasts. I believe that this installment will make no sense at all without the others, so I strongly suggest that you listen to them first, in order. Links to the earlier podcasts, along with everything else discussed here, are available from the transcript.

I have been very busy lately with the school year and other matters, and that is why it has taken some time for me to continue this series. But as I warned in my first podcast, this is a true “irregular” in every sense of the word so don’t expect too much!

I have decided to spare everyone from having to listen to me recite my twelve-step process yet again. If anyone is listening, I can imagine the sighs of relief!--and I will take up from the time that I worked at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, where I had entered my Serious Doubts Phase.

I was away from the library cataloging I had become accustomed to and was working with AGRIS cataloging rules, actually indexing separate chapters, papers, and articles when necessary, working with a thesaurus called AGROVOC; all of this along with a certain amount of systems development. While there, I also dealt with bibliographic formats and practices from other organizations, practices I had never seen before. These had to do with statistics, images, geographic information, internal documents, and all kinds of other types of resources. Therefore, I came into contact with separate “metadata worlds,” each world coherent and meaningful on its own, e.g. the metadata world of AACR2, our own metadata world of AGRIS, metadata worlds of different indexes, the metadata world of statistics, and so on. None was necessarily “better” than any other, and each on its own made sense more-or-less, and I would have loved to import any or all of those records into our catalog, but when I tried to get them to work together, all I got was hash and it would have been easier to just do everything from scratch. I saw how the power of the newer formats such as XML could manipulate “correctly-encoded data” in all sorts of amazing ways--and I could even do some of it myself!--yet the automatic methods could only go so far.

One sticking point lay in the details of “correctly-encoded data” and exactly what that meant. This went both for the formats as well as the data itself. It turned out that just getting other organizations to send author information coded as was tough enough, or to get people to use more or less in the same way. But trying to bring uniformity to the data itself, that is, so that everyone would use, e.g. “FAO” and not one of the dozens of other possible forms of its name, turned out to be overwhelming. It was very clear that you could work yourself to death trying to regularize this information. True, there were possible solutions using URIs instead of the exact forms of names, but it still seemed to me that there would have to be an incredible amount of agreement among all sorts of parties before any progress could be made. Being in the middle of all this propelled me deeply into my Serious Doubts phase.

But these considerations were soon brushed aside, since I accepted a position as Library Director at the American University of Rome, a small, undergraduate institution located in a beautiful area among graceful palazzi on the top of the Janiculum Hill, which provides visitors with some of the most spectacular views of the city that anyone could hope for. I took the position for various reasons: I wanted to be a real librarian again, but also, I had always felt that it was the smallest collections where the materials on the World Wide Web offered both the greatest opportunities, and posed the toughest challenges. A Harvard or a Yale will have a great collection no matter what, and in many cases for the people there, the materials on the web result only in an “extra format” of something already available to them. For a small collection however, such an opportunity should provide the difference between night and day!

But how do you do this in a small library with very little help? Perhaps in another podcast, I’ll talk about my own attempts and what I think are my successes and failures, but for now I want to focus on FRBR.

Returning to the Anglo-American cataloging world got me back into AACR2 and gradually, FRBR. More importantly, I began to have my very first substantial and regular contacts with the public as a reference librarian. I learned a lot and am still learning all the time. What have I learned so far? First, it’s not easy at all to think on your feet when a student has put everything off until the last second and is half frantic. It’s also not easy to wheedle out of someone what they really want to know and not allow yourself to get sidetracked into showing them all kinds of things they do not want, wasting your time and having them think you don’t know what you are doing; or to try and match your understanding of what they want to what is actually available. Plus, for loads of reasons, doing reference is far more difficult when you actively add materials on the World Wide Web into the mix, as I wanted to do: it is a practical impossibility to keep up with them; there are concerns of “quality of information”; World Wide Web sites change their names and locations; and, as I discovered, Google and other search engines are always tweaking their results, so a search that, in a manner of speaking, “worked” yesterday or last week may not work the same today. That can be maddening!

There are dozens or hundreds of very thorny obstacles when you actively try to incorporate the information available on the World Wide Web into part of the local collection, but I felt I had to do it, and I still do. The old methods just don’t work well enough however, and I have succeeded only partially.

Through my experiences with the public as a reference librarian and watching how they tried to work with the library’s catalog, I very soon fell into my Disillusionment phase. I saw firsthand how difficult a library catalog is for the public to use. At the same time, I saw how much easier it is for the public to use tools such as Google and Google Scholar, along with databases such as those from Ebsco or Sage. The Google-type tools and databases obviously were made with the user’s comfort and so-called “customer satisfaction” in mind, while the library catalogs had different ideas. It was at that time, while I reflected on my observations of my users’ troubles, that I remembered the purposes of the catalog as laid out in the FRBR user tasks: to find/identify/select/obtain works/expressions/manifestations/items by their authors/titles/subjects. Therefore, I began thinking about FRBR consciously once again.

And yet the main thing that I discovered very quickly was: when people ask for help, they very, very rarely are asking for works, expressions, manifestations or items. Of course, on a certain level, people continually ask for a book that they cannot find on the shelf, so they are asking for items, but beyond this purely mechanical/clerking need, they ask for answers to their questions, no matter where those answers may come from. Most questions are similar to: “I am writing a paper on the House of the Vestal Virgins, and I can’t find anything useful” or “I need statistics on drug crime over the last 10 years” “I’m updating a book I wrote several years ago and need the newest information” or similar questions. Rarely, and I emphasize very rarely but it does actually happen, I have gotten a question such as, “I need Hobbes’ translation of the Iliad” or, what I hear more often, “I need the latest edition of such and such a book”. To be honest, I am almost the only person I know of who wants highly specific editions. As one example of my own needs, I have been looking for a specific edition of Thomas Middleton’s play “A game of chess”, where I would like a first edition (yeah, sure!), but so far I can find no scan of the first edition. Still, I can download my own copy of the play from an edition of Middleton’s collected works from the Internet Archive, which includes excellent commentary http://www.archive.org/details/worksthomasmidd04bullgoog
and there is another copy of this set at HathiTrust. Plus, I do have access to a couple of scans of different frontispieces, one is from the first edition, while the other is probably what the editor in the collected works mentions in his preface to the play:
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Middleton_%27A_Game_of_Chess%27.jpg&filetimestamp=20070708233726; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Game_of_Chess.jpg.

I have found no copies of the first edition here in Rome, and I hope that no library would make such a rare book available for inter-library loan, but in spite of all that, I still have access to quite a bit of information just by sitting at my desk and knowing where to look. While I am not the only person who wants resources of this type, there are nevertheless very few in comparison with everyone else, and such people are certainly not in the majority. Of course, I would also like all of this to be much easier to find. Nevertheless, I freely admit that this is not the primary type of information that I need either, since I search much more often for answers to my own questions no matter where those answers happen to be. So, in the vast majority of situations, I am not much different from my patrons. Naturally, the very idea of relating the concepts of works/expressions/manifestations/items to web resources seemed to be nonsensical to me: while I agreed that with enough mental effort, you could probably force sites such as youtube, microsoft.com, blogs, or facebook into an FRBR structure, I could not see how the final product be useful to anyone or worth the effort.

These observations may seem obvious and rather unimportant, but to me, realizing and accepting all of this was simply devastating: if it is true that very few people want works/expressions/manifestations/items, then it follows that people want something else. Then, the conclusion is unavoidable: the catalog does not supply what people want! That is when I found myself on new ground, in a place I did not want to be, and I did not like it one bit.

I squirmed, but I could not avoid the unpleasant conclusion: the very premises of FRBR toward users were clearly and utterly wrong. FRBR had confused “user tasks” with what the traditional catalog actually did. It dawned on me that FRBR describes how the traditional catalog has always functioned and although it may be correct so far as it goes, it does not then logically follow that this is also what people want or need. That is where the fallacy lies. And I could see that fallacy in operation every single day when I worked with my patrons, or even when I did my own searching.

Still, if the premises of FRBR were wrong, what did that entail for everybody out there? What did this mean for RDA, which was just really getting off the ground? And I stood face to face with my Despair phase.

In retrospect, my Disillusionment phase was not so difficult because it passed rather quickly, but my Despair phase (which I confess I still fall into occasionally) lasted significantly longer and was therefore, much more difficult for me. I could still do my job of course: select materials, create records in the catalog, work with patrons and so on, but it all had much less meaning since I saw how the newer tools were being used more often, with more relish, and many times, with results that were really not all that bad. People still had major problems with the new tools of course, especially when it came to writing a paper, but the problems with full-text seemed trivial compared to those they encountered when they worked with a library catalog.

I also became responsible for the university’s bibliographic instruction, or, what is now styled as the library parts of information literacy. Many things I learned about my students surprised me, but primarily, I was surprised that when people type the terms they want into a search box, I have not yet met anyone who understands what they are searching or what is happening. People even find such a question surprising. To the people I have met, a search box is a search box is a search box, no matter what it is and what it is connected to. There is one box and it does everything for them. Therefore, it becomes highly difficult for people to understand that when they are searching a library catalog, they are searching, as I now call them in my Information Literacy sessions, “Summary records” and they are not searching full-text. Several students have been honest enough to tell me that they didn’t understand what it meant to search by author, title, or subject! This was some of the reality I encountered.

I do not think any of these people are stupid, and in fact, the way they approach matters makes a lot of sense: all search boxes look the same, therefore they are the same, so all should be searched the same way. It seems to me that using search boxes demands an intellectual leap that doesn’t apply when searching physical catalogs and indexes. When working with physical catalogs and indexes, it is very clear what you are searching and what you are not, since it is obvious that there is no way you could be searching the full-text of the books on the shelves when you are using a card catalog, or when leafing through the volumes of an index. But when the catalogs and resources are all virtual, the relationships among catalogs, indexes and everything else become far more nebulous and the searcher can sense no clear boundaries. The entire environment becomes far more abstract, and you don’t know what you are doing, and what you are not doing. That is, you can’t know without doing a lot of work.

This is why I believe people search library catalogs in the same way they search Google, and why they almost always get such poor results when compared to full-text searching. Searching a catalog competently is a skill that must be learned; and not only learned once, it must be exercised or it atrophies, just as any other skill that goes unused. So, even if I had made some strides forward in some of my classes and people actually learned something, it would turn out that after a few months or a year later, they forgot. That should not be surprising, but it was for me.

While I was doing some research on user education, I came across a provocative article, which quoted a Mr. Line from a paper in 1983 entitled “Thoughts of a non-user, non-educator” http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/deliberations/courses-and-resources/wilson.cfm, where he was quoted as saying that the term user education is, “meaningless, inaccurate, pretentious and patronising and that if only librarians would spend the time and effort to ensure that their libraries are more user friendly then they wouldn't have to spend so much time doing user education.”

While this made a lot of sense to me, I am also interested in library history, and one of my favorite authors is William Warner Bishop from the Library of Congress (who also happened to be the first head of cataloging at Princeton University). He gave a talk to the NY State Library School in 1915 (http://www.archive.org/details/catalogingasasse00bishrich). In this talk, he said something about catalogs that always rang true for me and I would like to quote him at some length:

“Now no instrument can always be worked easily, safely and successfully by the chance comer. Herein lies much of the difficulty found in the use of card catalogs.

For who uses a card catalog? For whom is it made? This is the real crux of much of the current discussion of the merits--and failings--of that machine. Obviously it is not for the way-faring man; equally obviously not for the child just entering school. Clearly persons who wish to read or study some definite book or some subject are the normal users of card catalogs. For the idle or the curious browser, there are the open shelves; for the fiction seeker, the finding list and more open shelves; for the child, the children's room; for the man in haste, the reference collection and its attendants.”

and later he says:

“Is it not a perfectly fair statement that in the users of a card catalog there may be presumed some modicum of intelligence and a more than passing interest in some topic? I do not believe that the card catalog can ever be made so easy of operation, especially in this day of huge libraries, that every chance comer can handle it successfully without some instruction.”

He goes on to say that a catalog is complex because books and people are complex. This is beautifully said and very convincing, but I fear, it is absolutely outmoded in our day and age. Mr. Bishop went to great pains to talk about how different kinds of people can avoid using the card catalog, but today with an ever-growing demand to use library collections remotely and the ubiquity of what is now called search, “every chance comer” has no choice but to work with the catalog, and to do it without any real instruction. Since the number of reference questions is also plummeting, patrons even do it without asking anyone for help. Of course they will have poor results! As a result, I reluctantly came to believe that Mr. Line is correct and not Mr. Bishop. Today, people who want information for whatever purpose can avoid not only the catalog, as Mr. Bishop pointed out in 1915 for “the man in haste” and the “curious browser”, but today everyone, including the serious searcher can avoid the entire library as well.

As a result, I concluded that since there is absolutely no possibility of training all users of our catalogs, it is the catalog that must change and no longer be seen as an impediment. This means that it must change in ways that will be more “user friendly”. But added to this imperative were all of the other problems I have mentioned in my earlier podcasts: a mushrooming number of worthwhile materials available online--Google Books is only one site which alone has been adding millions and millions of books but there are an enormous and ever-growing number of other great sites out there with new ones popping up all the time, each containing innovative and wonderful resources; I had also noticed that there is a huge amount of metadata, but it did not interoperate because formats, data, and bibliographic concepts are not coordinated and consequently, the metadata others create is not “good enough” and must be redone over and over again by each group; there was the genuine challenge of full-text retrieval methods plus the new “social web” which were difficult to assess, but showed great promise and it only made sense to work with these things somehow; almost all of us were also looking at flat budget lines and on and on the problems went. These were some of the real and serious challenges that I saw we were facing, and what was the library community’s response?

FRBR and then, RDA.

To be honest, I had always been looking forward to RDA since it was clear that changes were needed, particularly in raising productivity, and dealing with the new, weird things I saw on the web, where it seemed that the only thing that was constant was that they changed.

I need to pause for a moment here to avoid a potential misunderstanding: when I say that productivity needs to increase, I am absolutely not saying that catalogers are slackers or anything of the sort. Increases in production come primarily through the introduction of technological innovations and adherence to shared standards, not through individuals working harder. There have been relatively few technical improvements in the creation and sharing of catalog records since the introduction of Z39.50. Some tools provide help in making authority records and so on, but a lot more could be done. Much more important in my view is for catalogers to produce records that are of a sufficiently high standard that other bibliographic organizations can just accept them without local editing. I think we all know that while libraries claim that they create records that follow AACR2, they often fail in many ways and local editing is necessary with the result that the same items are re-cataloged repeatedly, or it turns out that the volume of copy records that require editing becomes so overwhelming that libraries just give up and accept whatever comes their way. Such a situation cannot be considered adherence to standards and is unsustainable in the long run. Imposition of genuine and realistic standards that must be followed, as they are in other industries such as foods and drugs, or the automobile industry, if such standards were possible to implement, would doubtless increase productivity tremendously.

So this is what I mean when I say that productivity must rise; we work smarter so that we can genuinely cooperate, not that each cataloger must produce 500 original records a day!

To return: while it was clear to me that FRBR did not provide what users wanted, I was very interested in seeing what RDA would come up with. Perhaps the actual practice would improve on theory by avoiding the problems I saw and provide some real solutions. But when RDA came out for general review and I could see it, I plunged into the darkest depths of my Despair phase. I couldn’t even discuss matters of detail of RDA because I saw that it was silent about the tremendous challenges we were really facing: of productivity, how to work with the other “worlds” of metadata, or interoperate with full-text tools. RDA did nothing new except change a couple of procedures, and it stuck faithfully to FRBR. As a result, our patrons’ experience would not change at all.

About this same time the economic bubble burst, and lots of things changed. Before the bubble, I could at least consider retraining and retooling, but afterwards, it was simply unthinkable. Perhaps even then, if I had honestly thought that RDA represented a step forward, I might have considered fighting for funding (still unsuccessfully, I have no doubt), but I could not ignore that in my professional opinion, RDA is not a solution for anything and I could not justify spending precious dollars (or euros) on that.

In the depths of my Despair phase, I contacted others and it turned out that they also shared many of my concerns; they also had no money for retraining staff and switching over to RDA. This was when I found a ray of Hope because I learned I was not alone, and I decided to initiate the Cooperative Cataloging Rules Wiki (http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/). It’s still new and I don’t know what will happen with it, it may be doomed to oblivion, but at least for me it represents a bit of hope and an option for libraries who either cannot or will not switch to RDA. I thought long and hard before announcing anything, but decided to simply forge ahead.

That pretty much describes my own, personal journey with FRBR up to the present, and the difficulty I experienced of accepting that FRBR changes nothing of substance and avoids the real problems facing modern librarians. Perhaps you will find this ending anticlimactic or unsatisfying, but it is not for me.

A very important concern of mine can be inferred from those who have listened to my earlier podcasts: that the FRBR user tasks are based on the work of Panizzi and Cutter, two giants in the field whom I have admired immensely. For me, renouncing FRBR was equivalent to renouncing Panizzi and Cutter and this made me exceedingly uncomfortable. Nothing improved until an exchange on the RDA-L list with Bernhard Eversberg, who helped me understand things better. http://www.mail-archive.com/rda-l@listserv.lac-bac.gc.ca/msg02048.html

I was discussing details of how difficult it had been for me to find some small bit of information I wanted (it turned out to be only a single page published over 100 years ago), but nevertheless I could do it and I considered the fact that I actually could find what I wanted nothing less than amazing. I mentioned that these are the sorts of things people want to do today and they have nothing whatsoever to do with the FRBR user tasks. Bernhard pointed out that in earlier days, people wanted to do the same things, but “they had to first align their intention with a bookish mindset and then walk into a library,” which seemed true, and I replied that in a case like mine, it was probably only after prolonged consultation with an experienced reference librarian.

So, perhaps Panizzi and Cutter were right after all, but for them, the existence of a reference librarian was simply too obvious to mention, since it went without saying that untrained people could never use a catalog competently.

The information environment has changed far too much and the presence of an ever-watchful, skilled reference librarian can no longer be taken for granted. This narrows the choices at our disposal: either to expect patrons to struggle with our catalogs as we can see them doing now and if patrons don’t find something it’s their problem and not ours, or we can try to make the catalog more useful and user friendly so that people can operate it more easily. Of course, in one way, shape, or form, our patrons pay our salaries, and since patrons can now actually get worthwhile information without the library, it is logical to assume that if we do nothing and expect everyone to continue fighting with our catalogs, those patrons will see us either as useless or obstructionist, and suddenly, their problems really do become our problems. For me, FRBR and RDA head in the wrong directions and are the equivalent of doing nothing.

So, we are left with improving the catalog. There are a lot of things we can and should be doing using the power of the computer systems, plus focusing on increasing quality and standards. Fixing this situation will demand time and imagination, a lot of trial and error; and I hope it will be done with fantasy, taste, and even a bit of fun here and there.

For those of you who have had the patience to share my journey, I hope you have enjoyed it, whether you happen to agree with me or not.

The music I would like to close with is from the first movement of Vivaldi’s stirring, and rather dark Double Cello Concerto in G Minor, performed by the King’s Consort. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYdTLnlc4q4&amp

That’s it for now. Thank you for listening to “Cataloging Matters” with Jim Weinheimer, coming to you from Rome, Italy, the most beautiful, and the most romantic, city in the world.

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, a personal journey Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 23:45:39 PDT

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, a personal journey

Part 3

Link to pt. 2

Link to podcast

Transcript
Hello everyone. My name is Jim Weinheimer and welcome to Cataloging Matters, a series of podcasts about the future of libraries and cataloging, coming to you from the most beautiful, and the most romantic city in the world, Rome, Italy. This installment continues my personal journey with the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (or FRBR).

This series: The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: a personal journey, has gone on for two previous podcasts. I believe that this installment will make very little sense without the first two, so I strongly suggest that you listen first to them, in order. Links to the earlier podcasts are available from the transcript.

I also want to mention that I added a Google Translate widget to my blog, so that those who want it, can now get an instant translation of the transcript, or any of my other postings, in a surprisingly large number of languages. Still, we are all aware of the problems of automatic translation, so keep in mind that Google Translate is designed only to provide help, but translations may turn out to be faulty. If Google Translate has me say something stupid, it is not necessarily my fault!

Now, to continue my journey:
Let me sum up where I am in my twelve step process, and pardon me for repeating the steps yet again, but I feel it is important:
Determination
--Incomprehension
----Humiliation
------Renewed Determination
--------Joy
----------Comprehension
------------Consternation
--------------Serious questioning
----------------Serious doubts
------------------Disillusionment
--------------------Despair
----------------------Hope

After encountering initial failure in my first efforts to understand FRBR, I now understood it, but based on my widening experience, I was being faced with questions without apparent answers. These questions I could not simply ignore, and consequently, I had entered my Consternation phase. Those first questions had to do with some rather uncomfortable facts concerning the manifestation, or I was used to calling it, the edition. This had been an aspect of traditional cataloging that I had always taken for granted, and yet it became crystal clear to me that different communities viewed the same physical item in quite different ways. These differences were actually based on definitions, and I saw how those definitions could vary widely among different bibliographic communities: you could be a late-20th century AACR2/ISBD cataloger, a rare book cataloger, someone cataloging for FAO of the United Nations, a cataloger from the late 19th century, and so on, and each person would look and relate to the same physical object in a unique, and often quite a different way.

I myself had experienced how on one day, a book was a new manifestation or edition, but because of a new LC Rule Interpretation, on the very next day, that same book was an item or copy. And this concerned a concept that to me had earlier seemed so fundamental and solid: whether this thing I am holding in my hands is a copy of something else or not! If there was no agreement on a point such as that, how could there possibly be any agreement on anything at all? (Jumping ahead for just a moment, this is the sort of reasoning that would eventually lead me to my Despair phase)

Still, it is important to say that I had no doubts as to the ultimate correctness of FRBR since its principles were based on Cutter’s Rules, which have served as the foundation of modern catalogs since the latter 19th century. These rules represent the solid base that we could all rely upon, and therefore, as far as the problems that I saw, I could safely put them on a shelf in the back of my mind labelled “Snags”, since I knew--or at least I had faith--that the problems I saw were either some kind of imperfection in my own understanding, or these were examples of some minor anomalies that would be worked out in time. As a result, I felt relatively comfortable and assured while I was in my Consternation phase.

But I couldn’t ignore it all forever and I was quickly entering my Serious Questioning phase. When I worked at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (or FAO), I found myself looking at all kinds of cataloging from different communities, such as those I myself was working with, but I also saw other records from journal and book publishers who wanted to share our data, and still other communities who were making online videos, the geographic mapping community, and from various others around the world. At the same time, Google Books was just starting to get off the ground; I could see fabulous resources in the the Internet Archive, and all sorts of digitized books were becoming available through different projects ranging from the University of Virginia to the University of Heidelberg to think tanks to fabulous antiquarian map sites from dealers. FAO itself was placing very important information online; not only books and documents, but conferences, videos and images, entire workshops, statistics and so on, and I saw how many other organizations and universities were doing the same things.

I discovered that few of these projects followed widely recognized standards, and often, some of these communities had no standards at all, or nothing that you could really label as standards. For example, someone might say that their records “followed the Dublin Core standards”, a peculiar idea that actually meant that the computer coding may have followed Dublin Core: i.e. creator, date, relation, and so on, but the information within the coding, (i.e. what I will call here the actual cataloging information) followed no standards at all, i.e. something authored by the “United Nations” could be entered as “United Nations” or “UN” or “U.N.” or “ONU” or “Naciones Unidas”, or a host of other possibilities.

And yet, at least these communities were semi-organized. Not the least important of these communities was the burgeoning open archive movement, where everything was supposed to be “self-managed” in some sort of way that was completely unclear to me.

Open Archives are a major topic and will be the subject of a future podcast, so I will avoid the discussion of them for now. For those who are interested however, I have placed a link in the transcript that goes to additional information. I suggest, and link to, Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm. For my purposes here, I simply want to point out that I felt I was witnessing an exponential growth in the immediate access to materials in open archives, that is, to materials that are highly important to patrons of any library.

It turns out that so far, my prediction of the rate of growth of these open archives has turned out to be true, although I think it was always a pretty safe bet. Links to the statistics are available in the transcript.
(Statistic of growth in open archives: ROAR:
http://roar.eprints.org (click on graphical analysis to generate it yourself) and OpenDOAR:
http://www.opendoar.org/onechart.php?cID=&ctID=&rtID=&clID=&lID=&potID=&rSoftWareName=&search=&groupby=r.rDateAdded&orderby=&charttype=growth&width=600&height=350&caption=Growth%20of%20the%20OpenDOAR%20Database%20-%20Worldwide)]

At the same time as I realized that the numbers of these new, easily accessible sources of important information had the potential to become genuinely overwhelming, and since I was at FAO and in communication with managers of different web sites, I also realized that these overwhelming numbers of resources did not necessarily imply a complete absence of metadata, since I discovered that metadata was continually being created at practically every level.

This metadata (I cannot find it within myself to call it “cataloging information”) was being created by publishers, journal databases, and sometimes by the authors themselves, as they added their materials into the open archives, but the vast majority of it was not being created by library catalogers. Much of this metadata was created for internal management and workflow purposes; for example, the publisher or editor could find out how far along a specific author may be on a chapter of a book, or if an item has been assigned an ISBN, and so on.

As a result, instead of a problem of quantity, the difficulty seemed rather to lie in the quality of the metadata. I had seen that there was quite a bit of metadata being produced according to accepted standards, such as our metadata that followed the AGRIS standards, but these standards did not follow AACR2 or ISBD. For example, the basic rule of “exact transcription of the title page” does not exist in the AGRIS rules, and catalogers are directed to enter only corrected titles. There are also some bibliographical concepts that do not exist in ISBD or AACR2. Therefore, although our AGRIS descriptions were standardized, the headings were standardized, the subjects were standardized and so on, they were all uncoordinated with respect to AACR2 and vice versa.

There were still other standards that were unrelated to any other standard, and the result was that the same items were cataloged over and over because the standards were not shared. Much of the rest of the metadata I saw did not adhere to any type of standards at all.

While it was certainly my opinion that AACR2-type cataloging was the “best”, I could not deny that there were many other standards that had been around for a long time, and that thousands of people, if not far more, had found them highly useful; therefore, I recognized that my personal bias in favor of AACR2 could just as easily be explained by the fact that my initial library training took place in the United States because I just happened to be born there, and not in some other country.

As an added complication, there was that damned Google that kept drawing me back like a moth to a flame, and doing a pretty good job of finding a lot of the information I wanted, so long as I wasn’t looking for anything in depth. As a result of these considerations, I found myself falling deeper and deeper into my Serious Questioning stage, although FRBR was not in my conscious thoughts in any focused way, as I had other tasks to attract my attention: practical cataloging and now, systems.

My time at FAO was when I made my first major strides into systems. I had made several rather extensive websites earlier, such as those of the Cataloging and Technical Services documentation at Princeton University Library, and several specialized cataloging manuals, one of which was my own Slavic Cataloging Manual, but databases had always remained beyond my abilities. While I had wanted to learn about databases and XML earlier, and had read books and asked people for help, I just could not understand it and nothing worked until I met two colleagues at FAO, who ultimately became my close friends. I am forever in their debt because they sat me down and showed me how to build simple databases and how to actually use XML.

I had been studying XML for some time, and one of the most important things I learned at FAO was that the way I had been approaching XML was completely wrong. XML is short for Extensible Markup Language, and its native format is terrifying to behold. For me, I had focused on creating these terrifying XML files of bibliographic records and the most that would happen was that I would run it through a program that would tell me whether the XML document was “well formed” or not. If it wasn’t, then I had more work to do, but sometimes it would say that it was “well formed”, and ... that was it! Since nothing else happened, it was tough to get excited over the “success” that my XML was “well formed”, and therefore, it had always been completely anticlimactic. As a result, I could not grasp how there could be any practical advantages in converting our records to XML format, and therefore, I was exceedingly skeptical over whether libraries should change to XML from native MARC.

At FAO, I discovered that while the XML format is certainly very important, that’s not the fun part. The cool options come from something called XSL-Transformations and related tools that work with XML. So long as your XML document is valid and well formed, then with XSL-Transformations, you can actually transform your XML record into anything you want.

Think about that for just a moment: anything you want.

So, I learned how to take an XML record (in my case, an AGRIS bibliographic record in XML format) and turn it into another format, as I did by turning it into MARC21; or I could make it into a pdf document, or an MS Word or Open Office document. I could transform XML-MARC records into web pages. I even found I could change batches of records into Excel sheets, where I could get some new views that could help for purposes of quality control.

The first few times I did it, I thought it was magic. I figured that probably I could have even converted those records into a movie if I had wanted to badly enough. What does this mean in the real world? As one example, a newspaper encoded in XML can be published simultaneously (or transformed) as a printed document and as a website by simply applying a new XSL-Transformation, and therefore the newspaper itself only has to be created one time. Once again, this same XML file could probably even be transformed into a video.

So, XML on its own is not very exciting, but when paired with complementary technologies such as XSL, it can provide radically novel displays and can sort and re-sort records in a whole variety of ways. I kept telling myself: with XML, you can transform the record into anything you want. This is not something that can be fully understood immediately since it is so expansive, and I am still coming to grips with it myself. Anything means anything. Now, as an aside, I will admit that probably it isn’t really anything, but I think it’s important at this point to assume that it literally is anything, so that we can eventually find and learn the limitations.

There are other technologies based on XML documents: XLinks, XQuery, XForms and so on that I have not worked with, but I am sure even these are not the end and that there will probably be other developments in the future. This is one reason why I believe it is vital for the library world to shift to XML formats of some kind, so that they can be transformed. I believed (and still believe) that such a capability will represent a fundamental break with the previous cataloging traditions and will have profound consequences for librarians and others, probably both good and bad, many of which we cannot foresee today.

When you add all of this to the possibilities arising from the complementary power of modern browsers and other systems to display and actually bring in information from distant databases on the fly using what is called web services, where everything can display on a single computer screen, and where the user can interact with it in various ways, the possibilities are literally endless. While I didn’t know how to make all of these things I am talking about, I could do a little bit, and that little bit helped me to understand more, and consequently to imagine possibilities that earlier, had never occurred to me. For those who are interested, I have added links to some simple videos about XML and web services from the transcript. I especially recommend What is a Mashup? from ZdNet, which shows how fun it can be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRcP2CZ8DS8 and IBM’s more technical, but I don’t think overly so, An Introduction to XML: The Basics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPKV6dBZ5n0

Now that I was concentrating on digital resources, I saw their numbers increasing at an unheard of rate. What were the consequences? In libraries, I had seen and heard stories of major reorganizations, but while I heard specifics in some cases concerning the reorganization of catalog departments, I did not hear anything at all about how the number of catalogers would increase. In fact, I heard the opposite. Slowly, slowly, these realities of how the creation and access to information was changing began to work its way into my brain, which led me even more deeply into my Serious Doubts phase.

Although at that time I was much less involved in the U.S. cataloging world, there was discussion about it at FAO, and I gave some presentations on FRBR to my colleagues. While I did my very best to describe FRBR, my subconscious doubts began to rise to the surface: What does the creation of works/ expressions/ manifestations/ items accessed by their authors/ titles/ subjects have to do with the enormities of the problems I saw? We were being faced with an avalanche of information from everywhere at once, so it seemed that what should take primary importance was to increase the number of catalog records by a quantum factor in some way. Otherwise, although we can claim that we have some type of “control”, it will be control over a very quickly diminishing percentage of worthwhile resources, until it becomes practically infinitesimal and useless. How in the world could you keep a straight face when you declare that you have control?

But on the other hand, how could productivity be increased like that? Catalogers were working hard already and no one was even suggesting that new catalogers would or even could be hired on in enough numbers that would make an appreciable difference.

But I remembered that the problem did not seem to be with the quantity of metadata, but the quality, and so to me, a major part of any solution was obviously to work together somehow. Yet, I realized that this innocent-sounding little phrase “work together” held a vast number of consequences and troubles and fights that seemed so insoluble that I personally did not want to think about them.

How could everyone possibly work together? There wasn’t even agreement on what a manifestation was, so what did this portend for expressions and works and everything else? At the same time, when resources were available with just a click, for me it was pretty much irrelevant whether it clicked into a pdf file or an html file that might include an image or even a video.

Another concept I learned at FAO, which is very important in that institution and I believe also exists in other fields, and in those where it does not exist, it should, is the concept of sustainability. In agriculture, sustainability is demonstrated in the saying we have all heard: give me a fish and I eat for a day, but teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime. This is absolutely true, but the key is to realize that such an idea is not limited only to fishing or agriculture. In all fields, there are quick-fix solutions and long-term solutions. Quick-fix solutions may be necessary, but by definition, they deal only with emergencies and cannot be relied upon in the long term. Therefore, such solutions are not sustainable.

On the other hand, a long-term solution is just what it says: a solution that will not necessarily last until the end of time, but at least it will for the foreseeable future and consequently, such a solution is sustainable. To take a specific example, there can be emergency solutions for villages faced with a temporary shortfall of rain and the locals need water for simple survival, so everybody gets together and takes them water. But in the long term, if global warming is turning the area into a desert, other solutions, far more drastic, will be needed.

Emergency solutions normally do not engender too much resistance because after all, everyone is facing an emergency, but long-term solutions inevitably cause tensions because in those cases, people are contemplating genuine, unavoidable changes, that is, changes that will last, for all practical purposes, forever. In such situations, there will be winners, and there will be losers. The winners in the current situation may not be the same after the imposition of the long-term solutions, and they may fear that they will turn out to be the losers; therefore sometimes they will oppose the long-term solutions. Nevertheless, changes will be unavoidable, since in the example above, the desert is advancing inexorably, and it is vital to avoid an endless number of increasingly severe emergencies, each requiring any number of quick-fix emergency solutions, that in any case must all end up in failure and possible catastrophe.

After my time at FAO, I felt that sustainability should be an important concept for catalogs and cataloging, as well.

Around this time, fully in my Serious Doubts phase, I left FAO to become Director of the Library of the American University of Rome, a small, undergraduate institution. For the first time in my library career, I would begin to work both regularly and extensively with the public as a reference librarian, and almost immediately as I started work with undergraduates and faculty on their research, I fell into my Disillusionment phase, followed rather quickly by Despair.

At this point, I shall stop once again, and save the rest of my journey for yet another podcast, part 4. I will do my best to finish in the next installment, but I can’t promise anything because there is still quite a bit to cover: my experiences with the public, and seeing how they work with information and what they expect to be able to do with it, plus my struggles with Information Literacy, led me toward new phases. But I’ll talk about them later.

The music I have chosen to end this segment is an excerpt from a fun piece by Marco Uccellini, called Aria quinta sopra la Bergamasca or the Fifth tune for the Bergomask performed by the group Il Giardino Armonico. For everyone’s information, I discovered that a bergomask is a dance that made fun of the people from Bergamo, a region of northern Italy, who were supposed to be notoriously bad dancers. For example, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the clowns dance a bergomask. The piece here is an excerpt; if you would like to listen to the entire piece, the link is available from the transcript. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca_9FpzcLds&feature=fvw

That’s it for now. Thank you for listening to “Cataloging Matters” with Jim Weinheimer, coming to you from Rome, Italy, the most beautiful, and the most romantic, city in the world.

Cataloging Matters Podcast no. 4: The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records a personal journey Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 03:17:43 PDT

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records
a personal journey

Part 2

Go to Part 1

Go to the Podcast

“A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”

(end of quote)

I would like to continue the line of reasoning from this famous quote of Madison: If information equals power, then in many ways for the vast majority of human history, this has meant having access to, and the use of, libraries: whether those libraries were ancient, medieval, or modern, subscription, public, government, or private, or whatever form they happened to take. If we also consider that by definition, people who live under dictators or absolute monarchs have no power, and consequently, these unfortunate people have little need for information since their wishes and opinions make no difference in the scheme of things anyway, but when those people decide to take the power, as they have in our modern republics, then everything changes and every single person is faced with certain responsibilities: the individual citizens have the responsibility to inform themselves on the issues of importance, and also, the organized mass of people, primarily through their governments, have the responsibility to ensure that the citizens have the means to inform themselves.

How can anyone possibly be expected to vote even half-way intelligently if they don’t have access to some kind of reliable information that is superior to whatever gossip and superstition that is available locally, or to simply vote as some local political boss or populist journalist says? If that happens and the people do not have enough information to make a reasoned decision, that is when it all becomes a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.

In the United States, as in other countries, the public library movement became absolutely critical to the development of a modern democratic society, so that the citizens could understand enough to be able to make informed choices.

And yet, while thinking about Madison’s quote in this way may make us feel good about our forms of government and our forms of society, it doesn’t exhaust the possibilities in today’s world: we are rediscovering that the issue of access to information is intensely controversial not only in national politics, where we hear different political groups today claim that the media is slanted toward the views of “the other side”, but concerns toward information are penetrating ever more subtly into people’s lives, and can even have major international consequences--true, sometimes with a strange, postmodernist quality to them. To bring up only one well-known example, I am sure many of you remember those cartoons satirizing Muhammad that were published in a Danish newspaper a few years ago. For those who would like some more information, in the transcript, I have posted a link to the incident in Wikipedia. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy]

I would like to set aside the moral, legal and cultural issues of the cartoons for the moment, and only mention that if those same cartoons had come out in 1955, probably no one outside of the metropolitan area where the newspaper was published would have known about them since everything would have been locked away in newsprint; a few copies would have wound up in libraries, and afterwards they would have been so exceedingly difficult to access, or even know about, they would have been forgotten quickly; but when the cartoons were published on the Internet 50 years later in 2005, the results were immediate: riots in various countries on the other side of the world; Danish embassies were stormed; people were killed; and a huge international scandal ensued, with aftershocks felt even today. In the transcript, I put a link into the latest news stories dealing with the cartoons in Google News. http://www.google.com/search?q=muhammad%20cartoons%20denmark&tbs=nws:1&source=og&sa=N&hl=en

I mention this incident not to blame or find fault with anyone, but to simply provide an example to show how truly complicated such matters are today, and that the lesson we learn is the simple fact that for better or worse, the Internet has changed the age-old information structures forever. Because concerns over information and access to it are changing in such fundamental ways, it turns out that when we debate issues of information storage, access, and retrieval, we find ourselves discussing changes in societal power, and there could very well be far greater consequences than what we can imagine now.

Even though it may be true that the vast majority of Internet users currently spend their time watching the latest youtube video of some boy wiping out on his skateboard, there are also new types of information sharing going on that are of greater significance and that will have far more profound consequences. For most of human history, libraries were the hubs of information sharing, but as technology forces changes to this traditional structure, we are witnessing changes that are out of our control in many ways.

So, I believe that any discussion of libraries and access to information is not merely a dry, theoretical exercise without consequences, but the discussion is actually very practical, and when solutions will be adopted by libraries, which have traditionally been the focal point for information, they will have widespread consequences for human society, whether what we make succeeds and libraries flourish, or if our tools fail, and society discovers that it has less and less need for libraries and our skills, and thereafter rely on the Googles and Yahoos and whatever else appears on the web. Whatever the results, I believe that such a discussion is very, very important to everyone.

With that out of the way, let’s return to my journey, and recap the twelve-step process I experienced:
Determination (to understand it)
--Incomprehension (not understanding anything)
----Humiliation (not telling anyone about my incomprehension)
------Renewed Determination (to understand it)
--------Joy (at the first glimmers of understanding)
----------Comprehension (full success)
------------Consternation (the first questions)
--------------Serious questioning
----------------Serious doubts
------------------Disillusionment
--------------------Despair
----------------------Hope

After experiencing initial failure in understanding FRBR, I had overcome my problems and entered the stage of Comprehension, and felt pretty good about it. But what effects did entering the Comprehension stage have on me? Actually, not much at all, since nothing practical existed and everything was just completely theoretical. I may have given a presentation or two to my cataloging colleagues about FRBR, but everything went on as normal.

As I remember it now, my feelings toward FRBR at that time were associated primarily with relief that I actually understood it. In more specific terms, I didn’t have problems with the group 2 or 3 entities--they were just about the same as the names and subjects we already had, but those doubts of the group 1 entities that had been nagging at me from the beginning remained at a barely conscious level. It was only quite a bit later I realized that down deep, I was thinking: “Everything has a work? Everything has an expression? Really? What does this mean?” But consciously, I was happy that nothing much was different.

It turns out that my initial serious questions were not directed toward FRBR itself, but rather on general cataloging practice dealing with copy vs. edition, or what FRBR calls, item or manifestation. Essentially, it comes down to a very practical question: “I have this ‘thing’ that I need to add to the collection. Is this thing something new, and if so, I need to make a new record, or is this ‘thing’ a copy of some other thing that already has a record in the catalog, and so I do not make a new record?” It almost goes without saying that this is the most basic question, i.e. Do I make a new record or not?, that must be answered before a cataloger can begin to do anything at all.

To explain once again, the manifestation or edition is supposed to describe “the thing you are holding in your hands”, and this is also the point of ISBD, i.e. the international standards detailing how to describe an item. This standard also implicitly defines variant manifestations by telling us exactly what aspects of the item we must choose to describe and how to do it. I understood this and was fine with it, but I had seen myself how updates to some of the rules resulted in some major changes. For instance, I remember the consequences of the update to LCRI 2.5B9, about counting plates, which now says “If the leaves or pages of plates are unnumbered, give the number only when the plates clearly represent an important feature of the book. Otherwise, generally do not count unnumbered leaves or pages of plates.” Before this update, we had always counted the unnumbered plates.

Clearly, this was to save cataloger time for greater productivity and is simple enough, but it turned out that at just about that same moment, I had a book with unnumbered plates, (I believe it was “The New Russians” by Hedrick Smith, issued both with plates and without) and with the updated LCRI, I was not supposed to add the plates to the record since they were not “clearly important”. Consequently, what on one day would have been a new edition or manifestation, on the next day this same book suddenly became a copy or item. I also considered highly dubious the update to LCRI 2.5B8 to use 1 v. (various pagings) for complex paging much more often than before, which would have to lead to the same consequences as not counting the plates and thus merge what had previously been different manifestations.

This bothered me, but of course, I did it.

At about the same time, I became interested in rare book cataloging, and discovered that those people consider an edition or manifestation in a much more detailed way than regular catalogers ever did, figuring out states and issues of the text, looking for points, the condition of the book, plus a dust jacket(!) all of which general catalogers ignored, while they threw out the dust jackets. (When I learned about this, I looked at dust jackets a little differently, but still threw them away) It turns out that these seemingly tiny variations can lead to an exponential difference in price that can literally blow your mind. If you have a first edition, first issue, first state, first everything and in mint condition of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby--and remember: don’t throw out the book jacket!--why, you might even be able to buy that house you’ve been wanting. See, e.g. the website Modern First Editions http://modernfirsteditions.net/ (the link is available from the transcript)

In any case, in rare book cataloging, it was indisputable that they really were much more concerned about the variants in the actual text than we were. We never compared text, but focused our attention on the areas outside the text itself, e.g. the prominent areas and preliminaries (in cataloging terms). It was clear why the situation was the way it was: regular catalogers had to deal with far greater numbers of materials than our colleagues in rare books, and we just didn’t have the time. But after talking with several scholars, it became obvious that they were not aware of these subtleties in the catalog: where in the same catalog, a rare book record describing the different states for copies of Huckleberry Finn, could be seen side by side the records made by us.

Yet another factor that added to my discomfort was the circumstance that Princeton University Library was in the midst of a huge retrospective conversion effort.

Now, let me assure those those of you who do not know what the remarkable term “retrospective conversion” means in the library catalog sense, that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Mormon religion and how they can baptize people who are long dead. (Just a joke) What “retrospective conversion” means in libraries is the process of taking the information in the card catalogs and transferring it to the computerized environment. It is invariably a huge undertaking, and my own involvement in the project spurred me into doing research into the history of Princeton’s catalog. It was surprising that it went back to 1755, then its first printed catalog appeared in 1760, and from that time, all kinds of changes took place. It turned out that studying the history of the Princeton catalog was very similar to studying the history of library catalogs in general, both the good practices, and the bad.

One thing I noticed however, was that there had been several previous “retrospective conversions” at Princeton over its 250 or so years, and it was fascinating to see how everything fit together logically, or did not fit together very well at all. In any case, through my historical studies of Princeton’s catalogs and other catalogs as well, I saw even more ways of cataloging materials, some that differed radically from what I was doing, while some aspects of it, not everything, but some aspects, I thought were superior to what I was doing.

Some other factors: for several years I was the moderator of a huge email list for ASIS&T, the special interest group for Information Architecture. While there were some librarians on that list, there were extremely few catalogers, if any at all, and in any case, their tiny voices would have been crushed under the weight of so many web developers and new-fangled “information architects”, each trying to come up with new ideas. Also, I was moderately involved in the Dublin Core initiative, which also had different ways of looking at information.

While these considerations did not bother me all that much, I stored them away and I looked at the records in the catalog we were making much more critically. It was clear that the idea of the edition/manifestation is not something that is inherent to the “thing you are holding in your hands”; rather, it is a matter of definitions and who you happen to be. I realized that there were obviously many ways of looking at “the same thing”, and this would become even clearer to me later.

I was fully ensconced in my Consternation Stage.

I can’t deny it: I was rather happy in my Consternation stage. It didn’t trouble me very much at all since, although I saw some of these problems, it was even easier to look away and I didn’t really think about them. At a subconscious level, I suspect that I assumed that the problems I saw were not really problems, but just “matters waiting further refinements,” or in other words, while there were certainly a few anomalies, nothing is perfect and such problems should be expected. Nevertheless, the overall purpose and structure remained sound. As I said in part 1: everything followed Cutter’s principles, and that is what we had been aiming at for over one hundred years. How could there possibly be a problem? Even though I had discovered that there were lots of other ways of viewing the information universe: Dublin Core, rare books, the information architects, angry faculty members from the 1820s forced to double as librarians, and so on, modern catalogers had the answers. We knew what was right because we had the weight of the history of cataloging and we could point to undeniable successes for a long, long time.

When my wife and I moved from the United States to Italy in 2001, I had to confront many changes with respect to the course of my former life. Several assumptions I had were shattered. As only a single curious example, one of the first of my assumptions to fall away came from how the U.S. press portrays Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. In the United States, I had the idea that he is a clown and a fool. Once here however, I discovered that he is far from a fool, but in fact, a deeply clever person in many ways, whether or not you happen to agree with his policies. As another example, the ways in which people relate to food and alcohol are totally different from the United States, and I found that I like the Italian ways a lot. It was in this state of mind that I began work at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, not long after I left the U.S.

At FAO, I did not work in the library, but in the documentation unit, which was responsible for the collection, cataloging, and indexing of all the documentation produced by FAO, anywhere in the world. What genuinely surprised me was that the cataloging standards that both my unit and the library followed were something I had never heard of before: the AGRIS standards supplemented by our internal FAO standards. The AGRIS standards had been around since the early 1970s and did not follow AACR2 or even ISBD, but nevertheless are used by libraries the world over.

Those rules are different. When cataloging and indexing at FAO, I discovered that I had to approach materials differently than I did as an AACR2/ISBD cataloger; I looked at them differently; I had to consider different aspects I had not dealt with before, and ignore other aspects that previously had been vital.

Finally, I need to mention something else that was quite new and that would become important only after FRBR came out; a tool I think everyone would agree changes everything, or almost: the website with that very silly name, “Google”. In spite of all my misgivings, I was forced to admit that this strange contraption could actually work!

I was quickly entering my Serious Questions stage.

At this point however, I would like to stop and save the rest for yet another part, part 3. I regret the inconvenience to anyone listening of going on so long, but that’s just the way I am. Probably, this second installment will prove to be a bit more controversial than the first one, since in the first I tried my best not to say anything new and concentrated on describing FRBR, while in this one, I am actually raising some questions that proved to be uncomfortable to me. From this point on however, the number of questions will grow and grow, while they also become progressively more uncomfortable--as I said, at least they are to me.

Still, I am going to jump ahead for a moment and emphasize that I think there are many excellent grounds for hope, so in my opinion, all is not lost but the key is to discover and define what are the problems facing catalogs today, avoiding theory as much as possible, and then to focus our efforts there. Otherwise, I fear that we are simply avoiding the questions and instead of facing the very serious issues before us, we are trying to force this new universe of information into forms where we feel more comfortable, whether this new universe fits or not, and whether anyone wants what we make or not, and if we don’t deal with the serious problems facing us, there is a danger that we will end up spending a huge amount of time and energy creating tools that will be irrelevant to our users and to society at large.

The music I have chosen for the end of this segment is the allegro of Corelli’s Sonata for violin and basso continuo in E major Op. 5 No. 11. For a change, I do have some information on this recording: it was performed by the Locatelli Trio, with Elizabeth Walfisch, violin, Richard Tunnicliffe, cello, and Paul Nicholson, harpsichord. If you would like to listen to the entire recording, the link is available from the transcript. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwY0kp8PnE4

That’s it for now. Thank you for listening to “Cataloging Matters” with Jim Weinheimer, coming to you from Rome, Italy, the most beautiful, and the most romantic, city in the world.