orienteering for libraries: grounding our adventure: definitional alignment as our terra firma

Kathryn:

Hello, everyone. My name is Kathryn Harnish, principal at Leap Forward Library

Consulting, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to Grounding Our Adventure:

Definitional Alignment as Our Terra Firma, the second Webinar in our Orienteering for

Libraries & Librarians series.

Before we get rolling, I’d like to take care of a few housekeeping items:

• First, we’ve prepared and sent each registrant several documents to support

this session — a handout on what to do if you (or we) experience any technical

difficulties with our Webinar platform and a set of definitions that we’ll review

during today’s session. You may want to reference these during our

presentations.

• Second, we very much encourage the use of the “chat” function during the

session, as we think that discussion is really important to these topics. We will,

however, hold questions until the end…and for any that we don’t have a chance

to tackle, we’ll follow up on the Leap Forward blog (see the post

http://www.leapforwardlibraryconsulting .com/define-it-to-transform-it/). We also appreciate

feedback on our “Talk to Us” page — http://imteaminc.com/talk-to-us/ .

Finally, we’re recording today’s session and will make sure that you all receive a link to it,

as well as copies of our slides and speakers’ notes, complete with links to any cited

resources, by Friday of this week. In addition, all of our session materials are posted to

Tuesday, November 10, 2015 Grounding Our Adventure

©2015 by Information Management Team, Inc.® and Leap Forward Library Consulting™

http://imteaminc.com/resources-2/orienteering-resources/ for your reference.



Kathryn:

Today’s Guides (http://imteaminc.com/about-us/our-people/)

Kathryn Harnish, principal at Leap Forward Library consulting, and an 18-

year veteran of the library software industry, having served in various

product management positions at ProQuest, OCLC, and Ex Libris. (http://www.leapforwardlibraryconsulting.com/about-me/)

Cathy Sackmann, lead analyst, and Nannette Naught, principal at IMT,

extensive experience with product and content development, architecture,

ontology, and modeling services for publishers, libraries, and their partners.(http://imteaminc.com/our-story/)



Kathryn:

As the library industry looks toward the future, it’s critically important that we

know ourselves — that we understand who we are and why we’re here. I

talked about many of these “identity” issues in our last session — we’re

collectors, we’re navigators, we’re guardians, and so on.

But we need to go further to get to what’s essential, to think really critically

about how we define ourselves, our services, our value.



Kathryn:

Are we collectors like our museum colleagues?

Are we service providers, offering a comprehensive set of knowledge

services against what we collect and beyond?

Or are we both?



Kathryn:

Are we navigators, trusted guides traveling alongside our users to facilitate

pathways through information?

Or should we be enabling navigation in the way that that Google does?

Or both?



Kathryn:

What does it mean to guard the intellectual record?

How are we rethinking our role as stewards of our collections in view of the trends

and activities described in OCLC’s Stewardship of the Evolving Scholarly Record:

From the Invisible Hand to Conscious Coordination? https://www.google.com/search?q=OCLC+

Stewardship+of+Evolving+Scholarly+Record&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

In view of a shift to increasingly electronic collections?



Kathryn:

We need to get to this essence before we start building — building strategy,

building systems, building our future.

Because if we don’t understand, very clearly, who we are and what we do,

we won’t create the right solutions. In fact, I would argue that, as an industry,

we should have gotten to this essence before we started creating so-called

“next-generation” library management systems … as a result, we’ve rebuilt

rather than redefined or future proofed.

We’ve achieved parity-plus with our former systems, but have we achieved

anything that will not just preserve, but extend our relevance for our users?

Within our organizations?

Ask yourself:

• What is the ROI on the implementation of a next-gen system?

• How much are you really saving?

• How much more effectively are you delivering service to your users?

• How much more visible and viable are you?



My sense is that there are very hard answers here.



Kathryn:

Which brings us to the topic of today’s session:

Definitional alignment as that grounding force — that thing we need to do

to:

• Get to our essence before moving forward.

• Avoid repeating our past mistakes.



Kathryn:

Stakeholders often have different understandings of terminology. As an example,

• My niece serves in the Navy, on the destroyer USS John Paul Jones. When

she thinks of a boat, she thinks of this.

• I live in northern Maine, not far from the Allagash Waterway. And when I think

of a boat, I think of this.

A common vocabulary ensures that everyone has the same understanding of the

words we’re using.

As Nannette noted in the last session, we need to increase our collaboration,

bringing in partners across the library, technical, and business aspects of our

organizations (and service providers) to achieve our goals of viability and visibility in

a Web-based world. Without shared understandings, we’ve been talking at cross-

purposes with these partners, like ships passing in the night. As a result, the

solutions we’ve created are unlikely to meet anyone’s needs — functional,

technical, or financial.

And this is evident in the answers to those previous questions about next-gen

systems . We’re NOT getting:

• Substantially better workflows.



• The benefits of modern technology.

• A return on our institutions’ investments in these systems.



Kathryn:

But before we even start talking about other stakeholders from outside of

Library, I would assert that we don’t have common vocabulary within

libraries, either writ large or, often, even within a single organization or single

team. As a result, we get twisted up, unable to come to consensus about

priorities, strategies, and how we deliver services.

I mentioned in our last session that my mom is also a librarian — she was

trained in the late 1960s and worked, until her retirement in 1998, as a

school librarian. While she and I share the same profession, we most

definitely do not share the same vocabulary … because we’ve worked at

different times, in different contexts, with different constituents. In short, our

business cases differed. And in many cases, as a result, our opinions differ,

as well.



Kathryn:

Coming to agreement on definitions is a hard process … if you’re not butting

heads, you’re probably not doing it right!

And we need to butt heads, as we need to:

• Have our own story nailed down.

• Be clear in how we describe what we want, before we start engaging with

other stakeholders.

I will say, however, that it’s an unreasonable expectation that there will be universal

agreement — different business cases will give rise to different schemas, different

solutions, different systems. There’s no need for a law library and a medical library

to come to complete agreement … where there’s need for divergence, it’s OK. In

fact, it’s vital to our visibility and viability.

Too often, librarians believe that there’s only one way … but the reality is that there

are many valid ways that work optimally in different situations.



Kathryn:

I recently left a product management position in which I was responsible for

conceptualizing a next-generation management system. For me, it was

important to do things differently, to improve our processes, and to respond

to customer needs in a way that no one else was. So I brought in partners

— IMT, in fact — that complemented my team’s library expertise with the

right technology focus. And unlike previous forays into this work, we, as a

group, spent a significant amount of time, right at the outset, on definitions.

We went through an exhaustive process of documenting all of the terms that

were flying around and then defining them in a consistent way.

We knew that without these definitions, we’d end up with inconsistent inputs

— requirements and specifications, the things that our technical counterparts

would act upon. And on the “outbound side”, once the coding was

completed, we wouldn’t be able to verify that we were getting what we asked

for in our testing.



Kathryn:

Once we had those definitions, once we’d thought critically about the

meaning of each and how they fit into our stated goal of connecting

resources to people, we were able to begin categorizing things, finding

relationships, consolidating … and even discarding some of the terms. This,

then, enabled us to categorize, relate, consolidate, and discard functionality.

This process was intended to enable my team to develop the simplest, most

cost-effective solution … we didn’t want to invest unnecessary effort in

developing big, complicated systems that increased our costs as a provider

and your costs as a library. Instead, we wanted to help you answer those

ROI questions I posed earlier with positive answers — to ensure that we

were addressing the real business needs of the library. This is how you get

to return on investment.



Kathryn:

With this clarity — which all starts with definitions — it became much easier

to reinvent, to transform, to think differently about what’s essential to

libraries.

And from there, we can build new strategies, new solutions with confidence

that we’ll meet user needs and expectations.

.



Kathryn:

Similarly, much of the writing I’ve done on behalf of Leap Forward Library Consulting is

informed by the benefit of clear, consistent definitions and the assessment that’s

enabled by them. Let me take a moment to explore an example … I’ll explain how my

thinking about ILSes, our integrated library systems, has changed thanks to this

process.

Historically, we’ve thought about our library management systems as a series of

workflow-oriented applications that fit together to support the overall lifecycle of a

collection of resources — our library inventory. We purchase, we describe, we deliver

in an integrated, end-to-end process that creates and manages our physical inventory,

and traditional library system design largely parallels these processes.

But if we look critically at this, if we define our terms appropriately, a new picture

emerges. Description, for example, is a siloed, library-specific activity, often carried out

manually, in support of inventory management:

• It’s more about describing what we own than about providing context for

creative works in a complex web of knowledge;

• It’s about the business of serving our collection, not about the business of our

patrons using those collections. We describe so that we can order and

invoice the right resources; we describe to enable users, internal and external,

to locate the right resources; we describe to deliver the right resources to

these users —in our library systems, for our individual inventories.



Kathryn:

Thinking about description differently changed my perspective on the ILS … and led me

to think about it as an IMS, or inventory management system, instead. We still need to

manage context through the activities of metadata aggregation, creation, and curation

(and note here that I intentionally switch from my use of the word “description”), but our

definitions enable us to separate inventory management from context management.



Kathryn:

In fact, with IMT, we did define both of these terms, which appear on our

vocabulary list (http://imteaminc.com/wp-

content/uploads/2015/11/Definitions_11_9_15.pdf). Before we go on, I’ll take just a

moment to pop these two definitions up so that you can better understand

the distinction I’m drawing between:

Inventory Management: Managing physical assets in the collection, and

Context Management: Managing relationships within and between

things.



Kathryn:

To play things out a little further, we could:

• Take some of fundamental components of the IMS — the inventory

model, many of our acquisitions transactions, and most aspects of

distribution — and leverage what’s being done in other domains

because we now share definitions.

• Look to the expertise of organizations for which inventory

management is a core competence — like Amazon and Walmart —

and learn from best practices established in other domains, as

Nannette suggested was necessary in our last session.

• Simplify our business processes and rules, especially given that the

physical collections that comprise our inventories represent much less

of today’s spending and use. (And here, I would argue that it’s not just

“could”, but must … the effort we continue to make in print collection

management, both in libraries and in the ILS companies that support

them, is distracting us, preventing us from leaping forward to meet

organizational and user expectations in an Web-based world.)

• Better align how libraries work with the way that other supply chains

work, particularly in the publishing space, to streamline workflows,

reduce costs, and accelerate resource delivery. Talk about ROI from a



system upgrade!



Kathryn:

And all this stems from clear definitions — from taking a pile of words and

sorting them out, from defining them and understanding the connections

between them.

Admittedly, I jumped into the deep end with my example of defining inventory

and context management, but never fear … Nannette’s going to take a step

back and go through some more basic definitions, things that are the

building blocks that enable the kind of transformed thinking that I just went

through. So, over to you, Nannette.

Crossword from http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2007/12/06/crossword-puzzle-maker/



Nannette:

Thanks, Kathryn. You are right we will take a step back and look at those

essence/essential/”isness” definitions, if you will.

But, first, let’s take a page from a cherished mentor’s playbook of mine ---

Barbara Tillett. Let’s:

• Inject a little fun.

• Suspend disbelief and DREAM for a moment of what we can be, of

what we want to be.

• Step through the door and envision the Library we want to live and

work in tomorrow, when all this transition, all of this transformation,

is done.

For as Barbara so eloquently suggested back then, we all need a break from

time to time, a break from all the hard work of “becoming.” A place to just be;

a place where we can connect our work with ourselves.

And, this space, this dream — This is the “isness” that informs our essential

definitions. It acts as a fence around them. Bounding them to both reality

and aspiration.

Unfortunately, though, those cherished FRBR glasses are well, a bit dated,



and, honestly, slightly out of fashion . . .



Nannette:

So let’s put on:

• Kathryn’s Library 2.0 glasses, Google glasses if you will.

• and maybe a slip into pair of social media jeans — yes, these were/are

a real thing, I found them in a piece entitled 10 wearable tech gadgets

librarians, and everyone else, can’t live without.

And with our focus thus removed from on that view immediately in front of

us, let’s use that enhanced reality of those Google glasses for just a

moment . . .

And ask ourselves, What do our systems look like now?

Image credits

Social Media Jeans. http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/10-wearable-tech-gadgets-librarians-and-

everyone-else-will-love/

Google glass background image. http://timnew.me/blog/2013/02/26/google-glass-isn-t-

really-an-enhanced-reality-device/

Become someone else campaign. http://ebookfriendly.com/ads-for-books-bookstores-

libraries/



Nannette:

Wow, they are actually smaller! Much smaller . . . IMS, is back office:

• Just for inventory, print distribution, etc.

• IMS is ILS without the overhead of:

• All those unified print workflows stretched to their breaking points with

the eResource “shove ins.” For as we all can see pretty easily now with

our adjusted focus, those commonly accepted ILS workflows certainly

are not best practices. In fact their underlying premises (i.e., print,

RBDMS with flat file, string based data) dooms them to little more than

stuffing a cat in a jar: As we can see now, with our Google glasses, a

very bad idea that is likely to:

• Limit movement/functionality, and if not done just right with the

proper opening for air, it’s likely to limit life itself (aka viability)

• Make people very mad — patrons, funders, staff, and even those

uncomfortable detractors in our environments who are looking for

a reason to end Library and gain the funding for themselves.

Sound familiar to any managers out there? Anyone working on a

strategic plan?

• Cause large amounts of damage to ourself and others, when the

tortured cat, those eResources, are finally let out, or escapes



their externally imposed containment.(Come on, you don’t

actually believe cats put themselves in jars do you?)



Nannette:

Look at that, our Systems serve people NOT Collections!

They remove antiquated system constraints and allow the Service of Library

to come to the foreground — Personally I see it coming to the top layer, like

when I am doing a graphic, with the system fading to the back, as an unseen

or hidden layer almost, where it should be. And the service floating to the top

as the display layer.

Yes, thorough these glasses, I’m seeing Kathryn’s system that “allows

librarians to be librarians again” where the:

Library and Librarian serve People with:

• Their collections behind them, like in this picture.

• Their systems underneath them, like that hidden layer,

supporting their service. Rather than in front of them as they are

now, dominating and constricting their vision.

But what do these smaller, people serving systems look like if they don’t look

like an ILS or a database? What are we doing in them, if we are not

maintaining the system, our collection, and its metadata?



Nannette:

Well, let’s contrast and compare.

They certainly aren’t Authority Control ---

Names that represent things, but aren’t really things, in a shadow like

word cloud (and if we’re honest, isn’t this exctly what Authority CONTROL in

the ILS era looks like? It’s a name hoping that it’s a thing.)

BUT when we put our Google glasses on, Authority Control

Becomes



Nannette:

Identity AND Identity Management. Instead of dealing with just Names,

we are dealing with electronic representations of People — and other things,

but we’ll get there later.

People with names — and not just:

• One name, but many names and even versions of names (e.g.,

maiden and married), And all those names are interrelated.

• Names, but and all other attributes of a person that are pertinent to

the work of library.

Wow, with our Google glasses on and our social media jeans in place, the

electronic world of library, is beginning to look a lot more like the brick and

mortar world of Library, were we serve our customers everyday. Gone are

the artificial system constructs that:

• Interrupt our service of patrons in favor or service to the system’s

preferred method lookup.

• We have to teach people, or worse yet, program around to give our

users the ability to use our systems without us in intuitive displays.



Nannette:

So let’s pause here a moment and pull out a couple important definitions

from this DREAM that we need to take with us into our essential, basic

considerations in a minute.

Identity

• It’s a condition of a thing, not a thing, but a condition of think, like a

current status or format of a resource.

• It’s not a label on a thing like a name. It’s inherently different than

what we have cataloged to date. And we may or may not be able to

get to it from what we’ve cataloged. And if we can, certainly not from

just one field. Ah yes, here’s the justification for that “clustering”

OCLC keeps talking about.



Nannette:

Identity Management

• It’s a service, that:

• Consists of many activities and tasks.

• Applies to not just People, but all the other Things which

enhance meaning in libraries and library service (e.g.,

Resources, Subjects, Rights, etc.). Hmmm, feels a lot like things

we just might be getting to essentials we need to define as part

of our essence.

• Addresses both the system’s needs and the humans needs

together in an integrated way (as the second bullet discusses),

without all that added cost and time we have now by:

• Making the human try to figure out that crazy machine

readable stuff without aid.

• Making the computer try to parse and make sense of the

“almost” human readable (not to mention human, error

laden compiled we’re doing “in service of the system”)

string stuff like — Think Access Control points, OpenURLs.



• Feeds that Context stuff Kathryn keeps talking about. Didn’t she say it had

something to do with Description? That is replaced Description?



Nannette:

Let’s look at that in a bit more detail — with our Google glasses on, while wearing our

Social Media jeans.

Description, and it’s parent workflow Cataloging.

Description, the act of filling in a bunch of nonconnected fields, in a “card” template,

often by hand, that take pre-supplied data from any number of sources. Sources like

those below and re-enter it.:

• The resource itself (e.g., printed on the title page).

• Invoices and other materials supplied as part of resource purchase.

• External system outputs, like Excel files from a distrubutor.

• And the list goes on . . .



Nannette:

Description, the act of re-entering, filling in these things, all this supplied data,

against or according to, a large number of detailed rules, and policies. Detailed rules

and policies that:

• Are designed to meet the specific requirements of your installed ILS, as you

have implemented it.

• Have to be consulted off-line or via a dizzying maze of interconnections that

require all systems to work just right at that that moment. And even when we

use these “automated tools,” we are still often required to consult an offline

reference or two to complete our work.

• Are organized against magic backbones you must go to school or be trained

to use. — Yeah I know I’m sounding like a bit of a heretic here, but honestly,

I am the technologist that spent 6 years studying the “next generation of

Cataloging — RDA" There’s a good number of reasons I’m not a cataloguer

and it’s not because I don’t like what cataloguers do. It’s not that I don’t love

metadata and all that geeky stuff. I do. It’s because I don’t like all of the

process and systems used to do it.

So when I put my Goggle glasses on, what does all of this Become?



Nannette:

I becomes, I think,

Collection

Going shopping, if you will, assembling things others have put out

there NOT recreating them by copying those things the metadata was

put out there on or accompanying.

AND, once we assemble them, we get to enrich them.

Enrichment

Addition, correction, fleshing out, connection, etc. of the assembled

things in a way that aids in the services we want to provide ourselves

and our users. NOT doing rote things per detailed processes that the

system requires and/or the collective says we must have.

Yep, with our Google glasses on, it becomes really simple. With the focus

removed from service of our systems, and changed to serving our users,

reductions of the amount of required work becomes almost a well duh! Heck,

as Kathryn pointed out Amazon and Walmart are doing it now, and I

guarantee you they aren’t doing Cataloging! It’s too expensive and hard to

attract enough people to do!



Nannette:

All of which, of course, allows us to do the vital work of Context

Management, once we put our Google glasses on — because after all, as

our users know, as we know when we aren’t blinded by our systems:

Context is everything!

It is the difference between, as this picture shows, a lovely romantic evening

and dumpster diving. Pizza’s, the thing’s, the same in either place, it just has

inherently different meaning to the human encountering based on where

they encounter it.

Image credits: http://adexchanger.com/comic-strip/adexchanger-context-matters/



Nannette:

So let’s pause here again and pull out a couple important definitions from

this DREAM that we need to take with us into our essential, basic

considerations in a minute.

Context

• It’s a relationship between things, inside or outside our collection,

that impacts meaning in our customers’, our patrons’, interactions

with our collections.

• It’s the things that tell the user if the pizza is treasure or trash.

• It’s part of the answers given by the librarian at the reference desk

who all too frequently does the job of filling in what our systems miss

or obfuscate for our users.

Look at that we’re back to “letting librarians be librarians again” and things

and service. I think this dream is really starting to help us see our essential

isnesses.



Nannette:

But before we jump to that, let’s pull out one more definition from this last

visionary experience.

Context Management

• It’s a service, that:

• Consists of many activities and tasks, like Identity Management.

• Applies to Things, again. Things which enhance meaning in

libraries and library service. Hmmm, the pattern of essence is

getting stronger.

• Addresses both the system’s needs and the humans needs

together in an integrated way, like Identity Management.

• Feeds Discovery, Lending, Collection — The services of Library!

This is both intuitively obvious for that brick and mortar side of

library and yet so different, so far removed from what we call

things like Discovery in our current systems, when we don’t have

our Goggle glasses on!



Nannette:

I’m starting to see now, why Kathryn and her team became so enamored of

this definitions process? It has a way of “pulling” the librarian and the library

out of the “tech gobbly gook/pile of words mire” and making it abundantly

clear what we need to do through our platforms.

Hard work and head butting required? Definitely! But I think, well worth it.

Yes?

And we’ve just started here. There is more here than we can cover in this

hour webinar. Take a look at your definition lists and consider things like

Rights Management. And how it fits in with Context and Identity

Management.

Certainly, we’ll go into all this in a bit more detail in both the next webinar

and our writings. But hopefully, this gives you a little glimpse of the

possibilities. And starts the conversation!



Nannette:

So let’s get down to the business of those essential definitions. Those things

that we need to first agree upon and then teach to our stakeholders, if we

are to, together, bridge the divide between the painful realities of our

systems of today AND the services of our dreams that we’ve been talking

about.



Nannette:

What are those few

• Essential, Isness Definitions?

• Those Shared, Interconnected expressions of who we are and what

we do that guide us and our extended team members?

Having work on definitions with librarians of all stripes for 10+ years now —

and definitions with other subject matter experts about the essences of their

disciplines for over 20 yrs — I see a pretty simple set:

• Library

• Things

• Technology

And it’s so convenient too, that this set gives us a simple clear, visual

pneumonic —

Library is the Foundation

Technology is the Connector

Things are The Top Level, what folks see first.



Very true to life, too. Which is a nice test on whether we got to the essentials!



Nannette:

So let’s start with Library, that foundation, and let’s go back to those guiding

questions Kathryn asked. Are Libraries:

• Collectors --- Navigating alongside our users?

OR

• Service providers — Offering a comprehensive set of knowledge

services against what we collect and beyond? Navigating alongside

users, and Enabling navigation in the way that that Google does?

OR — And here is where I will add one that as an experienced outside

observer I don’t hear talked about much, but which seems vital

• Researchers & Educators — Studying our discipline (MLIS)?

Teaching it to others (K12 Edu)?



Nannette:

I suggest, Library is all three. And I’ll give you a moment to read these

definitions, rather read them to you.

And as you are reading and questioning, remember:

• It is the Web-based, non-system trapped world that these definitions

need to live in.

• Value here, in this world, comes from variety that enables business

cases. It does not come from marching in lock step. It comes from

coordinated approaches that enable individual variations that allow

each library to service its community(s) to the best of its ability as

measured against its business case(s), as driven by its stated mission

and funders.

True, all of this is a bit different, in both approach and definition, than we

usually see. But think about it for a few minutes. Butt heads with yourself, if

you will. Is any of this untrue? Is there a good deal of fact in it —hard

essential truth?



Nannette:

Let’s keep asking that hard questions of yourself and notice the

commonalities.

• Contracted. Libraries are contracted.

• Funded with a Purpose. The purpose is to collect, to protect, to

warehouse, to distribute — Resources and the scholarly record, or

any other record for that matter that the funders value, as

mentioned in our previous session. Records like the Cultural Record

of a nation.

• For People. Members of the funding community and/or their

designees.

Do these provide the appropriate level connectedness while allowing that

required level of variation?

Does it provide a good foundation from which to define the People of

Library?

Let’s check.



Nannette:

Given that definition of Library, what is a Librarian? And I’ll give you again a minute to

read.

It this different that we think of it? Perhaps, MLIS isn’t mentioned. But then, butt heads

with that for a minute. Is MLIS actually an essential part of librarianship in the Library

today? Is it Helpful yes. Do we need some of them, yes. Is everyone one, No.

To me it’s kind of like Pharmacy. Where I have 1 Pharmacist per shift and that Pharmacist

has so many Pharmacy Techs underneath them. And together, they provide a wonderful

consultative service.

And this definition, it feels like it’s a very a nice match to those dreams. Identity and

Identity Management, as we talked about before.

It feels like it is more than just Names. It feels like a good thing. Especially when thinking

about that ROI, as it’s a foundation to make people, be that staff users, patrons, authors,

editors, those people we track on our systems. the same thing.

Wow! That’s:

• Different that the complication we have now in ILSes, even Next Gen ones.

• Pretty web-like come to think of it.

Hmm . . . An essence upon which to begin building new levels visibility and vitality in a



web world? If I read the tea leaves right, some important people in Library (e.g.,

OCLC and LD4L) seem to think so too.



Nannette:

So what about those others we need? Those others who impact our

business and/or our service creation and provision? What about the:

• Library Technologists. The Library technologists, the non-librarians I

talked about last week, that are essential to our future success?

• Those People We Serve: Patrons. Willing and able members of our

funders’ audience.

And let’s note that we still need, together to do a few more, to complete the

Library set, including:

• Library Funders.

• Library Business.

• Library Service.

If we are to have a complete foundation of library to share with our

stakeholders and the other members of our team. Again, I hope in throwing

these out starts the conversation.



Nannette:

With the foundation, Library, in place then, acknowledging that we still have some

extensions, some completions to do. lLt’s take a few minutes of the time we have left

to look at top level, what folks see --- The Things.

The Things we are as Libraries, Librarians, and others on the Library team are, by

definition, contracted to:

• Collect,

• Protect,

• Warehouse,

• Distribute,

• Provide Access to, and

• Serve.

And yes, I combined People and Resources. And let’s acknowledge, talking about it

this way, feels at first, a bit silly, artificial, and Dr. Seuss-like. But let’s also

acknowledge that we do live in the age of the Internet of Things AND we are

assembled for the purpose of finding visibility and viability for Library in a web-based

(i.e., an Internet) world. So despite how silly and/or childlike we feel, we cannot ignore



the Things. For if we do, we risk creating, yet another round of systems and services,

designed for a world that we no longer live in. Which, as we know, won’t bring us

either visibility or viability.



Nannette:

So let’s look at the truth in this THING analogy for a moment:

• Like Thing 1 and Thing 2, even expanded to many, many things. All

the Things:

• We are contracted to do, all those activities, and

• All those things, those People and Resources we are

contracted to do them with and for,

Can be defined by same granules and in same way, at their basest level.

They do indeed, look very much alike on the outside.

Though as we know, they, like the people who wear a t-shirt are on the

inside, by meaning, very different.

Ah there’s that Context thing again! Not to mention a hint at the Technology

part.



Nannette:

So let’s repeat the process we’ve been using today. Let’s take a look at a proposed

definition of Things.

Certainly, there is a lot more than we can go into here, in the short time we have left. I

just want to:

• Introduce this idea. This way of looking at it. And allow you to butt your head

against it for awhile

• Point out a few things for you to go away and think about. For example, look at all

the related words. Of those blue words:

• How many of these words do you use every day? How many do you use the

same as the other librarians you interact with? Are you hearing from

technologists that they don’t think you are all using them the same way? Or

that they don’t understand what you mean? Can you point these people to a

definition?

• How many of those problematic, those underlined blue worlds are

inadequately defined. How many are unintelligibly (meaning you have know

the “secret” language of Library to understand — I think there’s more than a

few in RDA alone). How many of them are irregularly, across the different

standards we use, defined? Or even worse, how many are undefined in our

standards and our data? And as that person who worked on RDA, I can you

that on release, in 2010, over 50% of the words we used in our data were

undefined upon release.

• The link means we’ve though this and feel some head butting needs to



occur. Take a look at our draft definitions, we’re proposing a starting

point for conversation. Please come back to us with the conversation.



Nannette:

And speaking of a starting point for conversation, let’s take just a minute to

consider the connector, Technology, in what we hope is plain English.

Let’s talk about three key technologies, everyone is bandying about today,

assuming everyone knows what they mean and understands what they are

saying:

• Linked Data

• Structured Data

• Federated Infrastructure



Nannette:

Linked Data, what is it?

It’s just a format for distributing relationships between things, as structured

data (oops, there’s a definition we have to get to and we will, as the blue

underline indicates). Really, it’s just a vehicle for moving that Context we

keep talking about around.

What I like better, and the first time I’ve see it, is #2. OCLC’s connection of

the technology to the business case for it. It’s what we really care about, the

connection, not the specifics of the technology itself (didn’t we dream about

that being just a hidden, underneath layer support us?).

To this way of thinking, it’s a method of publishing structured data (yeah,

we’ll get there, as the blue line indicates) that can be easily understood by

computers, …. (see above).

Ah, OCLC’s wearing both their Google glasses and their social media jeans.



Nannette:

Now what about that word, Structured Data?

Well, as a technologist, I can tell you, structured data is not really all that

hard. It’s just a standard machine-readable way to mark up content and

meta data. And yes, I did say content and meta data; both can be, both

should be structured data.

• A minimum, they should both be well formed. And what does well

formed mean? It means constructed according to basic, know syntax

rules. Can we say that about our MARC data? I don’t think so.

• At best, it means being

• Valid against a specific version of the format’s serialization (i.e., it’s

computer-code thing that allows you to validate statement syntax).

• Adherent to documented standards and defined models.

Right, the human and the machine, they both have to understand it, in

a way that connects to knowledge. That’s what the model is all about.



Nannette:

So let’s end then, with Federated Infrastructure. Which, to my way of things,

is a great place to end, as it jumps/leads right into final webinar in this series,

use cases.

What is a federated infrastructure? It’s:

• An architecture that allows interoperability and sharing between semi-

autonomous de-centrally organized businesses, systems, and

applications. Hmmm, according to our earlier conversation, that’s

Libraries.

• Coordinated, controlled sharing and exchange of information. Hmm…

in library, it’s the thing that we need to accomplish all of those dreams.

And as OCLC points out, the thing that we need to steward all those

records.

• The national digital platform for libraries.

But it’s also something simple that comes from Publshing, from those

creators and owners of the resources with whom we must cooperate to

steward both those records and our collections. It’s that technical backbone

that we’re putting out there, as PraXis by IMT. And as I said, we’ll go into this

with more detail in use cases in the next session.



So Kathryn, with that, back to you.



Kathryn:

Thanks, Nannette. One thing that I know both of us want to re-enforce is the

important of dialog in this process. It’s tremendously important to moving

forward.

I know that we’ve just spent close to an hour, sort of “fire hosing.” We like to

joke that Nannette can be a little bit of a fire hose, sometimes. And I think we

probably both fire hosed you this afternoon. BUT we want to make sure that

we have dialog. That you take time to think about what we’re proposing here

and to engage with us, to engage with one another, to make these

definitions as robust and comprehensive as they need to be.

This really is a community effort, despite the fact that the voices that you’ve

heard today are mine and Nannette’s.

As we wrap up today, I’d like to invite you to the final session in the

Orienteering for Libraries and Librarians series, Taking a Practice Trip:

Three Problems, Three Solutions. In this session, we’ll be focusing on some

real-world use cases and introducing working software — PraXis by IMT —

that addresses the challenges in each. After two sessions of talking the talk,

we’ll walk the walk with demonstrations and discussion.



Registration for the Tuesday, November 24 session is open on the IMT Web site,

under News and Events.



Kathryn:



Kathryn:

On behalf of Nannette, Cathy, and I, I’d like to thank you for taking time from

your schedule today to participate in this session. Again, the recording and

presentation materials will be available later this week via the Resources

menu on the IMT Web site, and we’d love to have comments and

conversation on the Leap Forward blog.

And so, until the 24th, I wish you visibility and viability for your library.

