what's goin' on?

Diane I. Hillmann

Metadata Management Associates LLC

Presentation at the University of Hawaii

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

After we empty the

card catalog …

We hear that there’s a crisis in libraries, but we still haven’t

realized how pervasive it is

Reality: we’ve gotten rid of the cards, now we need to get rid of

the catalog.

If we don’t, we may lose our institutional support, our mission,

and our way …

Linked Open Data, Hawaii (Dec. 2014) 2


“As librarians, we pride ourselves on operating outside of the

commercial marketplace. However, whether we like it or not, we

are working in an information environment the dynamics of which

are very much like those of a free market, except the the currency

spent by our “customers” is not money, but time and attention. …

We may believe, for example, that our carefully-crafted catalog

records provide excellent value in return for the time and energy

required to use them—and we may be right. But if our patrons

doubt that the catalog will return good value in exchange for the

time and energy required to use it, then whatever value the catalog

may actually contain becomes irrelevant.”

Rick Anderson, The Crisis in Research Librarianship,

Journal of Academic Librarianship, July 2011


“We must look with cold and hard-headed rationality at our

current practices and ask ourselves not what value they offer,

but rather what value our patrons believe they offer. If what we

offer our patrons is not perceived as valuable by them, then we

have two choices: change their minds, or redirect our resources.

The former is virtually impossible; the latter is enormously

painful. But the latter is possible, and if we do not undertake

such a redirection ourselves, it will almost certainly be

undertaken for us.”




“Wikipedia is founded on the belief (largely correct, as it

turns out) that crowds both can and will provide high-

quality content and metadata to the world at no charge.

For our part, in research libraries we still tend to treat

books as if they are primarily tools for linear reading, and

metadata records as artisanal products. We still build

collections that are fenced off from the larger information

world and encourage our patrons, against all reason, to

begin their information searches within the confines of

our artificially limited collections.”




“In the big picture, very little will change: libraries

will need to be in the data business to help people

find things. In the close-up view, everything is

changing-- the materials and players are different,

the machines are different, and the technologies

can do things that were hard to imagine even 20

years ago.”

Eric Hellman

http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2011/07/library-data-why-bother.html

http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2011/07/library-data-why-bother.html

“Today, we face another significant time of change that is

being prompted by today’s library user. This user no

longer visits the physical library as his primary source of

information, but seeks and creates information while

connected to the global computer network. The change

that libraries will need to make in response must include

the transformation of the library’s public catalog from a

stand-alone database of bibliographic records to a highly

hyperlinked data set that can interact with information

resources on the World Wide Web. The library data can

then be integrated into the virtual working spaces of the

users served by the library.”

--Karen Coyle, Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata, Jan. 2010



If all of this sounds otherworldly and vague, it is

because there is no specific vision of where these

changes will lead us. The crystal ball is unfortunately

shortsighted, in no small part because this is a time of

rapid change in many aspects of the information

ecology. The few things that are certain, however,

point to the Web, and its eventual successors, as the

place to be. For libraries, this means yet another

evolutionary step in the library of our catalog: from

metadata to metaDATA.”

--Karen Coyle, Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and

Metadata, Jan. 2010

Questionable Assumptions? We’re going to continue to build records for library catalogs

We’ve always shared ‘records’ in cataloging, and that’s still

the right way to share data

The choice of the ‘right metadata format’ (e.g., DC, MODS,

RDA, etc.) is critically important

The proliferation of metadata formats is a bad thing

The ‘old’ way of cataloging materials one-at-a-time always

produces better quality data than any other method


Questioning Our

Data Models

Today’s metadata is not about choices of formats, it’s

about ensuring interoperability and

harmonization for our data in the world

Our old model is based on catalog cards, regardless of the methods of storage and delivery through our online

catalogs

The new metadata environment provides better

ways to express relationships—both content to content and concept to

concept


Model of ‘the World’ /XML

XML assumes a 'closed' world (domain),

usually defined by a schema:

"We know all of the data describing this

resource. The single description must be a

valid document according to our schema.

The data must be valid.”

XML's document model provides a

neat equivalence to a metadata

'record’


Model of ‘the World’ /RDF RDF assumes an 'open' world:

"There's an infinite amount of unknown data describing this resource yet to be discovered. It will come from an infinite number of providers. There will be an infinite number of descriptions. Those descriptions must be consistent."

RDF's statement-oriented data model has no notion of 'record’ (rather, statements can be aggregated for a fuller description of a resource)


RDF? Huh? The current Web is primarily a Web of DOCUMENTS, where

URLs embedded in documents link to other documents. The

Semantic Web is a Web of DATA that exists outside of

documents, and focuses on meaning or semantics

RDF is a general-purpose frame work that provides

structured, machine-understandable metadata for the Web

RDF Schemas (RDFS) describe the meaning of each

property name, Web Ontology Language (OWL) is also used

Metadata vocabularies can be developed without central

coordination


Semantic Web Building Blocks Each component of an RDF statement (triple) is a

“resource”

RDF is about making machine-processable

statements, requiring

A machine-processable language for representing RDF

statements

A system of machine-processable identifiers for

resources (subjects, predicates, objects)

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)

For full machine-processing potential, an RDF statement

is a set of three URIs


Austen, Jane

Bath, UK

Pride and

prejudice

“1813”

Subject Predicate Object

is author of

has place of residence, etc.has date of publication

[Object]

[Subject]

[Object]

[Subject]


http://lccn.loc.

gov/n79032879

http://sws.geona

mes.org/2656173/

http://worldcat.

org/entity/work/

id/3535

“1813”


http://rdaregi

stry.info/Ele

ments/a/P501

95

http://rdaregistry.info/Elements/a/P50109

http://rdaregistry.info/Elements/m/P30011

[Object]

[Subject]

[Object]

[Subject]


What is

Linked Open

Data?”… a term used to

describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting

pieces of data, information, and

knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs

and RDF."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

Five Linked Data Make your stuff available on the Web (whatever format)

under an open license

Make it available as structured data (e.g. Excel instead of an

image scan of a table)

Use non-proprietary formats (e.g. CSV instead of Excel)

Use URIs to denote things, so that people can point at your

stuff

Link your data to other data to provide context


Linked Data is Inherently

Chaotic

Requires creating and aggregating data in a broader context

There is no one ‘correct’ record to be made from this data, no

objective ‘truth’

This approach is different from the cataloging tradition

BUT, the focus on vocabularies is familiar

Linked data relies on the RDF model (although XML can be

used to express RDF, it’s not always a happy marriage)

The bottom-up chaos and uncertainty of the linked data

world is possibly the hardest thing for catalogers to get their

heads around

19Linked Open Data, Hawaii (Dec. 2014)

Delving

Deeper Into

DataWhere do we find sources of data

that might be useful to us in the

short and long term?

How do we assess this data for

quality and stability?

Are we sure this data will work

better for us than what we use

now?


http://lccn.loc.

gov/n79032879

http://sws.geona

mes.org/2656173/

http://worldcat.

org/entity/work/

id/3535

“1813”


http://rdaregi

stry.info/Ele

ments/a/P501

95

http://rdaregistry.info/Elements/a/P50109

http://rdaregistry.info/Elements/m/P30011

[Object]

[Subject]

[Object]

[Subject]


Where do the Identifiers come

from?

LC NAF (Jane Austen)

RDA Registry (isAuthorOf)

Worldcat (Work identifier)

Bath, UK (Geonames)

Date is a ‘literal’, with no identifier (but could be ‘typed’)


Jane Austen identifier

information from VIAF

“Pride and prejudice”

work identifier

Note that the ‘person’ portion is embedded from the VIAF files,

But the record is about “Pride and prejudice” and the display is created

by OCLC.


[Schema.org example for person]


RDA Registry For Property Details


Map of Bath from Geonames


Alternative

names

Place

identifier in

Geonames

Latitude &

longitudeGeonames Map Key


New Data Management? Managing data at the statement level rather than record

level

Emphasis on evaluation coming in and provenance going out

Shift in human effort from creating standard cataloging records to knowledgeable human intervention in machine-based processes

Extensive use of data created outside libraries

Intelligent re-use of our legacy data and redistribution of our data more widely


Big Challenges/Big Ideas Records are still important but not as we’ve used them in the

past

We might want to think about records as the instantiation of a point of view [News: traditional library data has a point of view]

In this world, records are ‘packages’ for pickup and delivery

MARC required consensus because of limitations built into the technology

For any data in statements destined for the Semantic Web, we need provenance, so we know “Who sez?”

Being able to assign quality and trust markers for statements based on who, what, when is critical


Mapping Our

Way Around

-There’s not just one way to

align bibliographic data: we

don’t have to agree on one

‘authoritative’ mapping

-‘Crosswalking’ strategies,

aimed at use by particular

applications, see that

activity as primarily

accomplished by networks

-Crosswalks only recognize

one relationship: sameAs—

a very blunt instrument!


bibo:numPagesbibo:numVolumes

rdam:extent

isbd:”has extent”

dct:extent

rdam:extentOfText

dct:format

rdau:extent

rdau:extentOfText

dc:format

rdau:duration

rdae:duration

m21:M306__a

m21:M300

unim:U127__a

unim:U215__a

What We Mean by ‘Mapping’


Linked Data Cloud, April 2014


Will This Shift Cost Too Much?

We need to support efforts to invest in more distributed innovation and focused collaboration

It’s the human effort that costs us

Cost of traditional cataloging is far too high, for increasingly dubious value

Our current investments have reached the end of their usefulness

All the possible efficiencies for traditional cataloging have already been accomplished

Waiting for leadership from the big players costs valuable time with no guarantees of results


How Does Quality Happen? Lessons from the library community

Quality is quantifiable and measurable

To be effective, enforcement of standards of quality must take place at the community level

Looking more broadly:

Data problems are not unique to particular communities

General strategies can improve interoperability

Quality is not tied to any particular creation strategy

Human created metadata can be extremely variable

Machine-created metadata is far more consistent, but that consistency may not be correct


The Bottom Line Our big investment is (and has always been) in our data, not

our systems

Over many changes in format of materials, we’ve always

struggled to keep our focus on the data content that

endures, regardless of structure or presentation format

We are in a great position to have influence on how the

future develops, but we can’t be afraid to change, or afraid

to fail


Additional Resources Introducing Linked Data and The Semantic Web

(http://www.linkeddatatools.com/semantic-web-basics)

Free Your Metadata (http://freeyourmetadata.org/)

Linked Open Data Laundromat (http://lodlaundromat.org)

Van Hooland, Seth and Ruben Verborgh. Linked data for

libraries, archives and museums : how to clean link and

publish your metadata. Chicago : Neal-Schuman, 2014


http://www.linkeddatatools.com/semantic-web-basics

http://freeyourmetadata.org/

http://lodlaundromat.org

Contact Information

Diane Hillmann

[email protected]

Links:

http://RDARegistry.info

http://marc21rdf.info

http://managemetadata.com/blog/

The First MetadataMobile

mailto:[email protected]

http://RDARegistry.info

http://marc21rdf.info

http://managemetadata.com/blog/

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