© Lukas Koster

Recently I have been experimenting a bit with reading newspapers on my mobile phone (a G1 android device), or maybe I should say “reading news on my mobile”. I looked at two Dutch newspapers that adopt two completely different approaches.

“NRC Handelsblad” publishes it’s daily print newspaper as a daily “e-paper” in PDF, Mobi and ePub format, to be downloaded every day to the platform of your choice. In order to read the e-paper you need a physical device plus software (mobile phone, PC, e-reader, etc.) that can handle one of the available formats. On my G1 I use the Aldiko e-reader app for android with the ePub format. The e-paper is treated as an e-book file, with touch screen operation for browsing tables of content, paging through chapters or articles, zooming, etc. Access to the e-paper files is on a subscription basis.

“Het Parool” on the other hand offers a free app to be downloaded from the Android Market that serves as a front end to all recent articles available from their news server on the web. There is no need for a daily download of a file in a specific format that has to be supported by the physical platform of your choice. There is also an iPhone app. The app and access to the news articles are free of charge.

© Lukas Koster

Besides the difference in access (free vs paid), the most important contrast between these two mobile newspapers is the form in which the printed news is transformed to the digital and mobile environment. “NRC Handelsblad” takes the physical form the newspaper has had since it’s origin in the 17the century, dictated by physical, logistical and economical conditions, and transforms this 1 to 1 to the digital world: the e-paper still is one big monolithic bundle of articles that can’t be retrieved individually, completely ignoring the fact that the centuries old limitations don’t apply anymore. It is basically exactly the same as most manifestations of e-books.

“Het Parool” does completely the opposite. It treats individual news articles as units of content in their own right, “stories” as I call them in my post “Is an e-book a book?“. And this is how it should be in the digital mobile world. This is similar to the way that e-journals offer direct access to individual articles already.
Readers should be able to apply their own selection of “stories” to read in a specific, virtual, on the fly bundle, using the front end of their choice.
However, the “Parool” app functions as a predefined filter: it presents the reader with the most recent (24 hour max) articles from it’s own source of news. Of course this is fine as long as the readers choose to use the “Parool” app, but they may also choose to read news stories from different sources. This could be achieved with a different mobile, PC or web application that gathers content from a variety of sources.

Another drawback of the ‘Parool” implementation is that it does not offer a “save” option. There is no way to read old articles, other than to go to the official newspaper website, either through mobile browsing or by using a PC web browser. The “NRC Handelsblad” implementation on the other hand does offer this option, because it is based on a download model to begin with.

This brings me to the matter of mobile web browsing. Reading and navigating a web page designed for the PC screen on a mobile device is annoying at least, not to mention the time it takes to load complete web pages into the mobile browser. Common practice is to create a simplified version of full fledged web pages for mobile use only. Of course this means doubling the website maintenance effort.
An alternative could be the adoption of HTML 5 and CSS 3, as was stated at a Top Tech Trends Panel session at ALA Midwinter 2010, where a university library official said: “2010 is the year that the app dies“, because “developers can leverage a single well-designed service to serve both browser-based and mobile users“. But this view completely misses the point: “Apps are not about technology, they are about a business model” as Owen Stephens pointed out. This business model implies the separation of content and presentation in a much broader sense then that of database back end – website front end only. This was an innovative concept until a couple of years ago.

As I briefly described above, we need units of content being accessible by all kinds of platforms and applications through universal APIs. This model not only applies to reading texts, but also to finding these texts. Especially libraries should be aware of that.

Although the ALA Top Trends Panel stated that libraries’ focus should be on content rather than hardware, they did not touch upon the changing concept of what books are in the e-book era, as again Owen Stephens pointed out. New models and formats will have all kinds of consequences for the way we handle information. For instance: pages. A PDF file, which is a 1 to 1 translation of the print unit to a digital unit, as I explained, still has fixed pages and page numbers. An ePub file however has a flexible format that allows “pages” to be automatically adapted to the size of the device’s screen (thanks to @rsnijders and @Wowter for discussing this). There are no fixed pages or page numbers anymore. HTML pages containing full articles don’t have page numbers either, by the way. This will change the way we refer to texts online, without page numbers, which is one of the subject of the Telstar project, again with Owen Stephens involved (watch that guy).

The flexible page is another reason to have a critical look at MARC. There is no use anymore for tags like 300,a “Extent (Number of physical pages, etc.)”, 773,g (“Vol. 2, no. 2 (Feb. 1976), p. 195-230“).

The inevitable conclusion of all this is that all innovative developments on the end user interface presentation front end need to be supported by corresponding developments on the content back end, and vice versa.

Teylers museum library © Dymphie

On Sunday December 27, 2009 I was in the opportunity to visit the, otherwise closed, library of The Netherlands’ oldest museum Teylers museum in my home town Haarlem, together with a small group of Dutch library twitter people. We were very kindly shown around by librarian Marijn van Hoorn, who explained to us the library’s history and collection.

Now I’m not going to say something about the pleasant real life consequences of getting to know people in the virtual world (that has been done by @PeterMEvers already, in Dutch), or about the guided tour (already described very well by @underdutchskies in English and by @festinaatje and @ecobibl in Dutch). Also, none of the photos I made with my G1 phone are presentable; but you can have a look at the photos made by @Dymphie, @underdutchskies and @wbk500).

Instead, I will try to make a comparison between the old library’s course of life and the developments that modern libraries are going through, because I see some parallels there.

The museum was built in 1784 with money from the legacy of the wealthy banker and merchant Pieter Teyler van der Hulst, to preserve his collections and advance the arts and sciences. The museum’s library was established in 1826 to house a separate collection of books and journals in the field of natural history (botany, zoology, paleontology and geology).

One of the objectives for the library was to have a complete collection of all journals in the area of natural history. In the beginning the library was only accessible by invitation, and the honoured guests were welcomed and assisted by the “caretaker” or “landlord” of the museum.
By the middle of the 19th century the library opened up to a more general public, that is to say teaching and research staff members of the emerging universities.
But from 1870 the importance of the Teylers library for university staff declined drastically, because the universities in The Netherlands started to organise academic libraries of their own. So the library closed its doors for regular visitors. The collection continued to be maintained and expanded until 1987, when it was no longer realistic to pursue completeness.
During the 1970’s the privately funded museum and library faced the threat of closing down because of the cost of preserving the historical buildings and collections. In the written library catalog (created over time by a large number of volunteers and employees) all items were annotated with an estimated value in case of forced sale of the collection.

Teylers library catalog © Dymphie

Fortunately the Dutch state decided to subsidise the historically and culturally valuable museum, and now Teylers is a very popular place, with a new wing with a large hall for temporary exhibitions, an educational section and a cafe.
The museum library is only open for visitors on request and on special occasions. The collection is not expanded anymore, but it is a very complete and valuable historical natural history collection, which is, among other things, used to organise temporary thematic exhibitions in the museum. Besides the natural history items there are also old maps and atlases and travel journals, like the James Cook journals by Sydney Parkinson that @jaapvandegeer drew my attention to.
The museum and the library are also looking to the future. Both museum objects and library items are being digitised, there is a European project for creating a website on ornithology that uses the library’s birds images, there is a new thematic website that combines documents, images, metadata from the museum, the library and external sources, the library catalog has been migrated to an Adlib system, and there is a Ning social network.

So, what are the parallels with modern libraries? First of all, it is clear that the influence of external developments on libraries is not something that is limited to the modern digital web age of Google. Just like Teylers library, modern public, academic and special libraries were at first targeted at a limited, well defined audience, and only accessible on location on specific times, after which their target audience and accessibility widened substantially. Catalogs and varying parts of the collection are available online to a global audience.
The external influence from competing university libraries is currently mirrored by the world wide web itself, with Google as one of the main external threats. I have written about this in my post “No future for libraries?“.
The two important issues here are: the effects on modern library collections and audience. Teylers library decided to stop building its own collection, but they keep using it in a number of ways: temporary physical thematic exhibitions, but also in new digital “mashed up” ways. This might be a good example for modern libraries to follow: make use of modern technologies to reuse existing collections to create virtual online thematic aggregations of data, texts, images, etc. See also my post “Collection 2.0“.
As for modern libraries’ response to changing audiences: proceeding with new ways of using their collections will draw new customers anyway. But it is equally important to find other ways to “go where your users are”, like being on social networks like the Teylers Ning site. One of the most important moves in the near future will be mobile presence.

Teylers library shows us that there may be a new life for old libraries.

Book scroll © Henk-Jan van der Klis

2009 is the year of the e-book, or perhaps better: of the e-book reader. This is an important distinction that I will explain below. E-books are becoming more popular because of the increasing availability of various cheap e-book readers.
But what is an e-book? Is it the same as a book? Some people say yes, some people say no. This question shouldn’t be so hard to answer, should it? We just have to define what a book is first. So, what is a book?

When people think of a book, they picture something like the archetypal book: printed, medium sized, hardcover, no illustrations on the front. The thing that you can actually hold in your hands and read.
But if they say: “This book was written by that author”, they don’t think that the author actually wrote that particular item they are holding in their hands. Now we already have two different meanings of the concept “book”: one is a tangible object, the other is the content that is made available in this tangible object by means of printed text.

Besides these conceptual levels, there are more ways by which books can be described, as shown by this incomplete list of examples:

Physical form: Historically there have been clay tablets, inscribed stones, handwritten scrolls, handwritten bound pages, printed pages. We also know different formats targeted at specific uses or audiences: audio books, braille books, pop up books.

Popup book © doegox

Content: A book can contain text only, or images only (for instance a children’s picture book, or a book of photographs), or a combination of both.

Units: A book can consist of one “story” ( for instance a novel), optionally subdivided in chapters, or be made up of several stories, or articles (like a text book about a certain subject). Chapters and stories can be written by the same or by several authors. A book can also contain two or more other books by the same author (“collected works”), etc.

Content type: A book can contain fiction, aimed at entertaining readers. Books can be purely administrative, like accounting books. There are religious books to be used in religious ceremonies (sometimes these are referred to as “THE book“). Some books are for studying and learning (“text books”, which may also contain images by the way). There are scientific books and instructional books (travel guides, cook books, manuals).

First, we need see how all this fits together before we can answer the question “Is an e-book a book?” or more precise: “In which sense is an e-book a book?“. Fortunately there is already a conceptual model for bibliographic entities and the relationships between them that describes this: FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), published by IFLA. The IFLA Final Report (2009 version) says it all, but there are also a couple of short summaries: Barbara Tillet’s (LoC) “What is FRBR?”, Jenn Riley’s “FRBR” blog post, and there is William Denton’s FRBR Blog for more information.
The FRBR model is targeted at libraries, maybe even at publishers and booksellers too.

I will not go into the FRBR “Group 2” (persons and corporate bodies) and “Group 3” (subjects) entities here, but focus on the “Group 1” entities.

The FRBR “Group 1 entities” consist of Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item (also referred to as WEMI). FRBR entities not only apply to books or textual works, but also to movies, theater plays, music, etc.

• Work - a distinct intellectual or artistic creation
• Expression - the intellectual or artistic realization of a work
• Manifestation - the physical embodiment of an expression of a work
• Item - a single exemplar (or copy) of a manifestation

FRBR Model © Library of Congress/Barbara Tillett

• A work (for instance a book) can have (“is realized through“) one or more expressions (for instance the original English text and the Dutch translation).
• Each expression can have (“is embodied in“) one or more manifestations (for instance a specific edition with an ISBN, or one of more works/expressions in a “collected works” edition).
• Each manifestation has (“is exemplified by“) one or more items, the things you can actually hold in your hands.
• A manifestation can also consist of several expressions, as in the “collected works” example.

Besides these hierarchical relationships between different entity types there are also recursive relationships between entities of the same type: hierarchical and other. Some examples:

• A work is part of another work (hierarchical), as in a series like Harry Potter
• A work is an adaptation of another work
• An expression is a sequel to another expression
• A manifestation is a facsimile of another manifestation

So far so good. The FRBR conceptual model describes (or aims to describe) real world things and relationships on an abstract level. The model can be implemented in actual systems (both computerised and manual!). In these systems you are free to refer to the conceptual model entities (“work”, “expression”, “manifestation”, “item”) by names that are actually used in daily life. This is what Rob Styles is trying to do when he talks about “stories” and “editions” in his recent blog post “Bringing FRBR Down to Earth…” I think. I will define the “story” concept in a  different way below.

Until now, catalogers and library systems have been targeted at describing the thing they have in their hands (or better the items that make up the library’s collection).  In FRBR terms this means that catalogs describe manifestations and items, not works and expressions (or implicitly at best). In short, a bottom up approach. This is understandable, because in the past there was nothing else to go by than the explicit manifestation information available on the physical item (author, title, ISBN, edition, publisher, etc.) .
Of course, MARC21 provides some options to describe relationships with expressions and works and other manifestations, like the 250 – Edition Statement, the 490 – Series Statement and the 76X-78X – Linking Entries-General Information. But these fields can only be used if the information is known to the cataloger.
Also, in traditional catalogs, works that are distinct expressions in one manifestation (like articles, chapters, stories, poems) are not described separately, because of the same reason: you only catalog the item you have before you. In the ideal world, or better in the new digital world, the unit to be cataloged or described should always be the work, which we may call “story”. In other words: we should catalog units of content (“stories”) instead of, or supplementary to, physical items.
Current library practice is that we catalog books and journals in the catalog and offer article descriptions through subscribed article metadata databases separately.

So, back to the e-book. Where does that fit in? An e-book could be considered nothing more than a manifestation and/or an item belonging to a certain work/expression, because an e-book can be everything a printed book is. As such it is equivalent to a braille or audio book. Some libraries treat e-books as something different, as works/expressions as such. They catalog e-books separately, just like all other items/manifestations are treated as separate works. There are even separate e-book overviews.

E-book reader © alfi

But there is more to it than that. The big difference with books until now is that an e-book is not inseparably linked to the physical carrier. A printed book can only be read if the reader has a physical copy (a FRBR item) consisting of bound paper pages containing the text printed on them with ink. The same applies to handwritten texts, scrolls, clay tablets, etc.
Even more so, the physical form, together with economical conditions and possibilities for distribution, often determines the actual manifestation of a book and a journal. A book (or volume) can only contain a certain number of pages in order to be manageable. There is also a cost consideration in the size and distribution of the items.

What we call an e-book is actually only a digital, abstract manifestation of a work/expression. In order to be able to read it you have to download it in a specific format (PDF, epub, etc.) onto a physical carrier (USB-stick, computer disk, etc.), and then you need a physical reading device with dedicated software (dedicated e-book readers like Kindle, a computer, a mobile phone, etc.).
Libraries do not have e-books as items, only as manifestations. These e-book manifestations can be available on an online server somewhere in whatever form, and can be made into an item on-the-fly, using a specific format on-the-fly, choosing a physical carrier on-the-fly. What’s more, the content of e-books can also be selected out of several works/expressions on-the-fly, this way creating manifestations or even expressions on demand.

Now, is the FRBR conceptual model suited for describing e-books? If we treat e-books as manifestations without items (like we handle e-journals in our catalogs), how do we proceed? The FRBR Manifestation item among others has these attributes:

• form of carrier
• extent of the carrier
• physical medium
• system requirements (electronic resource)
• file characteristics (electronic resource)
• mode of access (remote access electronic resource)
• access address (remote access electronic resource)

But we have just seen that in the case of e-books these are features of the items generated on-the-fly, which are not known before. Does this mean that we have to describe as manifestations all possible physical forms that one e-book can take? This would also mean that an e-book as such should be described on the level of a FRBR Expression. This may be correct in some cases (the creation of aggregated content on-the-fly), but not in all: where an e-book is similar to manifestations like braille, audio book, etc.

Does FRBR need an extra level? I am not sure. Let’s look briefly at how e-journals are handled. As far as I can see, journal and e-journal issues are described as separate manifestations of journals and e-journals (with a “part-of” relationship to the higher level). These issue manifestations are treated as aggregates that contain articles, that are also described as manifestations with a “part-of” relationship to the issue. In MARC21 this handled by the 773 Host Item Entry tag.
I am not sure if and how different physical formats (PDF, HTML) for articles in e-journals are handled. The obvious difference with e-books is that the described unit is the article (or “story” as definition of unit of content), which can be downloaded as separate items. The e-journal articles are ideally also identified by unique identifiers (DOI’s).

What does this mean for e-books? I think we can treat an e-book as either an expression or a manifestation, depending on the nature of the specific e-book in question. For the e-book manifestation we would only need to register the mode of acces, access address and manifestation identifier attributes, preferably in the form of a URI.
I also think we should use the possibilities of the FRBR model to start describing, cataloging and identifying the “stories” (chapters, articles, etc.) that make up books and e-books separately, as units of content in their own right. People are interested in the content, the “stories”, not the physical items or artificial digital aggregate units like e-books or e-journals.
In this sense, the “e-journal” is an archaic concept, where the limitations of the physical journal are translated as such to the digital world. There is no real need to bundle articles in electronic form into one electronic issue of an e-journal that is published at regular intervals in time. Electronic articles can be published individually immediately after peer review and approval. Published articles can be aggregated in one nor more virtual online serials.

Like ISBN’s and ISSN’s we need an identifier for the units of content other than journal articles. As a matter of fact, there already is one, the DOI:
“A DOI name can be used to identify any resource involved in an intellectual property transaction. Intellectual property includes both physical and digital manifestations, performances and abstract works. An entity can be identified at any arbitrary level of granularity.” (see http://www.doi.org/faq.html#2). Thanks to Owen Stephens for pointing this out to me in a twitter discussion with Inga Overkamp.

I may be wrong about all this. I am open for comments and suggestions.

The other day I gave a presentation for the Assembly of members of the local Amsterdam Libraries Association “Adamnet“, about the Amsterdam Digital Library search portal that we host at the Library of the University of Amsterdam. This portal is built with our MetaLib metasearch tool and offers simultaneous access to, at the moment, 20 local library catalogues.

A large part of this presentation was dedicated to all possible (and very real) technical bottlenecks of this set-up, with the objective of improving coordination and communication between the remote system administrators at the participating libraries and the central portal administration. All MetaLib database connectors/configurations are “home-made”, and the portal highly depends on the availability of the remote cataloging systems.

I took the opportunity to explain to my audience also the “issues” inherent in the concept of metasearch (or “federated search“, “distributed search“, etc.), and compare that to the harvesting & indexing scenario.

Because it was not the first (nor last) time that I had to explain the peculiarities of metasearch, I decided to take the Metasearch vs. Harvesting & Indexing part of the presentation and extend it to a dedicated slideshow. You can see it here, and you are free to use it. Examples/screenshots are taken from our MetaLib Amsterdam Digital Library portal. But everything said applies to other metasearch tools as well, like Webfeat, Muse Global, 360-Search, etc.

The slideshow is meant to be an objective comparison of the two search concepts. I am not saying that Metasearch is bad, and H&I is good, that would be too easy. Some five years ago Metasearch was the best we had, it was a tremendous progress beyond searching numerous individual databases separately. Since then we have seen the emergence of harvesting & indexing tools, combined with “uniform discovery interfaces”, such as Aquabrowser, Primo, Encore, and the OpenSource tools VuFind, SUMMA, Meresco, to name a few.

Anyway,  we can compare the main difference between Metasearch and H&I to the concepts “Just in time” and “Just in case“, used in logistics and inventory management.

With Metasearch, records are fetched on request (Just in time), with the risk of running into logistics and delivery problems. With H&I, all available records are already there (Just in case), but maybe not the most recent ones.

Objectively of course, H&I can solve the problems inherent in Metasearch, and therefore is a superior solution. However, a number of institutions, mainly general academic libraries, will for some time depend on databases that can’t be harvested because of technical, legal or commercial reasons.

In other cases, H&I is the best option, for instance in the case of cooperating local or regional libraries, such as Adamnet, or dedicated academic or research libraries that only depend on a limited number of important databases and catalogs.

But I also believe that the real power of H&I can only be taken advantage of, if institutions cooperate and maintain shared central indexes, instead of building each their own redundant metadata stores. This already happens, for instance in Denmark, where the Royal Library uses Primo to access the national DADS database.

We also see commercial hosted H&I initiatives implemented as SaaS (Software as a Service) by both tool vendors and database suppliers, like Ex Libris’ PrimoCentral, SerialSolutions’ Summon and EBSCOhost Integrated Search.

The funny thing is, that if you want to take advantage of all these hosted harvested indexes, you are likely to end up with a hybrid kind of metasearch situation where you distribute searches to a number of remote H&I databases.

© Lukas Koster

I attended the IGeLU 2009 annual conference in Helsinki September 6-9. IGeLU is the International Group of Ex Libris Users, an independent organisation that represents Ex Libris customers. Just to state my position clearly I would like to add that I am a member of the IGeLU Steering Committee.
These annual user group meetings typically have three types of sessions: internal organisational sessions (product working groups and steering committee business meetings, elections), Ex Libris sessions (product updates, Q&A, strategic visions), and customer sessions (presentations of local solutions, addons, developments).

Not surprisingly, the main overall theme of this conference was the future of library systems and libraries. The word that characterises the conference best in my mind (besides “next generation“and “metaphor“) is “roadmap“. All Ex Libris products but also all attending libraries are on their way to something new, which strangely enough is still largely uncertain.

© Lukas Koster

Library paradise?
Ex Libris presented the latest state of design and development of their URM (Unified Resource Management) project, ‘A New Model for Next-generation Library Services’. In the final URM environment all back end functionality of all current Ex Libris products will be integrated into one big modular system, implemented in a SaaS (“Software as a Service“) architecture. In the Ex Libris vision the front end to this model will be their Primo Indexing and Discovery interface, but all URM modules will have open API’s to enable using them with other tools.
The goal of this roadmap apparently is efficiency in the areas of technical and functional system administration for libraries.

Intermediate generation
In the mean time development of existing products is geared towards final inclusion in URM. All future upgrades will result in what I would like to call “intermediate” instead of “next generation” products . MetaLib, the metasearch or federated search tool, will be replaced by MetaLib Next Generation, with a re-designed metasearch engine and a Primo front end. The digital collection management tool DigiTool will be merged into its new and bigger nephew Rosetta, the digital preservation system. The database of the OpenUrl resolver SFX will be restructured to accommodate the URM datamodel. The next version of Verde (electronic resource management) will effectively be URM version 1, which will also be usable as an alternative for both ILS’es Voyager and Aleph.
Here we see a kind of “intermediate” roadmap to different “base camps” from where the travelers can try to reach their final destination.

© Lukas Koster

Holy cows!
From the perspective of library staff we see another panorama appearing.
In one of the customer presentations Janet Lute of Princeton University Library, one of the three (now four) URM development partners, mentioned a couple of “holy cows” or library tasks they might consider stopping doing while on their way to the new horizon:

• managing prediction patterns for journal issues
• checking in print serials
• maintaining lots of circulation matrices and policies
• collecting fines
• cataloging over 80% of bibliographic records

I would like to add my own holy cow MARC to this list, about which I have written a previous post Who needs MARC?. (Some other developments in this area are self service, approval plans, shared cataloging, digitisation, etc.)
This roadmap is supposed to lead to more efficient work and less pressure for acquisitions, cataloging and circulation staff.

Eldorado or Brave New World?
To summarise: we see a sketchy roadmap leading us via all kinds of optional intermediate stations to an as yet still vague and unclear Eldorado of scholarly information disclosure and discovery.
The majority of public and professional attention is focused on discovery: modern web 2.0 front ends to library collections, and the benefits for the libraries’ end users. But it is probably even more important to look at the other side, disclosure: the library back end, and the consequences of all these developments for library staff, both technically oriented system administrators and professionally oriented librarians.

Future efficient integrated and modular library systems will no doubt eliminate a lot of tasks performed by library staff, but does this mean there will be no more library jobs?
Will the university library of the future be “sparsely staffed, highly decentralized, and have a physical plant consisting of little more than special collections and study areas“, as was stated recently in an article in “Inside Higher Education”? I mentioned similar options in “No future for libraries?“.

Personally I expect that the two far ends of the library jobs spectrum will merge into a single generic job type which we can truly call “system librarian“, as I stated in my post “System librarians 2.0“. But what will these professionals do? Will they catalog? Will they configure systems? Will they serve the public? Will they develop system add-ons?

This largely depends on how the new integrated systems will be designed and implemented, how systems and databases from different vendors and providers will be able to interact, how much libraries/information management organisations will outsource and crowdsource, how much library staff is prepared to rethink existing workflows, how much libraries want to distinguish themselves from other organisations, how much end users are interested in differences between information management organisations; in brief: how much these new platforms will allow us to do ourselves.

We have come up with a realistic image of ourselves for the next couple of decades soon, otherwise our publishers and system vendors will be doing it for us.

Tagged © funkandjazz

On August 17, after I tested a search in our new Aleph OPAC and mentioned my surprise on Twitter, the following discussion unfolded between me (lukask), Ed Summers of the Library of Congress and Till Kinstler of GBV (German Union Library Network):

• lukask: Just found out we only have one item about RDF in our catalogue: http://tinyurl.com/lz75c4
• edsu: @lukask broaden that search http://is.gd/2l6vB
• lukask: @edsu Ha! Thanks! But I’m sure that RDF will be mentioned in these 29 titles! A case for social tagging!
• edsu: @lukask or better cataloging
• edsu: @lukask i guess they both amount to the same thing eh?
• lukask: @edsu That’s an interesting position…”social tagging=better cataloging”. I will ask my cataloguing co-workers about this specific example
• edsu: @lukask make sure to wear body-armor
• lukask: @edsu Yes I know! I will bring it up at tomorrow’s party for the celebration of our ALEPH STP (after some drinks…)
• tillk: @edsu @lukask or fulltext search… SCNR…
• edsu: @tillk yeah, totally — with projects like @googlebooks and @hathitrust we may look back on the age of cataloging with different eyes …
• lukask: @tillk @edsu Fulltext search yes, or “implicit automatic metadata generation”?

What happened here was:

• A problem with findability of specific bibliographic items was observed: although it is highly unlikely that books about the Semantic Web will not cover RDF-Resource Description Framework, none of the 29 titles found with “Semantic Web” could be found with the search term “Resource Description Framework“; on the other side, the only item found with “Resource Description Framework” was NOT found with “Semantic Web“. I must add that the “Semantic web” search was an “All words” search. Only 20 of the results were indexed with the Dutch subject heading “Semantisch web” (which term is never used in real life as far as I know; the English term is an international concept). Some results were off topic, they just happened to have “semantic” and “web” somewhere in their metadata. A better search would have been a phrase search (adjacent) with “semantic web” in actual quotes, which gives 26 items. But of these, a small number were not indexed with subject heading “Semantisch web“. Another note: searching with “RDF” gets you all kinds of results. Read more on the issue of searching and relevance in my post Relevance in context.

• Four possible solutions were suggested:

1. social tagging
2. better cataloging
3. fulltext searching
4. automatic metadata generation

Social tagging
Clearly, the 26 items found with the search “Semantic web” are not indexed by the “Resource description framework” or “RDF” subject heading. There is not even a subject heading for “Resource description framework” or “RDF“. In my personal view, from my personal context, this is an omission. Mind you, this is not only an issue in the catalogue of the Library of the University of Amsterdam, it is quite common. I tried it in the British Library Integrated Catalogue with similar results. Try it in your own OPAC!
I presume that our professional cataloging colleagues can’t know everything about all subjects. That is completely understandable. I would not know how to catalog a book about a medical subject myself either! But this is exactly the point. If you allow end users to add their own tags to your bibliographic records, you enhance the findability of these records for specific groups of end users.
I am not saying that cataloguing and indexing by library specialists using controlled vocabularies should be replaced by social tagging! No, not at all. I am just saying that both types of tagging/indexing are complementary. Sure, some of the tags added by end users may not follow cataloging standards, but who cares? Very often the end users adding tags of their own will be professional experts in their field. In any case, items with social tags will be found more often because specific end user groups can find them searching with their own terms.

Better cataloging
I suppose Ed Summers was trying to say the same thing as I just did above, when he commented “or better cataloging, I guess they both amount to the same thing eh?“, which I summarised as “social tagging=better cataloging“, but he can correct me if I’m wrong.
Anyway, I hope I made it clear that I would not say “social tagging=better cataloging“, but rather “controlled vocabularies+social tagging=better cataloging“.
Or alternatively, could we improve cataloging by professional library catalogers? I must admit I do not know enough about library training and practice to say something about that. I am not a trained librarian. Don’t hesitate to comment!

Fulltext searching
Is fulltext searching the miracle cure for findability problems, as Till Kinstler seems to suggest? Maybe.
Suppose all our print material was completely digitised and available for fulltext search, I have no doubt that all 26 items mentioned above (the results of the “semantic web” all words search) would be found with the “resource description framework” or “rdf” search as well. But because fulltext search is by its very nature an “all words” search, the “rdf” fulltext search would also give a lot of “noise”, or items not having any relation to “semantic web” at all (author’s initials “R.D.F”, other acronyms “R.D.F.”, just see RDF in the BL catalogue). Again, see my post Relevance in context for an explanation of searching without context.
Also, there will be books or articles about a subject that will not contain the actual subject term at all. With fulltext search these items will not be found.
Moreover, fulltext searching actually limits the findable items to text, excluding other types, like images, maps, video, audio etc.
This brings me to the “final solution”:

Automatic metadata generation
Of course this is mostly still wishful thinking. But there are a number of interesting implementations already.
What I mean when I say “(implicit) automatic metadata generation” is: metadata that is NOT created deliberately by humans, but either generated and assigned as static metadata, or generated on the fly, by software, applying intelligent analysis to objects, of all types (text, images, audio, video, etc.).
In the case of our “rdf” example, such a tool would analyse a text and assign “rdf” as a subject heading based on the content and context of this text, even if the term “rdf” does not appear in the text at all. It would also discard texts containing the string “rdf” that refer to something completely different. Of course for this to succeed there should be some kind of contextual environment with links to other records or even other systems to be able to determine if certain terminology is linked to frequently used terms not mentioned in the text itself (here the Linked Data developments could play a major role).
The same principle should also apply to non-textual objects, so that images, audio, video etc. about the same subject can be found in one go. Google has some interesting implementations in this field already: image search by colour and content type: see for example the search for “rdf” in Google Images with colour “red”and content type “clip art”.
But of course there still needs a lot to be done.

Search! © Jeffrey Beall

If you do a search in a bibliographic database, you should find what you need, not just what you are looking for, or what the database “thinks” you are looking for. If you find what you are looking for, then you will not be surprised and you will not discover anything new. And that’s not what you want, is it? But if you find things you did not look for but also do not need, you’re not just surprised, you are confused! And that’s not what you want either.

You want the results that are the most relevant for your search, with your specific objectives, at that specific point in time time, for your specific circumstances, and you want them immediately.

So, how should search systems behave to make you find what you need? There are two conditions that need to be met:

• The search terms must be interpreted correctly
• The most relevant search results must be presented

The Problem
First of all, let’s take a look at current practice.

Search systems cannot cope with ambiguous search terms. My favorite example and test search term is “voc“. This can stand for a number of things in various disciplines: V.O.C. (Dutch: “Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie”  or “Dutch United East Indies Company”) in historical databases; “vocals” in musical databases; “volatile organic compounds” in physics databases. So if you do a search for “voc” in a standard library catalogue, you get all kinds of results. Even more so if you use a metasearch or federated search tool for searching several databases simultaneously.

Search for "voc" in British Library Integrated Catalogue

You are confused. You would like the system to “understand” which one of these concepts you are referring to instead of just using the literal string. You would like the system to take into account your context.

In most databases search results can be sorted or filtered by a number of fields, most commonly by year, title, author, and also by more specific fields in dedicated databases.  But unless you are interested in a specific year, author or title, this will not do. Recently many systems have implemented “faceted” and “clustered” browsing of results, enabling “drilling down” on specific terms or subjects. This basically comes down to setting the context after the fact.

But after the system has interpreted your search terms, the  results should also be ordered in a specific way, the ones you need most should be on top. This is where “relevance ranking” of search results comes in. Most catalogues and databases use a system specific default relevance ranking algorithm. Search results are assigned a rank, based on a number of criteria, that can differ between databases, depending on the nature of the database.
Some databases just present the most recent results on top. For medical and physical sciences this may be right, but for history and literature databases this may just be wrong.
Sometimes the search terms are taken into account: the number of times the given search terms are present in the result fields is important, but also the specific fields in which search terms appear. The appearance of search terms in “Title” and “Subject” may rank higher than in “Abstract” or “Publisher”. Moreover, the search indexes used can have a major influence on rank: if you search for “Subject” = “flu”, then results with “flu” as subject will be ranked higher than results with “flu” in the title only.
To come back to my example, with ambiguous search terms like “voc” this type of relevance ranking will definitely not be enough, because results from the three different conceptual areas will be completely mixed up.

Clustered search results in Amsterdam University Library MetaLib portal

When searching with a metasearch or federated search tool things get even more complicated. Each of the remote databases that you search in has its own default way of ranking. Usually the metasearch tool fetches the first 30 or so results from each remote database (one set sorted by date, the other by internal rank, the next by title), merges these into one list and then applies its own local ranking mechanism to this subset only. Confusion! And I did not even mention searching databases with metadata in multiple languages. Moreover, databases containing only metadata will produce different results and relevance than databases with full text articles. There is absolutely no way of telling if you actually have the most relevant results for your situation.

Again, with relevance ranking search systems do not take into account the context either. You could say it is an introverted, internally focused way of ranking, the confusing results of which are multiplied in case of metasearching.

Most metasearch tools give users the option of searching in sets of pre-selected databases, based on subject or type. This way you can limit your search to those databases that are known to have data about that specific subject. You more or less set the context in advance. But this mechanism only eliminates results from databases that probably do not have data on your subject at all, so they would not have shown up in the results anyway. Moreover, the same issues that were discussed above apply to this limited set of databases.

The metasearch tool that I know best (MetaLib) offers the option of setting a relative rank per database, so results from databases with a higher rank will have a higher relevance in merged result sets. But this is a system wide option, set by system administration, so it is not taking into account any context at all. It would be better if you could make the relative database rank dependent on the set or subject the search is done from (for instance: if a history database is searched in the context of a “History” set, the results get a higher rank than in a search from a “Music” set).

The best solution for this “internal” relevance problem regarding distributed databases is a central database of harvested indexes. In this case all harvested metadata is normalised and ranked in a uniform way, and users do not have to select databases in advance. But these systems still do not take into account “external” relevance: there is no context!

A very interesting and intelligent solution for the problem of pre-selecting databases is provided in PurpleSearch, the integrated front end to MetaLib (among other things), developed by the Library of the University of Groningen. The system records which databases actually produce results for specific search terms. As soon as the user enters search terms in the single search box, the system knows which databases will have results, and the search is automatically carried out in these databases, without asking the user to select the databases or subject area he or she wants to search in. Simultaneously a background search in all other databases is performed in order to check additional new results, and the information about results in databases is updated.
Of course, all other usual options are available as well, like pre-selecting databases (setting context in advance) and faceted results drilling down (setting context after the fact). But again, no external contextual settings.

Search "voc" in PurpleSearch

• Conclusion: the only way to find what you need, is to make search systems take into account the context in which the search is done, both for searching and for relevance ranking.

Solutions
Now, let’s have a look at a couple of conditions that would make contextual searches possible.

Personal context: a system should “know” about your personal interests, field of study, job situation, age, etc. so it can “decide” which databases to search in and which results are the most relevant for you. Some systems, like university systems, have access to information about their users. Once you log in, the system potentially knows which subjects you are studying or teaching and could use this information for setting the context for searching and ranking.
But what if you are a student in Law AND Social Siences, which subject area should the system choose? Or: if you are a History teacher, and you have a personal interest in Ecology, which the system does not know about, what then? Somehow you still need to set context yourself.

Some systems also offer the opportunity of setting personal preferences, like: area of interest, specific databases, type of material (only digital or print), only recent material, etc. Again: you must be able to deviate from these preferences, depending on your situation, which means setting context manually.

Different search systems will have different user profiles (user data and preferences). It would be nice if search systems could take advantage of universal external personal profiles (like Google Profiles for instance) using some kind of universal API.

Situational context: a system should also “know” about the situation you are in, both in a functional sense and in a physical sense.

Functional context means: wich role are you playing? Are you in your law student role or in your social sciences student role? Are you in your professional role or in your private role? But also: to which resources do you have access?
An interesting idea: if you work Monday to Friday during office hours, study in the evenings and spend time on your personal interests on the weekends, it would be nice if you could link times of day and days of the week to your different roles, so search systems could use the correct context for your searches depending on time and date: “if it’s Tuesday evening then use study profile and search in ‘History’; if it’s Sunday, use private profile and search in ‘Ecology’“.

This temporal context was also referred to by Till Kinstler in a (German) blog post about the new “Suchkiste” search system prototype of the German Union Library Network (GBV): ‘the search for “Charlie Brown” in October should result in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” at number 1, and in December in “A Charlie Brown Christmas“‘.

Physical context means: where are you? It would be nice if a library catalogue search system would take into account your actual location, so it could show you the records of the copies of the FRBR-ized results available in the library locations nearest to you (this idea came up in a recent Twitter discussion between @librarianbe and @gbierens). This is what Worldcat does when you supply it with your location manually. In Worldcat this is a static preference. But it would be nice if it would respond to your actual location, for instance by using the GPS coordinates of your mobile phone. Alternatively, search systems could derive your location from the IP address you are sending your search from.
This information could also be used to determine if records for digital or physical copies should be ranked the most relevant in this case. If you are inside the library building and you have a preference for physical books and journals, then records for available print copies should be on top of the results list. If you are at home, then records for digital copies that you have access to should come first.

Contextual searching and ranking should always be a combination of all possible conditions, personal, situational and internal system ones.

Of course it goes without saying that it would be great if metasearch tools were able to convey the search context to the remote databases and get contextual results back, using some kind of universal serach context API!

Last but not least, each search system should show the context of the search, and explain how it got to the results in the presented order. Something like: based on your personal preferences, the time of day and day of the week, and your location, the search was done in these databases, with this subject area, and the physical copies of the nearest location are shown on top.
This context area on the results screen could then be used as a kind of inverted faceted search, drilling “up” to a broader level or “sideways” to another context.

© PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

Some time after I wrote “UMR – Unified Metadata Resources“, I came across Chris Keene’s post “Linked data & RDF : draft notes for comment“, “just a list of links and notes” about Linked Data, RDF and the Semantic Web, put together to start collecting information about “a topic that will greatly impact on the Library / Information management world“.

While reading this post and working my way through the links on that page, I started realising that Linked Data is exactly what I tried to describe as One single web page as the single identifier of every book, author or subject. I did mention Semantic Web, URI’s and RDF, but the term “Linked Data” as a separate protocol had escaped me.

The concept of Linked Data was described by Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Whereas the World Wide Web links documents (pages, files, images), which are basically resources about things, (“Information Resources” in Semantic Web terms), Linked Data (or the Semantic Web) links raw data and real life things (“Non-Information Resources”).

There are several definitions of Linked Data on the web, but here is my attempt to give a simple definition of it (loosely based on the definition in Structured Dynamics’ Linked Data FAQ):

I will try to illustrate the different aspects using some examples from the library world. The article is rather long, because of the nature of the subject, then again the individual sections are a bit short. But I do supply a lot of links for further reading.

Data is relationships
The important thing is that “data is relationships“, as Tim Berners Lee says in his recent presentation for TED.
Before going into relationships between things, I have to point out the important distinction between abstract concepts and real life things, which are “manifestations” of the concepts. In Object modeling these are called “classes” (abstract concepts, types of things) and “objects” (real life things, or “instances” of “classes“).

Examples:

• the class book can have the instances/objects “Cloud Atlas“, “Moby Dick“, etc.
• the class person can have the instances/objects “David Mitchell“, “Herman Melville“, etc.

In the Semantic Web/RDF model the concept of triples is used to describe a relationship between two things: subject – predicate – object, meaning: a thing has a relation to another thing, in the broadest sense:

• a book (subject) is written by (predicate) a person (object)

You can also reverse this relationship:

• a person (subject) is the author of (predicate) a book (object)

Triple

The person in question is only an author because of his or her relationship to the book. The same person can also be a mother of three children, an employee of a library, and a speaker at a conference.
Moreover, and this is important: there can be more than one relationship between the same two classes or types of things. A book (subject) can also be about (predicate) a person (object). In this case the person is a “subject” of the book, that can be described by a “keyword”, “subject heading”, or whatever term is used. A special case would be a book, written by someone about himself (an autobiography).

The problem with most legacy systems, and library catalogues as an example of these, is that a record for let’s say a book contains one or more fields for the author (or at best a link to an entry in an authority file or thesaurus), and separately one or more fields for subjects. This way it is not possible to see books written by an author and books about the same author in one view, without using all kinds of workarounds, link resolvers or mash-ups.
Using two different relationships that link to the same thing would provide for an actual view or representation of the real world situation.

Another important option of Linked Data/RDF: a certain thing can have as a property a link to a concept (or “class”) , describing the nature of the thing: “object Cloud Atlas” has type “book“; “object David Mitchell” has type “person“; “object Cloud Atlas” is written by “object David Mitchell“.

And of course, the property/relationship/predicate can also link to a concept describing the nature of the link.

Anywhere on the web

ERD

So far so good. But you may argue that this relationship theory is not very new. Absolutely right, but up until now this data-relationship concept has mainly been used with a view to the inside, focused on the area of the specific information system in question, because of the nature and the limitations of the available technology and infrastructure.

The “triple” model is of course exactly the same as the long standing methodology of Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD), with which relationships between entities (=”classes“) are described. An ERD is typically used to generate a database that contains data in a specific information system. But ERD’s could just as well be used to describe Linked Data on the web.

Information systems, such as library catalogs, have been, and still are, for the greatest part closed containers of data, or “silos” without connections between them, as Tim Berners Lee also mentions in his TED presentation.

Lots of these silo systems are accessible with web interfaces, but this does not mean that items in these closed systems with dedicated web front ends can be linked to items in other databases or web pages. Of course these systems can have API’s that allow system developers to create scripts to get related information from other systems and incorporate that external information in the search results of the calling system. This is what is being done in web 2.0 with so-called mash-ups.
But in this situation you need developers who know how to make scripts using specific scripting languages for all the different proprietary API’s that are being supported for all the individual systems.
If Linked Data was a global standard and all open and closed systems and websites supported RDF, then all these links would be available automatically to RDF enabled browser and client software, using SPARQL, the RDF Query Language.

• Linked Data/RDF can be regarded as a universal API.

The good thing about Linked Data is, that it is possible to use Linked Data mechanisms to link to legacy data in silo databases. You just need to provide an RDF wrapper for the legacy system, like has been done with the Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Some examples of available tools for exposing legacy data as RDF:

• Triplify – a web applications plugin that converts relational database structures into RDF triples
• D2R Server – a tool for publishing relational databases on the Semantic Web
• wp-RDFa – a wordpress plugin that adds some RDF information about Author and Title to Wordpress blog posts

Of course, RDF that is generated like this will very probably only expose objects to link TO, not links to RDF objects external to the system.

Also, Linked Data can be used within legacy systems, for mixing legacy and RDF data, open and closed access data, etc. In this case we have RDF triples that have a subject URI from one data source and an object URI from another data source. In a situation with interlinked systems it would for instance be possible to see that the author of a specific book (data from a library catalog) is also speaking at a specific conference (data from a conference website). Objects linked together on the web using RDF triples are also known as an “RDF graph”. With RDF-aware client software it is possible to navigate through all the links to retrieve additional information about an object.

Linked Data

URI’s
URI’s (“Uniform Resource Identifiers”) are necessary for uniquely identifying and linking to resources on the web. A URI is basically a string that identifies a thing or resource on the web. All “Information Resources”, or WWW pages, documents, etc. have a URI, which is commonly known as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

With Linked Data we are looking at identifying “Non-information Resources” or “real world objects” (people, concepts, things, even imaginary things), not web pages that contain information about these real world objects. But it is a little more complicated than that. In order to honour the requirement that a thing and its relations can be interpreted and used by humans and software, we need at least 3 different representations of one resource (see: How to publish Linked Data on the web):

• Resource identifier URI (identifies the real world object, the concept, as such)
• RDF document URI (a document readable for semantic web applications, containing the real world object’s RDF data and relationships with other objects)
• HTML document URI (a document readable for humans, with information about the real world object)

Redirection

For instance, there could be a Resource Identifier URI for a book called “Cloud Atlas“. The web resource at that URI can redirect an RDF enabled browser to the RDF document URI, which contains RDF data describing the book and its properties and relationships. A normal HTML web browser would be redirected to the HTML document URI, for instance a web page about the book at the publisher’s website.

There are several methods of redirecting browsers and application to the required representation of the resource. See Cool URIs for the Semantic Web for technical details.

There are also RDF enabled browsers that transform RDF into web pages readable by humans, like the FireFox addon “Tabulator“, or the web based Disco and Marbles browsers, both hosted at the Free University Berlin.

RDF, vocabularies, ontologies
RDF or Resource Description Framework, is, like the name suggests, just a framework. It uses XML (or a simpler non-XML method N3) to describe resources by means of relationships. RDF can be implemented in vocabularies or ontologies, which are sets of RDF classes describing objects and relationships for a given field.
Basically, anybody can create an RDF vocabulary by publishing an RDF document defining the classes and properties of the vocabulary, at a URI on the web. The vocabulary can then be used in a resource by referring to the namespace (the URI) and the classes in that RDF document.

A nice and useful feature of RDF is that more than one vocabularies can be mixed and used in one resource.
Also, a vocabulary itself can reference other vocabularies and thereby inherit well established classes and properties from other RDF documents.
Another very useful feature of RDF is that objects can be linked to similar object resources describing the same real world thing. This way confusion about which object we are talking about, can be avoided.

A couple of existing and well used RDF vocabularies/ontologies:

• RDF – the base RDF vocabulary
• RDFS (for RDF Schema)
• DC (for Dublin Core)
• FOAF (for FOAF- Friend of a Friend) – online identities and social networks
• SKOS (for SKOS – Simple Knowledge Organisation System) – thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies
• OWL (for OWL -Ontology Web Language)

(By the way,  the links in the first column (to the RDF files themselves) may act as an illustration of the redirection mechanism described before. Some of them may link to either the RDF file with the vocabulary definition itself, or to a page about the vocabulary, depending on the type of browser you use: rdf-aware or not.)

A special case is:

• RDFa – a sort of microformat without a vocabulary of its own, which relies on other vocabularies for turning XHTML page attributes into RDF

Example
A shortened example for “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell from the RDF BookMashup at the Free University Berlin, which uses a number of different vocabularies:

A partial view on this RDF file with the Marbles browser:

RDF browser view

See also the same example in the Disco RDF browser.

Library implementations
It seems obvious that Linked Data can be very useful in providing a generic infrastructure for linking data, metadata and objects, available in numerous types of data stores, in the online library world. With such a networked online data structure, it would be fairly easy to create all kinds of discovery interfaces for bibliographic data and objects. Moreover, it would also be possible to link to non-bibliographic data that might interest the users of these interfaces.

A brief and incomplete list of some library related Linked Data projects, some of which already mentioned above:

• RDF BookMashup – Integration of Web 2.0 data sources like Amazon, Google or Yahoo into the Semantic Web.
• Library of Congress Authorities – Exposing LoC Autorities and Vocabularies to the web using URI’s
• DBPedia – Exposing structured data from WikiPedia to the web
• LIBRIS – Linked Data interface to Swedish LIBRIS Union catalog
• Scriblio+Wordpress+Triplify – “A social, semantic OPAC Union Catalogue”

And what about MARC, AACR2 and RDA? Is there a role for them in the Linked Data environment? RDA is supposed to be the successor of AACR2 as a content standard that can be used with MARC, but also with other encoding standards like MODS or Dublin Core.
The RDA Entity Relationship Diagram, that incorporates FRBR as well, can of course easily be implemented as an RDF vocabulary, that could be used to create a universal Linked Data library network. It really does not matter what kind of internal data format the connected systems use. ]]> http://commonplace.net/2009/06/linked-data-for-libraries/feed/ 22 http://commonplace.net/2009/05/no-future-for-libraries/ http://commonplace.net/2009/05/no-future-for-libraries/#comments Sun, 24 May 2009 22:02:36 +0000 Lukas Koster http://commonplace.net/?p=536 Will library buildings and library catalogs survive the web?

© Moqub

Some weeks ago a couple of issues appeared in the twitter/blogosphere (or at least MY twitter/blogoshere) related to the future of the library in this digital era.

• There was the Espresso book machine that prints books on demand on location, which led to questions like: “apart from influencing publishing and book shops, what does this mean for libraries?“.
• There was a Twitter discussion about “will we still need library buildings?“.
• There was another blog post about the future of library catalogs by Edwin Mijnsbergen (in Dutch) that asked the question of the value of library catalogs in relation to web2.0 and the new emerging semantic web.

This made me start thinking about a question that concerns us all: is there a future for the library as we know it?

To begin with, what is a library anyway?

For ages, since the beginning of history, up until some 15 years ago, a library was an institution characterised by:

© Mihai Bojin

• a physical collection of printed and handwritten material
• a physical location, a building, to store the collection
• a physical printed or handwritten on site catalog
• on location searching and finding of information sources using the catalog
• on site requesting, delivery, reading, lending and returning of material
• a staff of trained librarians to catalog the collection and assist patrons

The central concept here is of course the collection. That is the “raison d’être” of a library. The purpose of library building, catalog and librarians is to give people access to the collection, and provide them with the information they need.

Clearly, because of the physical nature of the collection and the information transmission process the library needed to be a building with collection and catalog inside it. People had to go there to find and get the publications they needed.

If collections and the transmission of information were completely digital, then the reason for a physical location to go to for finding and getting publications would not exist anymore. Currently one of these conditions has been met fully and the other one partly. The transmission of information can take place in a completely digital way. Most new scientific publications are born digital (e-Journals, e-Books), and a large number of digitisation projects are taking care of making digital copies of existing print material.
Searching for items in a library’s collection is already taking place remotely through OPACs and other online tools almost everywhere. A large part of these collections can be accessed digitally. Only in case a patron wants to read or borrow a printed book or journal, he or she has to go the library building to fetch it.

All this seems to lead to the conclusion that the library may be slowly moving away from a physical presence to a digital one.

But there is something else to be considered here, that reaches beyond the limits of one library. In my view the crucial notion here is again the collection.
In my post Collection 2.0 I argue that in this digital information age a library’s collection is everything a library has access to as opposed to the old concept of everything a library owns. This means in theory that every library could have access to the same digital objects of information available on the web, but also to each other’s print objects through ILL. There will be no physically limited collection only available in one library anymore, just one large global collection.

In this case, there is not only no need for people to go to a specific library for an item in its collection, but also there is no need to search for items using a specific library’s catalog.

Now you may say that people like going to a library building and browse through the stacks. That may still be true for some, but in general, as I argue in my post “Open Stack 2.0“, the new Open Stack is the Web.

© Nicole C. Engard

In the future there will be collections, but not physical ones (except of course for the existing ones with items that are not allowed to leave the library location). We will see virtual subject collections, determined by classifications and keywords assigned both by professionals and non-professionals.

On a parallel level there will be virtual catalogs, which are views on virtual collections defined by subjects on different levels and in different locations: global, local, subject-oriented, etc. These virtual collections and catalogs will be determined and maintained by a great number of different groups of people and institutions (commercial and non-commercial). One of these groups can still be a library. As Patrick Vanhoucke observed on Twitter (in Dutch): “We have to let go of the idea of the library as a building; the ‘library’ is the network of librarians“. These virtual groups of people may be identical to what is getting known more and more as “tribes“.

Having said all this, of course there will still be occurrences of libraries as buildings and as physical locations for collections. Institutions like the Library of Congress will not just vanish into thin air. Even if all print items have been digitised, print items will still be wanted for a number of reasons: research, art, among others. Libraries can have different functions, like archives, museums, etc. and still be named “libraries” too.
Library buildings can transform into other types of locations: in universities they can become meeting places and study facilities, including free wifi and Starbucks coffee. Public libraries can shift focus to becoming centres of discovery and (educational) gaming. Anything is possible.

It’s obvious that libraries obey the same laws of historical development as any other social institution or phenomenon. The way that information is found and processed is determined, or at least influenced, by the status of technological development. And I am not saying that all development is technology driven! This is not the place for a philosophy on history, economics and society.

Some historical parallels to illustrate the situation that libraries are facing:

• writing: inscribing clay tablets > scratching ink on paper > printing (multiplication, re-usability) > typewriter > computer/printer (digital multiplication and re-usability!) > digital only (computer files, blogs, e-journal, e-books)
• consumption of music: attending live performance on location > listening to radio broadcast > playing purchased recordings (vinyl, cassettes, cd, dvd) > make home recordings > play digital music with mp3/personal audio > listen to digital music online

From these examples it’s perfectly clear that new developments do not automatically make the old ways disappear! Prevailing practices can coexist with “outdated” ways of doing things. Libraries may still have a future.

In the end it comes down to these questions:

• Will libraries cease to exist, simply because they no longer serve the purpose of providing access to information?
• Are libraries engaged in a rear guard fight?
• Will libraries become tourist attractions?
• Will libraries adapt to the changing world and shift focus to serve other, related purposes?
• Are professional librarian skills useful in a digital information world?

I do not know what will happen with libraries. What do you think?

© leah the librarian

This week I had a nice chat with André Keyzer of Groningen University library and Peter van Boheemen of Wageningen University Library who attended OCLC’s Amsterdam Mashathon 2009. As can be expected from library technology geeks, we got talking about bibliographic metadata formats, very exciting of course. The question came up: what on earth could be the reason for storing bibliographic metadata in exchange formats like MARC?

Being asked once at an ELAG conference about the bibliographic format Wageningen University was using in their home grown catalog system, Peter answered: “WDC” ….”we don’t care“.

Exactly my idea! As a matter of fact I think I may have used the same words a couple of times in recent years, probably even at ELAG2008. The thing is: it really does not matter how you store bibliographic metadata in your database, as long as you can present and exchange the data in any format requested, be it MARC or Dublin Core or anything else.

Of course the importance of using internationally accepted standards is beyond doubt, but there clearly exists widespread misunderstanding of the functions of certain standards, like for instance MARC. MARC is NOT a data storage format. In my opinion MARC is not even an exchange format, but merely a presentation format.

St. Marc Express

With a background and experience in data modeling, database and systems design (among others), I was quite amazed about bibliographic metadata formats when I started working with library systems in libraries, not having a librarian training at all. Of course, MARC (“MAchine Readable Cataloging record“) was invented as a standard in order to facilitate exchange of library catalog records in a digital era.
But I think MARC was invented by old school cataloguers who did not have a clue about data normalisation at all. A MARC record, especially if it corresponds to an official set of cataloging rules like AARC2, is nothing more than a digitised printed catalog card.

In pre-computer times it made perfect sense to have a standardised uniform way of registering bibliographic metadata on a printed card in this way. The catalog card was simultaneously used as a medium for presenting AND storing metadata. This is where the confusion originates from!

MARC record

But when the Library of Congress says “If a library were to develop a “home-grown” system that did not use MARC records, it would not be taking advantage of an industry-wide standard whose primary purpose is to foster communication of information” it is saying just plain nonsense.
Actually it is better NOT to use something like MARC for other purposes than exchanging, or better, presenting data. To illustrate this I will give two examples of MARC tags that have been annoying me since my first day as a library employee:

• 100 – Main Entry-Personal Name (NR) – subfield $a – Personal name (NR)
• 773 – Host Item Entry (R) – subfield $g – Relationship information (R)

100 – Main Entry-Personal Name
Besides storing an author’s name as a string in each individual bibliographic record instead of using a code, linking to a central authority table (“foreign key” in relational database terms), it is also a mistake to use a person’s name as one complete string in one field. Examples on the Library of Congress MARC website use forms like “Adams, Henry”, “Fowler, T. M.” and “Blackbeard, Author of”. To take only the simple first example, this author could also be registered as “Henry Adams”, “Adams, H.”, “H. Adams”. And don’t say that these forms are not according to the rules! They are out there! There is no way to match these variations as being actually one and the same.
In a normalised relational database, this subfield $a would be stored something like this (simplified!):

• Person
  • Surname=Adams
  • First name=Henry
  • Prefix=
  • …

773 – Host Item Entry
Subfield $g of this MARC tag is used for storing citation information for a journal article, volume, issue, year, start page, end page, all in one string, like: “Vol. 2, no. 2 (Feb. 1976), p. 195-230“. Again I have seen this used in many different ways. In a normalised format this would look something like this, using only the actual values:

• Journal
  • Volume=2
  • Issue=2
  • Year=1976
  • Month=2
  • Day=
  • Start page=195
  • End page=230

In a presentation of this normalised data record extra text can be added like “Vol.” or “Volume“, “Issue” or “No.“, brackets, replacing codes by descriptions (Month 2 = Feb.)  etc., according to the format required. So the stored values could be used to generate the text “Vol. 2, no. 2 (Feb. 1976), p. 195-230” on the fly, but also for instance “Volume 2, Issue 2, dated February 1976, pages 195-230“.

The strange thing with this bibliographic format aimed at exchanging metadata is that it actually makes metadata exchange terribly complicated, especially with these two tags Author and Host Item. I can illustrate this with describing the way this exchange is handled between two digital library tools we use at the Library of the University of Amsterdam, MetaLib and SFX , both from the same vendor, Ex Libris.

The metasearch tool MetaLib is using the described and preferred mechanism of on the fly conversion of received external metadata from any format to MARC for the purpose of presentation.
But if we want to use the retrieved record to link to for instance a full text article using the SFX link resolver, the generated MARC data is used as a source and the non-normalised data in the 100 and 773 MARC tags has to be converted to the OpenURL format, which is actually normalised (example in simple OpenUrl 0.1):

isbn=;issn=0927-3255;date=1976;
volume=2;issue=2;spage=195;epage=230;
aulast=Adams;aufirst=Henry;auinit=;

In order to do this all kinds of regular expressions and scripting functions are needed to extract the correct values from the MARC author and citation strings. Wouldn’t it be convenient, if the record in MetaLib would already have been in OpenURL or any other normalised format?

The point I am trying to make is of course that it does not matter how metadata is stored, as long as it is possible to get the data out of the database in any format appropriate for the occasion. The SRU/SRW protocol is particularly aimed at precisely this: getting data out of a database in the required format, like MARC, Dublin Core, or anything else. An SRU server is a piece of middleware that receives requests, gets the requested data, converts the data and then returns the data in the requested format.

Currently at the Library of the University of Amsterdam we are migrating our ILS which also involves converting our data from one bibliographic metadata format (PICA+) to another (MARC). This is extremely complicated, especially because of the non-normalised structure of both formats. And I must say that in my opinion PICA+ is even the better one.
Also all German and Austrian libraries are meant to migrate from the MAB format to MARC, which also seems to be a move away from a superior format.
All because of the need to adhere to international standards, but with the wrong solution.

Maybe the projected new standard for resource description and access RDA will be the solution, but that may take a while yet.