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November 17 Patron CootiesI guess I knew this would come up sooner or later. Over at The D-Light of Digital Collections, Lyle says: Strictly speaking, including ratings and tags on bibliographic records violates the Library Bill of Rights interpretation on Labels and Rating Systems. Now there's definitely a problem here, even if the LBoRioLaRS is left breathless by the attempt to describe it. LBoRioLaRS attempts to draw a bright line where there isn't one. For example:
Movie ratings are useful even if they're not perfect. And I'm highly amused by the phrase "private groups", as though a government agency could do a better job. Or librarians! I don't really think we need a film ratings board staffed by librarians. But apparently when publishers inscribe a book's subject headings on stone tablets and ship them off for permanent storage in the basement of the Library of Congress, the taint of private enterprise is burnt off by the intensity of their moral purity. The contributor’s metadata is full enough for an image like this one, and many of the others here, to be appraised by curators and archivists for addition to professionally assembled collections and exhibitions such as those discussed above.
MacColl has nothing but praise for the images on Flickr and their descriptions, apparently with a small exception: as good as they are, however good they are, they need only one thing to be perfect: to be appraised by a professional. But Flickr already is a collection and exhibition. How did we slide from the idea that catalogs (and librarians, for that matter) have unique value, to thinking that folksonomies are just wannabe catalogs? Surely both have unique value. In the current issue of Against The Grain (v.20 #5, November 2008, not online as of this posting), Rick Anderson talks about how few information professionals there are compared with the amount of information that's generated every year. He states (p 52) that five billion gigabytes of information were created in 2002, and that on a liberal estimate of the number of number of information professionals in the world, each of them would need to categorize a Library of Congress every year in order to keep up. Anderson uses the figures to make a slightly different point, but my conclusion is that attempting to catalog all the tags in the world is impossible as well as pointless. November 12 Public Relations 2.0Oh dear! TLC (The Library Company) has just announced a new ILS, LS2, and a new OPAC, LS2 PAC. But here's how they describe it: LS2 is a social-centric search experience. It exploits the best of the Web to enable points of interaction between users, enriching their experience of your collection. While I might be willing to have my experience of your collection enriched, I'm pretty sure my wife would object if anyone enabled points of interaction with me. Engage your users. Promote your library. Make your users do a double-take and then invite them to settle in and hang out. I hope you'll forgive me for saying so, but when I use your OPAC, I want to be done and out of there as soon as possible. Create a place to go and be (and search, find, and see). No comment! OK, one comment: it doesn't even scan. The silly thing about this is that the feature list is very impressive:
November 10 Metadata QualityA little while ago, I received a Google Alert email, which "alerted" me to an interesting post at A Librarian's Life, and thence to K-State Libraries conference reports blog, where I found a report on Karen Calhoun's recent presentation to KU. I did a Google search on the title, "Our space: the new world of metadata", and found the presentation slides on SlideShare. This presentation actually comes from a different time and place, but it has the same title, and not being a cataloger, that's good enough for me.
There's a lot of good stuff in the presentation, but there was one sentence that caught me eye (slide 59): "With respect to metadata quality, it is likely that librarians' and end users' definitions differ." For my sins, I spent a few years selling manufacturing quality management software, and I've been thinking about how the notion of quality developed for that problem domain might be applied to libraries in general, and metadata in particular. And I tend to over-react whenever I see the word 'quality'.
My first reaction was that the definition of quality BELONGS to users and librarians don't get a vote, thank you very much. But that's not right.
Manufacturers have been thnking about quality management for more than fifty years, first in the auto industry but now throughout manufacturing. Whatever your opinion of the final result, quality management is a well-understood discipline. When widget manufacturers talk about quality, they mean that the process and product meet a succession of requirements from the design of the widget to its eventual use. The production process should be safe and not generate unnecessary scrap. The dimensions of the widget should fall within specified tolerances, and the widget should work in the hands of the eventual user. There's a product designer that specifies the widget itself, and often a separate process engineer who specifies the process to be used in manufacturing, packaging and delivery. Given those specifications, each person that touches the widget is indirectly responsible for the quality requirements of everyone after them in the production chain, through to the eventual user.
Now the metadata in a library catalog doesn't just sit there either. For example, in a discovery application a search query uses the metadata to select the results of the query. The metadata of the result set is passed to the application, formatted by the user interface and delivered to some user device. Each step in this process requires a focus on quality. In fact, quality is a property of the process, not (just) the end product delivered to the end-user.
While software is not the same as manufacturing, there are a couple of ideas from manufacturing quality that can be applied to metadata. Widget quality is almost invariably checked at the end of the manufacturing process. Inspired by Brian Herzog's Work Like a Patron Day, my suggestion for catalogers is that once they've added an entry to the catalog, they try to find it using the patron interface to the catalog.
For widgets, use by the end user is the last point at which quality can be observed and reported. For metadata, that point is the patron's screen. But this screen is more complicated than a single response to a single query. For example, it may have links to, or lists of, other books by the same author, or other books on the same subject or with the same tags. Or reviews or ratings, and on and on. It's true but not relevant that the cataloger has no particular control over how the the application extracts data from the catalog, interprets it and formats it for display. The cataloger and the metadata s/he enters is logically the first step in the flow from catalog to application to user, but the application is fixed by the time metadata is entered, and the cataloger is chronologically the last step before the patron. Manufacturing quality also includes a robust process for handling returns -- errors that are discovered after the product has left the factory. What happens if there's an error in the catalog? Does it makes sense for users to report errors? Coincidentally, Google Books includes just such a mechanism, with a commitment to continuous improvement of their metadata.
Today I came across a book in the catalog with no ISBN, something I would have bet wasn't possible. What's to be done? November 06 Show me a signI try to avoid the stereotype that men never ask for directions, but I also seem to have a problem following them.
I was in an unfamiliar library a few days ago, and had to ask where "005.8" was. I tried to listen carefully to the directions, and off I went. I didn't even end up in the right room.
The previous time I asked for directions I was in my local library, when I asked for directions to the graphic novels. I tried to listen carefully to the directions, and off I went. I didn't even end up in the right room. I think I need a little help. Sooo ... these are nice signs. November 04 Everything except books is miscellaneousOver at Just Another Classes.TameTheWeb.com Blogs Weblog, Nick has a great review of Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous. I think this is an excellent and useful book, and I've pretty much drunk the Kool-Aid with respect to "miscellaneous" classification schemes like tagging. But then I returned to reality. Here's an expanded version of the comment I posted on Nick's blog.
I run hot and cold on Dewey and the organization of knowledge. Over the weekend I wanted to find some books on web site security. The corresponding Library of Congress Subject Heading is "Web Sites -- Security Measures". Looking this up in the catalog produced exactly eight books in the entire 40-library network, none at my local library, but one at a library 12.6 miles away as the google flies. When I got to the library I found two other useful books next to the book I was looking for, still in 005.8, but with slightly different subject classifications. I wouldn't have found the other two books if I hadn't been looking at an organized shelf.
In principle, I agree with David Weinberger. You should be able to search for and select books by arbitrary tags and labels from whatever source. If books had RFID, librarians could pile them in the middle of the library floor, or shelve them by size or color or recency, and patrons would still be able to find them. In practice, it's too darn hard to browse using the current generation of discovery applications. Weinberger is right that there is no right classification. The problem for libraries is that some organization is evidently useful. For librarians, you can put this in the form of two questions: what shelving order and what headings on the shelves? For patrons, the corresponding questions are: where is the book that I want, and what books are like this book? The Dewey shelf is alive because current software systems can't replace how the shelf answers those questions. Now astute readers might wonder why I didn't search the catalog by Dewey number. It's a good question. One reason is that it took me two days to think of it. Another reason is that the web interface to the catalog doesn't really help the process. Now, click here, which is where you land when you click through to the catalog from the library web site. If you wanted to search by Dewey number, should you click on the "Advanced Search" link? Nope! It's on the "Other" tab along with four other code number searches and search by journal title. (This last is an odd one, because it seems to be the same as an advanced search on title limited to journals.) But let's do a search for items which match "005.8". Click here for the results. When you search by call number, the result is a list of matching call numbers. This isn't helpful! No worst there is none.
There's a genuine design problem here. Searches are often ambiguous, like a search for "web site security". A discovery application might choose to accept the ambiguity and display any matching items, or it might attempt to resolve the ambiguity. There's no right answer. Amazon always shows you a list of items: if you search for "carol" on Amazon you'll get songs by Carole King as well as books of carols in one unsorted list. On the other hand, if you search for "carol" on IMDB you'll be shown carefully organized alternatives, including names and titles, as well as some politely phrased suggestions for "improving your search".
But there's also an important principle which should drive the design of discovery applications: people using the catalog are looking for books (or CDs or DVDs or ...), not catalog numbers or subject headings. The latter can only appear in the user interface if there's a clear path to the former.
What the Dewey shelf provides that my library catalog doesn't is a way to easily widen a search to related topics. You just keep looking along the shelf. You might miss other books shelved in other places, but you'll see some related books. Weinberger might be right that the future is miscellaneous, but the present has been shelved in order.
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