I have resigned from CC:DA. The meetings at this year's ALA Annual will be my last as a voting committee member. As a new manager I've had less time to deal with the deluge of detail. My attitude since formally resigning last winter is wake-me-when-its-over. Once it's released I'll work with colleagues in my institution to determine whether or not we need to implement.
Let the triumvirate figure out the business case.
Don't get me wrong. I think RDA is a good thing. There's a good conversation happening at the
Inquiring Librarian about RDA implementation and the LC statement. I agree with Jenn Riley that
that RDA is overall a positive thing, and that it represents a necessary (although of course not perfect) step forward in the ongoing evolution of libraries
I'm also with Irvin Flack, who commented on Jenn's post
I want RDA to work but I've decided I'm going to wait for the full final draft before I try to read any more of it. I become too frustrated and confused. I can't afford to lose any more hair! I find myself wondering: why on Earth did they write that rule that way?
A-effing-men!
They wrote RDA by cutting and pasting wholesale portions of AACR2 then re-writing bits -- not a good way to create a whole new means of looking at content standards for cataloging, IMHO. It also introduced a lot of the consistency errors within the text. Then they re-arranged the ordering of the parts and only released certain parts at at time. I found it impossible to keep a cohesive mental model of the drafts. I look forward to the full release. I don't think I'll read it though. Life's too short. I resigned from CC:DA because I don't have time to faithfully review it and contribute to its development anymore. I'd love to follow it, but I need to be practical with my time and my health since
beginning to have problems in that realm. Not to mention
the hernia risk.
I intend to test catalog some things using the electronic version of RDA when available. Let the print version die please! I realize that some small, less funded, libraries will still need to work from a print version hence the JSC's decision to stick with publishing both print+online. But couldn't we write it online and let the people with less money print out customized versions rather than writing it as if we still live in a print-centric world when it comes to "standards" for working with metadata? That could help with the cohesiveness issues in the text.
As a manager of a small cataloging and acquisitions operation I sometimes wonder just how relevant RDA is going to be in our future. I suspect not much. Sorry. I had to talk about the elephant in my room.
Shelf-ready monographs, umpteen thousand title electronic resource packages, open access eBooks, etc. mean that I'll be ingesting more records directly from publishers. And do publisher's give a rat's ass about RDA? (see
EDitEUR) As for legacy bib records in my OPAC, I predict that somebody will write a MARC/RDA translator and that we'll be automating the migration of records (if it proves necessary, which I believe it may not).
I suspect it will be better for MPOW to play the middle road. Wait until other libraries adopt RDA and see how they do. I've got other priorities right now. MPOW is a specialized research institution. Our metadata services are moving in the direction of assisting with the information management of resources created on campus. Sure we'll always order books and journals but that stuff is going to become more automated as time goes by. RDA is not on my radar as a skill set I need to be training people to have. Understanding metadata formats and interoperability is a bigger concern. Ditto metadata for digital preservation and data curation. I suspect repositories and reference will be our library's life blood. I believe
John Wilbanks was right when he said providing things like namespaces will be the bread and butter of the new-school library. We need to have the skills to do that type of thing or we risk diminished relevancy when our primary clientèle's needs are not being met. And yeah, we need to do the appropriate needs assessment to determine that we prioritize in terms of evolving the library.
I'm filing RDA under nice-to-be-aware-of but not worth following in detail anymore. But that's just me. Your mileage may vary.
Labels: cataloging, CC:DA, life1.0, metadata, RDA
My new gig is still at the overwhelming-but-in-a-good way phase. I've
got jobs open, btw, if you want to work with me. Once I'm a bit less short-staffed I'll be able to blog a bit more as previously promised. I've set myself a goal of posting at least once per week.
I've got a few ideas percolating plus a few longish posts which have been in draft since (eep!) last summer. I've been holding in my snarks about RDA. I've got long ignored notes from DCC to discuss. I've got a few stories about online identity management. And so on....
The big but is that I've been experiencing a lot of health issues. I've recently learned that my heart murmur may be getting worse and I've also got some thyroid funny business happening. Nothing to worry about most likely. It does mean a slew of tests and doctors appointments, however. All my promises above are predicated on my ability to stay well.
Labels: dcc-2007, life1.0, metadata, RDA
It took me over an hour to print out the latest draft chapters of RDA (Really Dreadful Annoyance).
Yes, I know it's going to be the online product which will eliminate some of the redundancies through the magic of hypertext. Yes, I know that in the real world people won't be reading this work wholesale -- it is a reference tool, after all.
BUT
How on earth can we ever expect anybody outside of the library science domain to use this if it takes a major re-arrangement of schedule to merely print it out???
I think I may have given myself a hernia carrying it to my car.
Labels: RDA
I'm going to pull a
Mark Lidner and give up on trying to comment
the Futures report. There's been a huge-o explosion of happenings in the bibliographic wilderness this past week. It's hard enough for me to get the most relevant-to-me stuff even read.
I did attend the
3rd International Conference on Digital Curation and I'll try to summarize my copious notes. I'll be writing a trip report anyway, so it serves a dual purpose. In the meantime, check out what
Peter Murray-Rust and
Chris Rusbridge have to say about it.
Other things worth reviewing and commenting on which I probably won't:
- OAI-ORE alpha specification
- Yee's cataloging rules
- Zotero IA alliance
- Roy Tennant on the term "bibliographic control" (which I've always LOATHED ... it gives me mental images of leather-clad dominatrices demanding all the books be returned to a library)
What's with all this stuff coming out during this season anyway? Holy
Toledo people! It's time for holidays. Stop blogging already and go spend time with your families! I wish I could, but the next draft of RDA is going to be released very soon and I need to have it under my belt prior to ALA Midwinter for CC:
DA's discussion.
I'm starting to wonder if I even have time to blog at all... how the heck does everybody else manage it? Don't you have lives?
Labels: CC:DA, dcc-2007, LC, life1.0, metadata, Peter Murray-Rust, RDA
The
unedited web cast of the 11/13 meeting of the LC working group is available.
Karen Coyle does a nice summary.
Recommendation 4.2 re: RDA is particularly interesting esp. coming on the heels of the JSC's recent re-re-organization of the RDA structure.
4.2 Realize FRBR. The framework known as FRBR has great potential but so far is untested. It is being used as the basis for RDA, even though FRBR itself is not clearly understood. The working group recommends that no further work be done on RDA until there has been more investigation of FRBR and the basis it provides for bibliographic metadata. [Note: this recommendation is likely to change such that there will be specific recommendations relating to RDA; FRBR will be treated separately.]
The LC report has it dead.bang.on with that recommendation. The connections between FRBR and RDA weren't made explicit until the last revision of the
RDA Prospectus and the release of
the mapping this past June . They key phase is "
FRBR itself is not clearly understood. "
Building a de-facto standard based upon a conceptual model which isn't clearly understood seems kind of bass-ackward. Is it realistic, however, to wait for FRBR to be better understood? We've had it for almost a decade. Let me play devil's advocate for a second. If a conceptual model is difficult to understand than maybe it's not a very good model? It's one argument for a do-over on writing RDA.
I think stopping the RDA process and re-starting from scratch from the conceptual model up would be ideal. Especially if when re-starting the process the JSC continued to consult with non-library related communities to discuss their conceptual models and come to a common, or at least complimentary, model(s)
prior to coming up with specifications for the actual metadata. The problem is stopping the RDA process is never going to happen. The publication schedule is driving this train and JSC has no intention of deviating from the proposed 2009 release. Remember that JSC reports to the RDA Committee of Principles, which consists of reps from the national library organizations which have a vested interest in their publishing income. There is no economic incentive for the JSC to call a halt to things and re-think. It's unrealistic to expect that to change and crazy-making to those of us commenting on RDA to keep requesting it. The stop-the-presses option has been discussed more than once at CC:DA and we keep coming back to the same conclusion.
What to do then? As best we can. I am optimistic that RDA may, eventually, get things right. The JSC is getting better about working with other stakeholder groups. See, for example, the
DCMI/RDA task group working on a DC application profile for RDA and a controlled element vocabulary. I think it's conceivable that more partnerships will be developed and that RDA will evolve to be based upon a mutually understood conceptual framework -- most likely a more fully-understood FRBR. It will be interesting to see the full LC working group recommendations when they are released on 12/1. Maybe, given recommendation 4.2 they will suggest another RDA/?? working group on fully exploring the implications of FRBR as a conceptual model and integrating the conceptual models of other communities.
All I really know is that RDA will be an imperfect work-in-progress for quite a long time. We all have to accept that we will have a release-refine-release cycle and that we won't get perfection the first time out. Otherwise we'll wait forever.
Labels: cataloging, CC:DA, FRBR, JSC, LC, metadata, RDA
metadata.net doesn't list RDA as a resource discovery/description
metadata initiative. To be fair, the site hasn't been updated for a year. Also, they have
METS, MODS, and
CIMI listed, as well as a link to
IFLA's list of
metadata initiatives, so they're not completely ignorant of
librariana.
It's just sort of interesting to ponder the oversight as one considers the relevance of RDA outside of the library world.
metadata.net,
fwiw, is run by the
MAENAD project, which was(is?) a
metadata research project run by the venerable
Jane Hunter, a leading researcher in
metadata issues for complex digital objects.
Is it an act of hubris to reach out to other communities with the expectation that they will leap to adopt our "standard"?
Labels: metadata, RDA
I want to write about CC:DA comments on RDA Ch.6 and 7, but it will take me eons to pull together the issues. I started the new gig yesterday and have some thoughts akin to Karen's about starting a new job.
In the meantime, I want to point out
SciVee, an incredibly cool tool for disseminating scientific information. It makes me incredibly happy to see
SDSC's involvement. I first saw scientific visualizations back in 1996 when I was
SDSC's librarian. At the time I was responsible for maintaining a bibliography of publications by the center's researchers. The "bib" as it was affectionately known, was kept for NSF reporting purposes. Big grants mean big accountability and the number of peer-reviewed publications is one measurement of a project's success. At the time I felt that it would be really cool to create
metaworks of articles with their associated publications,
presentations AND raw data. Those
metaworks would need to be engendered via
metadata for bibliographic families. Ten years later all of these disparate yet related materials are beginning to come together within tools scientists can use. That's just wicked rad!
Even though I'm glad to see this trend, it does make me ponder the role of cataloging and
metadata services within academic libraries vs. public libraries. Our audiences are so different and the types of materials we deal with are so different that I wonder if it's a good idea to continue to hold alliances with rules such as RDA. As CC:DA reviews RDA, I'm continually reminded to think about small, rural, public libraries and the needs of those libraries with less funding. Can a standard for bibliographic description work for both the academic handling bibliographic families pulled together on-the-fly AND the small town librarian handling graphic novels?
I have my doubts.
Labels: CC:DA, metadata, RDA, SciVee, SDSC
I'm glad that
Meredith, and others have brought up the issue of staying sane. Librarian life can be stressful. There are reasons I sought such a long break between gigs. I need to decompress. I let myself get overworked, discouraged, run-down in the past few months and I owe to myself to regain my health. My first month of vacation has been hectic and not quite the respite I need.
Part of regaining my health involves getting s**t done. There's a bathroom and bedroom to be painted and a home office needing a purge. I've been drinking the David Allen Kool-Aid so I'm going through all the steps of integrating those time management principles into my life. The idea is to get all those unfinished niggly things out of the way so I don't stress about them. I haven't gotten very far with the niggly things yet because I've been busy with gadgets, CC:DA work, culinary school, and ALA travel.
I lucked into a bit of money and was able to procure a MacBook and upgrade my cell phone to a Treo -- I'm hoping it will help me implement GTD. So far, it's just been yet-more-stuff-to-learn. The MacBook is (oestensibly) for my daughter. She has graciously allowed me to abscond with it for a couple of months. I've been geeking out installing a bunch of open source software and learning my way around Appledom. As a bonus, it's good for practicing the
techbootcamp unix cheat sheet commands (password=library). It is not a bonus for getting sh**t done. Evaluating and installing software takes time. Especially when your software installations fail because you didn't know to drag the installer to the application folder to do the installation. Nothing like beginning with a new operating system to humble one's-self. Add another new OS (Palm) to the mix and one really needs to get into the groove of
beginner's mind. My struggles to learn new tech have been ongoing since the day I left MFPOW.
My first few days off were spent with virtual colleagues writing
the preliminary report of the CC:DA Task Force on Internal and External Communication. I was hoping to write more about RDA ch.3. I haven't forgotten my promises to comment. I just have trouble finding dedicated time for writing coherently. See the part above re: stressing myself out. Task force deadlines have trumped analysis and opinion pieces for the blog. I can't even keep up with NGC4LIB. In the interest of staying sane, I hereby renege on my promises and add a very weak, "what they said!" to the others who have already very ably commented on Ch.3.
Speaking of getting sh**t done, CC:DA has the most work of any committee upon which I've ever served. I've been getting to know the history and purpose of CC:DA committee quite well during my participation on the TF. That is worth blogging about. I sense a bit of a disconnect between our purpose and our work. I've added it to my tickler file. I spent the better part of June madly reading all of the paperwork coming from the JSC and attending
culinary school in Ft. Bragg, CA. I've now got two courses towards my certification as a raw vegan chef under my belt.
I'm working on house and personal stuff so I can make space for all this writing I'm not doing. I have lots of opinions about the RDA scope document update and the various goings on. Right now, however, it's all I can do to keep up with the reading and committee voting stuff. ALA was its typical mad blur of meetings and travel. I'm happy to (finally) be back at home, even if only for a brief respite.
I'll be driving cross-continent and
cycling the Underground RR with the wife and kid for the last half of July/early August so posts are likely to be intermittent. There will be a lot of RDA stuff coming down the pipe for me to review for CC:DA, so that will form the bulk of my time online along with continuing to learn about my new Mac/Palm personal computing environment.
I really need to do better at doing nothing with my vacation time.
Labels: CC:DA, RDA
Diane Hillmann comments on a May 11 post to NGC4LIB by Karen Coyle. Karen says "The problem that we see today in the library world is that when there is a standard that is rising up to the point of being useful and usable by many in our community, it isn't clear where to take it so that it can move from being a neat hack to being a community standard," and suggests that ALA is the obvious body to promote library interests, at least in theory.
Diane asks "given this standards reality check from Karen, what are the implications for us?"
I say the implication for ALA is that the Divisions need to coordinate better on standards. They need to speed up the official channels of communication between committees. The extreme busyness of people contributes to the lack of standards work being done. Nobody wants more work. The other part of it is that we're not making effective use of social tools to do the business of the association. We create more work for ourselves by not using the time-saving new tools. The difficulty is that learning the tools takes time+effort=more work. There's no incentive to change.
That's starting to change (hooray for ALA communities,wikis, and blogs despite their growing pains! hooray for hiring Jenny Levine! ). But I still have trouble convincing people to use web-based conferencing a go. The reason it takes months for a committee to write a report is that, even with email, it takes time to send out a doc, get responses, compile responses, synthesize and summarize, check back in with committee members, then take necessary actions.
Come to think of it, a committee probably only recommends actions. Another problem is assigning responsibility for action and following through to make sure it's done!
As a task force chair, I'd much rather have one single real-time discussion with the task force members to gather all comments at once. It's faster. I'd like to spend less time volunteering please. Perhaps if we did better with the social tools, we'd do better with the standards work? ALA already has some channels in place for standards development. I give you the example of CC:DA.
I just submitted a preliminary report from the
CC:DA's Task Force on Internal and External communication. The TF reviewed
CC:DA's charge as well as
"Building international descriptive cataloging standards..." (the promotional "pamphlet" to explain to the masses just what-the-heck CC:DA does).
In the CC:DA charge section of the
"Building international.." document it says:
To develop official ALA positions on proposed international cataloging policies and standards pertaining to the committee’s area of responsibility and to advise the official ALA representative; or, if there is no official ALA representative, to act as the clearinghouse within ALA for review of these policies and standards and to serve as the formal liaison between ALA and the originating organizations.
Most of the committee scope described "Building international..." is related to the development of AACR and interactions with the JSC. Yet it also says CC:DA's role is to develop official ALA positions on cataloging and related standards. This bullet point quoted above indicates, to me anyway, that CC:DA should be taking a proactive role in standards discussions within ALA. It also means we need to pay attention to the first two words, "to develop." The FBI calls that a clue, son. To develop implies taking action. (smile). I think this action needs to be both internal to ALA and external to other standards bodies. CC:DA has sucked at taking the external-to-ALA actions.
Take a look at the CC:DA roster, for example. Most of the external liaison members are from library or librarian associations. There weren't any non-library bodies represented until Diane Hillmann (for DCMI) and Curtiss Priest (for IEEE) were added.
The "Building international ... standards" document also says that CC:DA welcomes suggestions
*In applying standards for bibliographic control to new and emerging technologies
*In employing automated solutions to the development of descriptive cataloging records.
Yes, CC:DA welcomes suggestions but has really only been taking them from librariankind.
If CC:DA is supposed to do standards work, why hasn't it? The snark in me wants to say that it's because the minutiae of dealing with AACR and MARC takes up all of CC:DA time and probably a forest's worth of paper. To be fair, there is the "pertaining to the committee’s area of responsibility" clause in the "Building international ... standards" document. AACR really is the bulk of CC:DA's area of responsibility as per the written charge. I can understand how we could collectively miss following through on a wee little suggestion to develop positions for ALA beyond AACR/RDA. I don't think it excuses the neglect, however. At CC:DA meetings we really don't much discuss standards beyond AACR/RDA (if we consider that a standard).
Betty Landesman, ALA's NISO rep, gives us a report each Midwinter and Annual, and she announces NISO proposals/votes on the CC:DA email list which gives committee members the opportunity to respond. I've tried to review those and give Betty feedback, but I just couldn't. My life is f.u.l.l. And I have no idea if other CC:DA members, voting or non, give Betty any feedback either. My sense is that nobody does, but you'd have to ask Betty.
I bear some of the blame for this lack of attention to the standards proposals as a voting member of CC:DA. Diane hit the nail on the head when she said the work of standards development doesn't happen, "mostly because we already have busy lives and sometimes our institutions don’t support such activity very well. " The RDA publication process has CC:DA members in a mire of reading/thinking/responding work. Not an excuse for not paying attention to standards. Especially when I hold the radical view that ALA should insist on decoupling RDA development from the Committee of Principles' publication schedule. I can't very well argue that radical stance unless CC:DA members are willing to be proactive in their involvement with the other related standards work.
I think it means that we need to add more people to CC:DA in order to spread the work load around a bit more. I also think it means that the CC:DA TF on Communication really needs to come up with concrete, do-able, alternatives to CC:DA's current methods of disseminating information.
Labels: CC:DA, metadata, RDA, standards
Karen Coyle interviews Diane Hillman about the outcomes of a recent meeting between the editor of RDA, some members of the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of RDA,* and other stakeholders.
Diane Hillman has been a tireless champion encouraging the JSC to work with other metadata communities to develop RDA.
The RDA/DCMI collaboration will include an RDA application profile for DC and a formal element vocabulary. An controlled yet extensible element vocabulary is necessary for describing carriers as per the revised chapter Ch.3 of RDA. No, I haven't forgotten to write up my notes on that, btw. With any luck, I should get to that today!
*note the new name! for those of you not in the know, the JSC used to be for the revision of AACR
Labels: DCMI, interoperability, metadata, RDA, standards
As I am reading the new draft ch.3 of RDA, all I can think is, "how the $*%& am I going to train people how to use this thing?"
And I love metadata. Picture how it would read to somebody who doesn't thrill to the notion of cataloging. Picture how reading it will feel to a new hire in a formerly-known-as-cataloging department or a library-school student. I have to confess, I skimmed the AACR2 when I was in Gloria Leckie's kick-ass cataloging class back in my lib-school days. It really is meant to be a reference book digested in wee pieces. I'm not suggesting that newbies read it wholesale like the current reviewers are doing with RDA. Yet one needs a mental model of what the whole "book" is about in order to understand how to use it. At least for me. I'm a visual thinker.
If any a text required a visualization, the
AACR2 AACR3 RDA does. It's difficult for me to digest the many and varied connections between RDA and other standards. I'm constantly flipping back and forth between FRBR, ISBD, FRAR, FRAD, etc. I'm glad I can print them out at work and I don't have to spend for the printer ink on my own dime. And don't even get me started about carrying them to ALA for the CC:DA meetings.
I do have thoughts on what I've read of the rev.Ch 3 so far. Oh yes indeedy do. I need to clean them up and clarify a few things for myself before I comment publicly. Mostly I want to get caught up with NGC4LB and RDA-L and make sure I add value to the discourse
Labels: metadata, RDA
I've ranted about
the notion of a book on Institutional Repositories. Since writing that rant, I've had some publishers contact me to elucidate the advantages of using a professional publisher, namely: a close read and suggestions for revisions, publicity, and experience with distribution.
Of course I'm not dissing publishers and editors. I recognize the value they bring to the publication process. The point of the rant is my opinion that literate people will need to radically reconceptualize our collective notion of the book in order to make full use of books of the future. For librarians, this should go hand in hand with our use of FRBR and RDA.
I've been procrastinating about reading the recent release of its draft chapter number three.
Even though I'm a trained cataloger, I still struggle with catalogerese. And it's not the most scintillating of reads after a long days work. I'm purposefully avoiding the RDA discussion list and the NextGenCatalog space, just so that I can form my own opinions while I read it.
I'm also beginning task force work for CC:DA on internal and external communication. It should be interesting in this time of flux to take another look at that.
For what its worth, I'm firmly in the Coyle/Hillman/Weiss train of thought when it comes to all things RDA. They state the issues far more eloquently than I could. Once I've got the draft chapter under my belt, I'll write out my thoughts.
Labels: book, metadata, RDA
