libraries
Freedom and #Diversity in #Libraries
I read Marshall Breeding’s May 2017 “Library Systems Report 2017” way back when it was published in American Libraries magazine – but something struck me this morning while reading a completely unrelated article on politics/culture in the US…
(accessed from American Libraries magazine, 27 July 2017)
That if, as Breeding states, in the internet age, libraries are moving toward increasingly centralized, for-profit “solutions” for their tools and services – from technical services, authority syncing, reference chat tools and vendors for research materials of all formats (and I think he is correct), then libraries are moving away from their democratic ideals towards arrangements with a more fascist bent.
This trend in libraries of course simply reflects the state of culture at large that works by default with the internet.
But the end result, as I see it, is at least twofold:
- That the number of librarians and interested connected professionals are able to engage less and less in the design and implementation of those technologies across almost every front- This not only affects those people’s ability to engage in deep-dive lifelong learning, but it also means that “design local” as a guiding metaphor is being thrown out the window. Even as libraries’ staff talk about how much they like to serve their patrons/community/users (whatever each library wants to call its local constituents, it is actually less able over time to to design solutions built specifically for those very people.
- That one major result of the above trend as partially commented upon in bullet # 1 is a significant decline in diversity – this even as diversity & inclusion committees and working groups are being formed across libraryland in the United States. We talk about diversity and intellectual freedom in libraries. But we define those ideas in increasingly narrow terms if we do not take into consideration the elaborate tools that might be built if local libraries maintained their own servers, ILSs, and well defined privacy policies that could be much better managed if local libraries (of all types) maintained a higher level of control over their own systems.
The result of this trend migrates thinking & tinkering away from local decision making, policies, technological innovation towards a totalitarian model wherein diversity is discouraged and intellectual freedom is hindered across several important fronts – especially meaningful fronts in the information age.
A few thoughts…
Thank you for reading.
#Linked data, BibFrame and #libraries
I spent thursday and friday (04-05 may 2017) at the Library of Congress hearing about how the PCC committees are working with linked-data for libraries.
PCC (Program for Cooperative Cataloging) is a Library of Congress hosted standards group made of mostly academic libraries in the areas of metadata, marc21 and cataloging in general. The general sub areas of PCC are BIBCO (for records standards), NACO (for name authority data), CONSER (for serials handling), and SACO (for subject creation & management). The library at which I am Head of Cataloging/Metadata is a PCC member – so this is important for my professional development etc.
I am not really here to extol the virtues of standards in marc-based cataloging – as that could take a while. I am a fan. I am actually here to talk a little about how PCC libraries are examining linked-data for cataloging and all the necessary tools required to work with data in this form.
One surprising fact that I had not considered during my ongoing learning about linked data is the lack of totality for bibframe to contain the necessary modules and preset connections to all levels of vocabularies and thesauri related to material forms, name authority files and the like. Within a Library of Congress context, their catalogers can link to the files they have already defined as most of the necessary authority work and terms are their standard files anyway. Not so with everyone else.
Differences of authority data** depend on the nature of the community being served by the library doing the work. What I mean is that there are lots of linked data files relative to names – each with their own rules and biases – from VIAF to ISNI. VIAF brings together several standard name authority services maintained globally while ISNI is a subset of name authority linked services. Whether one or the other is used depends on the context.
OCLC, which hosts VIAF, uses its traditions of global connections over the internet to aggregate name authority data into one place. One challenge to this approach is that it is not clear that every library is interested in just any name authority file. So if a library wants to use one authority file over another, they will need to link to that one specifically. The open-ness of linked-data creates new challenges in metadata sources that do not exist to such a degree in marc.
This challenge pertains to genre/form headings as much as to authority information. There are a range of terms a cataloger or metadata specialist can attach to descriptions for resources and objects in collections, but not all these come from Library of Congress. They do have their extensive genre/form vocabulary ($2 lcgft), but there is also Getty’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus. The correct list used will just depend on what the local library needs for its users and how it gains access to these files over the internet.
The current web environment opens the doors to entirely new connections of computers to computers – exposing files and data sets to each other across the network. Way different approach to the current model – which is built on a strict & contained record. The new challenges for libraries and linked-data (in bibframe) reveal that the configurations possible are myriad – which means that there are a number of real infrastructure changes required to use these metadata sources for locally maintained catalogs.
This observation was just one of the many learned notions at the PCC meetings.
Thank you for reading.
** here, authority data refers to a standard file form for a name of a person, corporate entity or family name that is used so that all materials or results of queries for searched names can return all (at least theoretically) such materials and resources that might be relevant – either in a local library search, or even more important, in an open-web environment.
DC/SLA Board of Directors 2017
For archival purposes mostly…
Link to newsletter here.
Yes, I am on the board for 2017-2020 on the chapter president track.
J.
#Copyright and #CopyrightX
Good morning everyone.
I am planning to apply to the Harvard law School / HarvardX / Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University’s networked course, CopyrightX.
The application process involves several long questions to justify interest, sort of like a personal statement when applying to graduate school.
Has anyone out there applied to this course in the past who would be willing to offer any advice?
Thank you in advance,
Jesse
Limit of Time for #Librarian of Congress
According to the Library Journal, Congress is debating whether to put a 10-year limit on the position of Librarian of Congress.
It has been a life-position since 1802.
According to the article, the Senate has already passed the bill unanimously – which has then sent it to the House to vote.
Curious, what do people think about this?
Supposedly, ALA is supportive of the change.
Thoughts?
Thank you for reading.
Jesse
#Libraries Deepen the #Past with #History
One thing that seems to have gotten lost in the current conversation about access to information in libraries, scholarly communication (by way of Open Access Journals etc) is the notion that these technologies do not very well represent the past.
The Digital Humanities folks seem to be the best workers toward goals of representing the past with their digitization projects and increased contextualization of those documents. The time one takes to learn a subject is also an exhibition of time itself connected with artifacts, ephemera, books, and archived websites.
I mean, design in the networked era is always changing but there is nary a place to appreciate the web itself as a historically situated technology and tool that collects history.
The Internet Archive is the only place where the history of the internet can be browsed.
But that is only one place. Might we need an archive of the archive? You know, Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (L.O.C.K.S.S.). Yes, a micro-tangent.
They do offer a service (for a fee) for cultural heritage institutions called Archive-It, with which libraries, universities, museums etc can curate web crawls (collections of specifically chosen internet archives). This has some value. I worked with this tool a few years back at Folger Shakespeare Library.
But the main issue I see with the internet, digitized objects, born-digital resources, e-books, etc (and their archiving) is that the objects themselves, the files (be they DRM free, MP3, .PDF, .JPEG Open Source or Free Software tools, etc) is that the marks of history fail to make any impression on the objects themselves. These objects (say, digitized manuscripts from the 16th century in Arabic) may be surrounded by dates, historical contextualization and narrative, but are not, in my view, fundamentally distinguishable from an object created just 15 minutes ago. The encoding of the object is the same and the viewing is from the same point-of-view – – – from a screen or networked device of some kind.
Books and paper do not have this trouble. Each copy of an analog object is physically dis-ambiguous from its “exact” copy right beside it AND the travels and journeys (its history) will become evident increasingly over time because we live in a physical world. The networked age and digital agenda can not represent this fact. It can only state it – a fundamentally different thing.
Libraries and museums as physical spaces full of physical objects CAN and DO represent the past in a more visceral mode.
Comments?
Thank you for reading.
Jesse.
Surveillance & Privacy Publication at Library Journal
My collection development article, Careful, You’re Being Watched: Surveillance & Privacy, has just been published at Library Journal.
The print edition is out in August and will feature more information and resources.
Please click on over to read this version and subscribe to Library Journal or head on over to your local library to peruse the print.
Thank you for reading.
Jesse
