Women designing

Those of us in the library community are generally aware of our premier "designing woman," the so-called "Mother of MARC," Henriette Avram. Avram designed the MAchine Reading Cataloging record in the mid-1960's, a record format that is still being used today. MARC was way ahead of its time using variable length data fields and a unique character set that was sufficient for most European languages, all thanks to Avram's vision and skill. I'd like to introduce you here to some of the designing women of the University of California library automation project, the project that created one of the first online catalogs in the beginning of the 1980's, MELVYL. Briefly, MELVYL was a union catalog that combined data from the libraries of the nine (at that time) University of California campuses. It was first brought up as a test system in 1980 and went "live" to the campuses in 1982.

Work on the catalog began in or around 1980, and various designs were put forward and tested. Key designers were Linda Gallaher-Brown, who had one of the first masters degrees in computer science from UCLA, and Kathy Klemperer, who like many of us was a librarian turned systems designer.

We were struggling with how to create a functional relational database of bibliographic data (as defined by the MARC record) with computing resources that today would seem laughable but were "cutting edge" for that time. I remember Linda remarking that during one of her school terms she returned to her studies to learn that the newer generation of computers would have this thing called an "operating system" and she thought "why would you need one?" By the time of this photo she had come to appreciate what an operating system could do for you. The one we used at the time was IBM's OS 360/370.

Kathy Klemperer was the creator of the database design diagrams that were so distinctive we called them "Klemperer-grams." Here's one from 1985:

MELVYL database design Klemperer-gram, 1985

Drawn and lettered by hand, not only did these describe a workable database design, they were impressively beautiful. Note that this not only predates the proposed 2009 RDA "database scenario" for a relational bibliographic design by 24 years, it provides a more detailed and most likely a more accurate such design.

RDA "Scenario 1" data design, 2009

In the early days of the catalog we had a separate file and interface for the cataloged serials based on a statewide project (including the California State Universities). Although it was possible to catalog serials in the MARC format, the systems that had the detailed information about which issues the libraries held was stored in serials control databases that were separate from the library catalog, and many serials were represented by crusty cards that had been created decades before library automation. The group below developed and managed the CALLS (California Academic Library List of Serials). Four of those pictured were programmers, two were serials data specialists, and four had library degrees. Obviously, these are overlapping sets. The project heads were Barbara Radke (right) and Theresa Montgomery (front, second from right).

At one point while I was still working on the MELVYL project, but probably around the very late 1990's or early 2000's, I gathered up some organization charts that had been issued over the years and quickly calculated that during its history the project the technical staff that had created this early marvel had varied from 3/4 to 2/3 female. I did some talks at various conferences in which I called MELVYL a system "created by women." At my retirement in 2003 I said the same thing in front of the entire current staff, and it was not well-received by all. In that audience was one well-known member of the profession who later declared that he felt women needed more mentoring in technology because he had always worked primarily with men, even though he had indeed worked in an organization with a predominantly female technical staff, and another colleague who was incredulous when I stated once that women are not a minority, but over 50% of the world's population. He just couldn't believe it.

While outright discrimination and harassment of women are issues that need to be addressed, the invisibility of women in the eyes of their colleagues and institutions is horribly damaging. There are many interesting projects, not the least the Wikipedia Women in Red, that aim to show that there is no lack of accomplished women in the world, it's the acknowledgment of their accomplishments that falls short. In the library profession we have many women whose stories are worth telling. Please, let's make sure that future generations know that they have foremothers to look to for inspiration.

Citations get HOT

The Public Library of Science research section, PLOSLabs (ploslabs.org) has announced some very interesting news about the work that they are doing on citations, which they are calling "Rich Citations".

Citations are the ultimate "linked data" of academia, linking new work with related works. The problem is that the link is human-readable only and has to be interpreted by a person to understand what the link means. PLOS Labs have been working to make those citations machine-expressive, even though they don't natively provide the information needed for a full computational analysis.

Given what one does have in a normal machine-readable document with citations, they are able to pull out an impressive amount of information:

• What section the citation is found in. There is some difference in meaning whether a citation is found in the "Background" section of an article, or in the "Methodology" section. This gives only a hint to the meaning of the citation, but it's more than no information at all.
• How often a resource is cited in the article. This could give some weight to its importance to the topic of the article.
• What resources are cited together. Whenever a sentence ends with "[3][7][9]", you at least know that those three resources equally support what is being affirmed. That creates a bond between those resources.
• ... and more

As an open access publisher, they also want to be able to take users as directly as possible to the cited resources. For PLOS publications, they can create a direct link. For other resources, they make use of the DOI to provide links. Where possible, they reveal the license of cited resources, so that readers can know which resources are open access and which are pay-walled.

This is just a beginning, and their demo site, appropriately named "alpha," uses their rich citations on a segment of the PLOS papers. They also have an API that developers can experiment with.

I was fortunate to be able to spend a day recently at their Citation Hackathon where groups hacked on ongoing aspects of this work. Lots of ideas floated around, including adding abstracts to the citations so a reader could learn more about a resource before retrieving it. Abstracts also would add search terms for those resources not held in the PLOS database. I participated in a discussion about coordinating Wikidata citations and bibliographies with the PLOS data.

Being able to datamine the relationships inherent in the act of citation is a way to help make visible and actionable what has long been the rule in academic research, which is to clearly indicate upon whose shoulders you are standing. This research is very exciting, and although the PLOS resources will primarily be journal articles, there are also books in their collection of citations. The idea of connecting those to libraries, and eventually connecting books to each other through citations and bibliographies, opens up some interesting research possibilities.

Clarification from Sweden on OCLC negotiations

The National Library of Sweden has issued a short blog post clarifying their objections to the WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities (WCRR) policy. The inability of the two parties to reconcile these issues led the library to break off contract negotiations with OCLC. I find the Library's objections to be logical and undeniable:

1. The relationship with OCLC around record use is asymmetrical, with OCLC having the right to do whatever it wishes with the records while library use is restricted by the policy.

2. The policy actually requires libraries to favor WorldCat over other services, and thus hinder competition, which is not appropriate for a national library. [kc: This may even be illegal for publicly funded libraries in the US.]

3.  Open data is of strategic importance for libraries.

They conclude with:

To this end we urge OCLC to allow members to treat downloaded records as their own, including releasing them under any open license such as CC0. We feel that this would strengthen rather than diminish OCLCs strong status as a service provider to the library community.

National Library of Sweden and OCLC fail to agree

In a blog post entitled "No deal with OCLC" the National Library of Sweden has announced that after five years they have ended negotiations with OCLC to become participants in WorldCat. The point of difference was over the OCLC record use policy. Sweden has declared the bibliographic data in the Swedish National Catalog, Libris, to be open for use without constraints.

"A fundamental condition for the entire Libris collaboration is voluntary participation. Libraries that catalogue in Libris can take out all their bibliographic records and incorporate them instead into another system, or use them in anyway the library finds suitable." (from the blog post)

This is an example of the down-stream constraint issues that we discussed while working on the Open Bibliography Principles for the Open Knowledge Foundation. While open data may appear to be primarily an ideological stance it in fact has real practical implications. A bibliographic database is made up of records and data elements that can have uses in many contexts. In addition, the same bibliographic data may exist in numerous databases managed by members of entirely different communities. Someone may wish to create a new database or service using data coming from a variety of sources. At times someone will want to use only portions of records and may mix and match individual data elements from different sources. Any kind of constraints on use of the data, including something as seemingly innocuous as allowing all non-commercial use, require the user of the data to keep track of the source of each record or data element. Practically this means that an application using the mix of data is effectively constrained by the most strict contract in the mix. 

The Swedish library was concerned that their participating libraries would be hindered in their future systems and activities if any limitations were placed on data use. In addition, they would not be able to share their data with the Europeana project, as Europeana requires that the data contributed be open precisely because of the complications of managing hundreds or thousands of different sources with different obligations.

As many of us pointed out during the discussions about the OCLC record use policy, the practical problems of controlling down-stream use of data are insurmountable. Some people argue that the record use policy hasn't affected libraries using WorldCat, but my experience is that the policy has a chilling effect on some libraries, and is making it more difficult for libraries to embrace the linked open data model. The Swedish National Library had to make the difficult decision between WorldCat services and future capabilities. It was undoubtedly a hard decision, but it is admirable that the National Library did not give up what it saw as important rights for its users.