It's "academic"

We all know that writing and publishing is of great concern to those whose work is in academia; the "publish or perish" burden haunts pre-tenure educators and grant-seeking researchers. Revelations that data had been falsified in published experimental results brings great condemnation from publishers and colleagues, and yet I have a feeling that underneath it all is more than an ounce of empathy from those who are fully aware of the forces that would lead one to put ones' thumbs on the scales for the purposes of winning the academic jousting match. It is only a slight exaggeration to compare these souls to the storied gladiators whose defeat meant summary execution. From all evidence, that is how many of them experience the contest to win the ivory tower - you climb until you fall.

Research libraries and others deal in great part with the output of the academe. In many ways their practices reinforce the value judgments made on academic writing, such as having blanket orders for all works published by a list of academic presses. In spite of this, libraries have avoided making an overt statement of what is and what is not "academic." The "deciders" of academic writing are the publishers - primarily the publishers of peer-reviewed journals that decide what information does and does not become part of the record of academic achievement, but also those presses that issue scholarly monographs. Libraries are the consumers of these decisions but stop short of tagging works as "academic" or "scholarly."

The pressure on academics has only increased in recent years, primarily because of the development of "impact factors." In 1955, Eugene Garfield introduced the idea that one could create a map of scientific publishing using an index of the writings cited by other works. (Science, 1955; 122 :108–11) Garfield was interested in improving science by linking works so that one could easily find supporting documents. However, over the years the purpose of citation has evolved from a convenient link to precedents into a measure of the worth of scholars themselves in the form of the "h-index" - the measure of how often a person (not a work) has been cited. The h-index is the "lifetime home runs" statistic of the academic world. One is valued for how many times one is cited, making citations the coin of the realm, not sales of works or even readership. No one in academia could or should be measured on the same scale as a non-academic writer when it comes to print runs, reviews, or movie deals. Imagine comparing the sales figures of "Poetic Autonomy in Ancient Rome" with "The Da Vinci Code". So it matters in academia to carve out a world that is academic, and that isolates academic works such that one can do things like calculate an h-index value.

This interest in all things academic has led to a number of metadata oddities that make me uncomfortable, however. There are metadata schemas that have an academic bent that translates to a need to assert the "scholarliness" of works being given a bibliographic description. There is also an emphasis on science in these bibliographic metadata, with less acknowledgement of the publishing patterns of the humanities. My problem isn't solely with the fact that they are doing this, but in particular with how they go about it.

As an example, the metadata schema BIBO clearly has an emphasis on articles as scholarly writing; notably, it has  a publication type "academic article" but does not have a publication type for "academic book." This reflects the bias that new scientific discoveries are published as journal articles, and many scientists do not write book-length works at all. This slights the work of historians like Ann M. Blair whose book, Too Much to Know, has what I estimate to be about 1,450 "primary sources," ranging from manuscripts in Latin and German from the 1500's to modern works in a number of languages. It doesn't get much more academic than that.

BIBO also has different metadata terms for "journal" and "magazine":

• bibo:journal "A periodical of scholarly journal Articles."
• bibo:magazine"A periodical of magazine Articles. A magazine is a publication that is issued periodically, usually bound in a paper cover, and typically contains essays, stories, poems, etc., by many writers, and often photographs and drawings, frequently specializing in a particular subject or area, as hobbies, news, or sports."

Something in that last bit on magazines smacks of "leisure time" while the journal clearly represents "serious work."  It's also interesting that the description of magazine is quite long, describes the physical aspects ("usually bound in a paper cover"), and gives a good idea of the potential content. "Journal" is simply "scholarly journal articles." Aside from the circularity of the definitions (journal has journal articles, magazines have magazine articles), what this says is simply that a journal is a "not magazine."

Apart from the snobbishness of the difference between these terms is the fact that one seeks in vain for a bright line between the two. There is, of course, the "I know it when I see it" test, and there is definitely some academic writing that you can pick out without hesitation. But is an opinion piece in the journal of a scientific society academic? How about a book review? How about a book review in the New York Review of Books (NYRB), where articles run to 2-5,000 words, are written by an academic in the field, and make use of the encyclopedic knowledge of the topic on the part of the reviewer? When Marcia Angell, professor at the Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine writes for the NYRB, has she slipped her academic robes for something else? She seems to think so. On her professional web site she lists among her publications a (significantly long) letter to the editor  (called a "comment" in academic journal-eze) of a science journal article about women in medicine but she does not include in her publication list the articles she has written for NYRB even though these probably make more use of her academic knowledge than the comment did. She is clearly making a decision about what is "academic" (i.e. career-related) and what is not. It seems that the dividing line is not the content of the writing but how her professional world esteems the publishing vehicle.

Not to single out BIBO, I should mention other "culprits" in the tagging of scholarly works, such as WikiData. Wikidata has:

• academic journal article (Q18918145) article published in an academic journal
• academic writing (Q4119870) academic writing and publishing is conducted in several sets of forms and genres
• scholarly article (Q13442814) article in an academic publication, usually peer reviewed
• scholarly publication (Q591041) scientific publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural sciences

There is so much wrong with each of these, from circular definitions to bias toward science as the only scholarly pursuit (scholarly publication is a "scientific publication" in the "natural sciences"). (I've already commented on this in WikiData, sarcastically calling it a fine definition if you ignore the various directions that science and scholarship have taken since the mid-19th century.)  What this reveals, however is that the publication  and publisher defines whether the work is "scholarly." If any article in an academic publication is a scholarly article, then the comment by Dr. Angell is, by definition, scholarly, and the NYRB articles are not. Academia is, in fact, a circularly-defined world. 

Giving one more example, schema.org has this:

• schema:ScholarlyArticle (sub-class of Article) A scholarly article.

Dig that definition! There are a few other types of article in schema, org, such as "newsArticle" and "techArticle" but it appears that all of those magazine articles would be simple "Article."

Note that in real life publications call themselves whatever they wish. With a hint at how terms may have changed over time: Ladies' Home Journal calls itself a journal, and the periodical published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science, gives itself the domain sciencemag.org. "Science Magazine" just sounds right, doesn't it?

It's not wrong for folks to characterize some publications and some writing as "academic" but any metadata term needs a clear definition, which these do not have. What this means is that people using these schemas are being asked to make a determination with very little guidance that would help them separate the scholarly or academic from... well, from the rest of publishing output. With the inevitable variation in categorization, you can be sure that in metadata coded with these schemas the separation between scholarly/academic and not scholarly/academic writing is probably not going to be useful because there will be little regularity of assignment between communities that are using this metadata.

I admit that I picked on this particular metadata topic because I find the designation of "scholarly" or "academic" to be judgemental. If nothing else, when people judge they need some criteria for that judgement. What I would like to see is a clear definition that would help people decide what is and what is not "academic," and what the use cases are for why this typing of materials should be done. As with most categorizations, we can expect some differences in the decisions that will be made by catalogers and indexers working with these metadata schemas. A definition at least gives you something to discuss and to argue for.  Right now we don't have that for scholarly/academic publications.

And I am glad that libraries don't try to make this distinction.

User tasks, Step one

Brian C. Vickery, one of the greats of classification theory and a key person in the work of the Classification Research Group (active from 1952 to 1968), gave this list of the stages of "the process of acquiring documentary information" in his 1959 book Classification and Indexing in Science[1]:

1. Identifying the subject of the search. 
2. Locating this subject in a guide which refers the searcher to one or more documents. 
3. Locating the documents. 
4. Locating the required information in the documents. 

These overlap somewhat with FRBR's user tasks (find, identify, select, obtain) but the first step in Vickery's group is my focus here: Identifying the subject of the search. It is a step that I do not perceive as implied in the FRBR "find", and is all too often missing from library/use interactions today.

A person walks into a library... 

Presumably, libraries are an organized knowledge space. If they weren't the books would just be thrown onto the nearest shelf, and subject cataloging would not exist. However, if this organization isn't both visible and comprehended by users, we are, firstly, not getting the return on our cataloging investment and secondly, users are not getting the full benefit of the library.

In Part V of my series on Catalogs and Context, I had two salient quotes. One by Bill Katz: "Be skeptical of the of information the patron presents"[2]; the other by Pauline Cochrane: "Why should a user ever enter a search term that does not provide a link to the syndetic apparatus and a suggestion about how to proceed?"[3]. Both of these address the obvious, yet often overlooked, primary point of failure for library users, which is the disconnect between how the user expresses his information need vis-a-vis the terms assigned by the library to the items that may satisfy that need.

Vickery's Three Issues for Stage 1 

Issue 1: Formulating the topic 

Vickery talks about three issues that must be addressed in his first stage, identifying the subject on which to search in a library catalog or indexing database. The first one is "...the inability even of specialist enquirers always to state their requirements exactly..." [1 p.1] That's the "reference interview" problem that Katz writes about: the user comes to the library with an ill-formed expression of what they need. We generally consider this to be outside the boundaries of the catalog, which means that it only exists for users who have an interaction with reference staff. Given that most users of the library today are not in the physical library, and that online services (from Google to Amazon to automated courseware) have trained users that successful finding does not require human interaction, these encounters with reference staff are a minority of the user-library sessions.

In online catalogs, we take what the user types into the search box as an appropriate entry point for a search, even though another branch of our profession is based on the premise that users do not enter the library with a perfectly formulated question, and need an intelligent intervention to have a successful interaction with the library. Formulating a precise question may not be easy, even for experienced researchers. For example, in a search about serving persons who have been infected with HIV, you may need to decide whether the research requires you to consider whether the person who is HIV positive has moved along the spectrum to be medically diagnosed as having AIDS. This decision is directly related to the search that will need to be done:

HIV-positive persons--Counseling of
AIDS (Disease)--Patients--Counseling of

Issue 2: from topic to query 

The second of Vickery's caveats is that "[The researcher] may have chosen the correct concepts to express the subject, but may not have used the standard words of the index."[1 p.4] This is the "entry vocabulary" issue. What user would guess that the question "Where all did Dickens live?" would be answered with a search using "Dickens, Charles -- Homes and haunts"? And that all of the terms listed as "use for" below would translate to the term "HIV (Viruses)" in the catalog? (h/t Netanel Ganin):

As Pauline Cochrane points out[4], beginning in the latter part of the 20th century, libraries found themselves unable to include the necessary cross-reference information in their card catalogs, due to the cost of producing the cards. Instead, they asked users to look up terms in the subject heading reference books used by catalog librarians to create the headings. These books are not available to users of online catalogs, and although some current online catalogs include authorized alternate entry points in their searches, many do not.* This means that we have multiple generations of users who have not encountered "term switching" in their library catalog usage, and who probably do not understand its utility.

Even with such a terminology-switching mechanism, finding the proper entry in the catalog is not at all simple. The article by Thomas Mann (of Library of Congress, not the German author) on “The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries” [5] shows not only how complex that process might be, but it also indicates that the translation can only be accomplished by a library-trained expert. This presents us with a great difficulty because there are not enough such experts available to guide users, and not all users are willing to avail themselves of those services. How would a user discover that literature is French, but performing arts are in France?:

French literature
Performing arts -- France -- History

Or, using the example in Mann's piece, the searcher looking for in information on tribute payments in the Peloponnesian war needed to look under "Finance, public–Greece–Athens".  This type of search failure fuels the argument that full text search is a better solution, and a search of Google Books on "tribute payments Peloponnesian war" does yield some results. The other side of the argument is that full text searches fail to retrieve documents not in the search language, while library subject headings apply to all materials in all languages. Somehow, this latter argument, in my experience, doesn't convince.

Issue 3: term order 

The third point by Vickery is one that keyword indexing has solved, which is "...the searcher may use the correct words to express the subject, but may not choose the correct combination order."[1 p.4] In 1959, when Vickery was writing this particular piece, having the wrong order of terms resulted in a failed search. Mann, however, would say that with keyword searching the user does not encounter the context that the pre-coordinated headings provide; thus keyword searching is not a solution at all. I'm with him part way, because I think keyword searching as an entry to a vocabulary can be useful if the syndetic structure is visible with such a beginning. Keyword searching directly against bibliographic records, less so.

Comparison to FRBR "find" 

FRBR's "find" is described as "to find entities that correspond to the user’s stated search criteria". [6 p. 79] We could presume that in FRBR the "user's stated search criteria" has either been modified through a prior process (although I hardly know what that would be, other than a reference interview), or that the library system has the capability to interact with the user in such a way that the user's search is optimized to meet the terminology of the library's knowledge organization system. This latter would require some kind of artificial intelligence and seems unlikely. The former simply does not happen often today, with most users being at a computer rather than a reference desk. FRBR's find seems to carry the same assumption as has been made functional in online catalogs, which is that the appropriateness of the search string is not questioned.

Summary 

There are two take-aways from this set of observations:

1. We are failing to help users refine their query, which means that they may actually be basing their searches on concepts that will not fulfill their information need in the library catalog. 
2. We are failing to help users translate their query into the language of the catalog(s). 

I would add that the language of the catalog should show users how the catalog is organized and how the knowledge universe is addressed by the library. This is implied in the second take-away, but I wanted to bring it out specifically, because it is a failure that particularly bothers me.

Notes

*I did a search in various catalogs on "cancer" and "carcinoma". Cancer is the form used in LCSH-cataloged bibliographic records, and carcinoma is a cross reference. I found a local public library whose Bibliocommons catalog did retrieve all of the records with "cancer" in them when the search was on "carcinoma"; and that the same search in the Harvard Hollis system did not (carcinoma: 1889 retrievals; cancer 21,311). These are just two catalogs, and not a representative sample, to say the least, but the fact seems to be shown.

References

[1] Vickery, B C. Classification and Indexing in Science. New York: Academic Press, 1959.
[2] Katz, Bill. Introduction to Reference Work: Reference Services and Reference Processes. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992. p. 82 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/928951754. Cited in: Brown, Stephanie Willen. The Reference Interview: Theories and Practice. Library Philosophy and Practice 2008. ISSN 1522-0222
[3] Modern Subject Access in the Online Age: Lesson 3 Author(s): Pauline A. Cochrane, Marcia J. Bates, Margaret Beckman, Hans H. Wellisch, Sanford Berman, Toni Petersen, Stephen E. Wiberley and Jr. Source: American Libraries, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Apr., 1984), pp. 250-252, 254-255 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25626708
[4] Modern Subject Access in the Online Age: Lesson 2 Pauline A. Cochrane American Libraries Vol. 15, No. 3 (Mar., 1984), pp. 145-148, 150 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25626647
[5] Thomas Mann, “The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries” (June 13, 2007). PDF, 41 pp. http://guild2910.org/Pelopponesian%20War%20June%2013%202007.pdf
[6] IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, 2009. http://archive.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr_2008.pdf.

Flexibility in bibliographic models

A motley crew of folks had a chat via Google Hangout earlier this week to talk about FRBR and Fedora. I know exactly squat about Fedora, but I've just spent 18 months studying FRBR and other bibliographic models, so I joined the discussion. We came to a kind of nodding agreement, that I will try to express here, but one that requires us to do some hard work if we are to make it something we can work with.

The primary conclusion was that the models of FRBR and BIBFRAME, with their separation of bibliographic information into distinct entities, are too inflexible for general use. There are simply too many situations in which either the nature of the materials or the available metadata simply does not fit into the entity boundaries defined in those models. This is not news -- since the publication of FRBR in 1998 there are have numerous articles pointing out the need for modifications of FRBR for different materials (music, archival materials, serials, and others). The report of the audio-visual community to BIBFRAME said the same. Similar criticisms have been aimed at recent generations of cataloging rules, whose goal is to provide uniformity in bibliographic description across all media types. The differences in treatment that are needed by the various communities are not mutually compatible, which means that a single model is not going to work over the vast landscape that is "cultural heritage materials."

At the same time, folks in this week's informal discussion were able to readily cite use cases in which they would want to identify a group of metadata statements that would define a particular aspect of the data, such as a work or an item. The trick, therefore, is to find a sweet spot between the need for useful semantics and the need for flexibility within the heterogeneous cultural heritage collections that could benefit from sharing and linking their data amongst them.

One immediate thought is: let's define a core! (OK, it's been done, but maybe that's a different core.) The problem with this idea is that there are NO descriptive elements that will be useful for all materials. Title? (seems obvious) -- but there are many materials in museums and archives that have no title, from untitled art works, to museum pieces ("Greek vase",) to materials in archives ("Letter from John to Mary"). Although these are often given names of a sort, none have titles that function to identify them in any meaningful way. Creators? From anonymous writings to those Greek vases, not to mention the dinosaur bones and geodes in a science museum, many things don't have identifiable creators. Subjects? Well, if you mean this to be "topic" then again, not everything has a topic; think "abstract art" and again those geodes. Most things have a genre or a type but standardizing on those alone would hardly reap great benefits in data sharing.

The upshot, at least the conclusion that I reach, is that there are no universals. At best there is some overlap between (A & B) and then between (B & C), etc. What the informal group that met this week concluded is that there is some value in standardizing among like data types, simply to make the job of developers easier. The main requirement overall, though, is to have a standard way to share ones metadata choices, not unlike an XML schema, but for the RDF world. Something that others can refer to or, even better, use directly in processing data you provide.

Note that none of the above means throwing over FRBR, BIBFRAME, or RDA entirely. Each has defined some data elements that will be useful, and it is always better to re-use than to re-invent. But the attempts to use these vocabularies to fix a single view of bibliographic data is simply not going to work in a world as varied as the one we live in. We limit ourselves greatly if we reject data that does not conform to a single definition rather than making use of connections between close but not identical data communities.

There's no solution being offered at this time, but identifying the target is a good first step.

LC discovers infinity

If you were at ALA Midwinter in Denver (January, 2009) you may have been in one of the meetings where the Library of Congress announced its intention to atone for the lcsh.info fiasco. In case you missed that, Ed Summers of LC created an online version of the Library of Congress Subject Heading authority records, re-organized as a SKOS vocabulary and available for linking on the open Web. After being available for about six months (beginning in May of 2008), Ed was asked by his employer to take down the site on December 18, 2008. This was in spite of the fact that the data had been out there long enough to have a number of users, and that the removal broke existing systems that had developed around the data.

[Note, lcsh.info has been re-born as http://lcsubjects.org/, hosted by Talis.]

The outcry in the community was strong, including a reply to Ed's lcsh.info blog post by Sir Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee. Library of Congress must have been suitably embarassed.

Thus the announcement at Midwinter that LC not only understands the value of linked open access to LCSH, but that all of the vocabularies managed by LC -- from the name authorities to the lists of document types, languages, locations, etc., -- need to be openly available in a format suitable for inclusion in Web services. LC has created a web site to host these vocabularies: id.loc.gov. On that site they say:

Initially, within 6 to 8 weeks, the Library of Congress will release its first offering: the Library of Congress Subject Headings. This will be an almost verbatim re-release of the system and content once found at the popular prototype lcsh.info service.

They also say:

We aim to make resources available on this site within 6-8 weeks. Check this site regularly for more updates as we continue to develop this service!

The page is dated 1/22/09. My calculations show that 9 weeks have passed. OK, that's only one week over their stated deadline. But nothing on the page has changed. No resources have been made available. An "almost verbatim" release of lcsh.info should not be too hard given that Ed had code written that he has made publicly available.

But even today, the promised service is 6-8 weeks away. It may stay that way for a long time. Maybe even forever.

Why does this matter? It matters because the availability of these vocabularies is essential for the library world to move forward. Some of us have been asking LC to put the vocabularies online in a machine-actionable format for a very long time. The Dublin Core community worked with LC to create a machine-actionable and URI-identified version of the MARC role terms as early as 2005. You can't find this linked from any of the MARC documentation. Some of us brought up the topic ad nauseum at MARBI meetings, but to no avail. Now LC seems to have "gotten it" conceptually but they have yet to show us that they can deliver.

I may seem to be undeservedly impatient on this score, but it's not that we have been waiting for this for 9 weeks: we've been waiting for years. And quite honestly, this is not rocket science, nor does LC have no guidance for how to manage this data. In fact, they could use the NSDL Metadata Registry, or, if they insist on hosting this themselves, the Registry's source code is available. Quite frankly, if LC does not prove to us soon that it can perform this necessary function, I feel that we are quite justified in going forward without them, registering the vocabularies where they can be used and managed by anyone who needs them, and going forward with a transformation of library data that will meet 21st century needs.