Name authority control, aka name identification

Libraries do something they call "name authority control". For most people in IT, this would be called "assigning unique identifiers to names." Identifying authors is considered one of the essential aspects of library cataloging, and it isn't done in any other bibliographic environment, as far as I know. When a user goes to a library catalog, they will find all of the works of T.C. Boyle under a single name, even though he has variously used T.C. Boyle and T. Coraghessan Boyle on his books, and was born with the name Thomas John Boyle. Authority control puts all of his works under one name, with references from other forms of his name: TC Boyle, see: T. Coraghessan Boyle. When there are two authors with the same name, one of them (the second one to be added to the authority file, generally) is distinguished using a middle initial or the year of birth. Thus you can have

Smith, John
Smith, John 1709
Smith, John 1936
Smith, John A.

There are some problems with the current method used by libraries to realize authority control, not the least of which is that it is a difficult and expensive process and the number of authors is growing rapidly as we all become creators in this information age. I want to address here 3 aspects of name authority control that are especially non-functional: 1) the use of dates as distinguishing characteristics is not easy for the catalogers creating the authority record 2) the use of dates as distinguishing characteristics does not help the users 3) the name heading is not a legitimate identifier because it may change.

Date of Birth is Hard for Catalogers

We hear that authority control, including name authority control, is responsible for upwards to 40-50% of the time it takes to catalog a book. Part of this is in determining if you do indeed have a new author to enter into the system. Another part is in creating the unique entry. Take the case of Michael Fitzergerald, editor of a book called Touching All Bases. Touching all Bases is a collection of columns by sports writer Ray Fitzgerald. His sons, Michael and Kevin gathered the columns after their father's death in 1982 and published them. Because there have been other Michael Fitzgerald's as authors, the year of his birth had to be added to his name. Here's the authority record for Michael:

LC Control Number: n  83124260
Cancel/Invalid LCCN: n  97055382  no 90013838
HEADING:  Fitzgerald, Michael, 1955-
Found In: Fitzgerald, R. Touching all bases, c1983 (a.e.) CIP t.p.
         (Michael Fitzgerald)
         Call to publisher, 6/27/83 (Accountant, b. 2/22/1955)

Michael Fitzgeralds seem to be in great abundance. There was even another one who wrote a book and was also born in 1955. To distinguish between them, Michael Fitzgerald 1955 #2 has his full date of birth added to his name

LC Control Number: n 2003097483
LC Class Number:   PS3556.I8345
HEADING:    Fitzgerald, Michael, 1955 June 11-
Found In:   The Creative circle, 1989: t.p. (Michael Fitzgerald) p. 241
              (teaches at Shenandoah College in Virginia)
           Earth circle, c2003: CIP t.p. (Michael Fitzgerald) data
              sheet (b. 06-11-55)

His book, Creative Circle, is about art, music and literature from a Baha'I perspective. We see that at the time the authority record was created he was teaching at Shenandoah College.

So here we have two authors whose works would never be mistaken for each other, yet who have the same name. The authority records are evidence of why it is so time consuming to create these identifiers. Because the date of birth is generally not one of the pieces of information about an author that is included in the book nor in the promotional material provided by publishers, the librarians establishing the name heading often must resort to contacting the publisher or the author or the author's institution to determine that information.

Date of Birth May Not Help Users

In a time when few people wrote books, and when users may have come to the library with some knowledge of the famous intellectual whose works they were seeking, the distinction between two John Smiths, one born in 1709 and one born in 1936, may have been an obvious one. We are now, however, in a time of author abundance. Anyone can, and many do, write books, and many of those writing are not known in wider circles. Reading is now considered a "popular" activity, as the bookshelves of any chain bookstore will evidence. So a user of a library catalog may find himself facing a daunting choice among authors, such as these, all named "Michael Fitzgerald":

Fitzgerald, Michael
Fitzgerald, Michael, 1768-1831
Fitzgerald, Michael, 1859-
Fitzgerald, Michael, 1918-
Fitzgerald, Michael, 1937-
Fitzgerald, Michael, 1946-
Fitzgerald, Michael, 1955-
Fitzgerald, Michael, 1955 June 11-
Fitzgerald, Michael, 1957-
Fitzgerald, Michael, 1958-
Fitzgerald, Michael, 1959-
Fitzgerald, Michael, 1970-
FitzGerald, Michael A.
etc.

The Michael Fitzgerald born June 11, 1955, will be able to find himself in this list, but other than members of his immediate family, no one else will know which of these he is. Catalogers have to call publishers or authors to find out the author's date of birth because it's not included on the book, so there is no reason to believe that the date is available to users of the library catalog. All of that time and effort is expended to create a distinction that often doesn't help the user.

All That, and It's not Even a Valid Identifier

The final blow to name authority control is that the name heading (as the name entry is called, e.g. Smith, John A.) can change. Sometimes it might change because a mistake was made in creating the heading, or even in the printing of the book, other times it changes because the library rules for creating name headings change. The heading performs multiple functions: it is the display form in displays of the book's data, it is used as the string to search on in a catalog, and it identifies the author. If a new display form is needed, then the identifier itself changes. When this happened on a grand scale a few decades ago, due to a change in the library cataloging rules, all of the connections between names and books broke, and names in library records all over the country (and beyond) had to be changed. A true identifier only identifies, and if display forms change the identifier stays the same. John Smith is the same person even if the library entry changes from Smith, John A. to Smith, John Arthur.

What Now?

It seems pretty clear that we won't be able to deal with our author abundance using the current name authority methods. There are too many new authors appearing for us to spend time calling around to determine birthdates. There are also too many new authors for those dates of birth to be useful as a way to distinguish between persons. To add to that, we really need a true identifier for authors.

Library catalogs attempt to maintain uniformity throughout, so the idea of treating contemporary authors differently from historical ones is a very disruptive concept. However, the notion is beginning to circulate that we could have contemporary authors identify themselves in some way. Something to the effect of: Yes, I am the same Michael Fitzgerald who authored that book on Art, and that's the identifier for me. After all, who better than the author knows his own identity?

That doesn't solve the problem that users have of identifying the author they seek from a long list of persons with essentially the same name. Perhaps the days of looking at lists of authors' names is over. Maybe users need to see a cloud of authors connected to topic areas in which they have published, or related to books titles or institutional affiliations. In this time of author abundance, names are not meaningful without some context.

Wish list: Pimp my hard drive

I can't believe that it's 2007 and I'm still staring at nested displays of little yellow folder icons, which then open up to show me, of all things, file names. Or I can get little thumbnails that tell me no more than I know from the file name extension.

Shouldn't we be beyond this? Here's what I want to see when I look at my hard drive:

Titles. Most of the documents on my hard drive have titles. Some of them even have those titles coded in some way as titles - such as the html files, and files in various word processing formats. I'm sure that it is possible to make an algorithmic guess at titles (or at least first lines) for just about any file with text.

Authors. OK, it won't really be authors, but if nothing else I should be able to distinguish files I created from those created by others. There are automated (and frequently erroneous) "owners" in files, but that ownership is often a good clue as to the provenance of the file. I want to see that. (Meanwhile, I'm going to start storing what I write in folders apart from what I have downloaded. No, I don't use "my documents." I hate that folder. I renamed it once and really screwed things up, so I have my own top level folder under c:.)

Snippets. Is there any reason why I shouldn't be able to see snippets from my own files as I browse a folder? An opening line or beginning paragraph would be fine. I shouldn't have to manually open every file to see what's in it.

Most used. The "recent documents" function in Windows is useless. OK, pretty much useless. I want to be able to see the files I have most frequently (but not necessarily recently) opened. I can't tell you how much time I've spent hunting for local copies of certain files.

Tags. I want to tag my files, and I want the tags to be available external to the files themselves, a kind of delicious for my hard drive. (And don't tell me to get Windows Vista -- that's not what I want, in more ways than one.) I want to see tag clouds and tag lists.

"Like." This may be pushing it, but I really want to see clusters of documents that are like each other. This will be the usual statistical reliance on the imprecision of language, but it would reveal connections in the documents that could be useful.

Folder names. I'm not sure I can explain this one but... I have a folder named "FRBR" and a folder named "MARC". When I want to look in one of those folders I don't want to have to go through the hierarchy of folders to find them -- especially because I never can remember where I've put them. Why can't I just type "MARC" and see the folder or folders with "MARC" in the name? Why do I always have to run through the whole hierarchy? (If you have found a way to do a folder name search only on Windows XP, please let me know.) Or maybe folder names could be treated as tags, once tagging is working.

There are undoubtedly many other things I could wish for, but basically what it comes down to is that there needs to be a better interface to the hard drive. Some of this can be found in google desktop, but I have found it unsatisfactory, generally.

Wish list: on-line in the stacks

This is my workspace. It's messy, I know, but the key thing is that my main "desktop" is on the screens. The physical workspace is primarily for setting things down, not for working.



Basically, everything happens on these screens -- I search, I read, I write, I converse (both text and voice). I can't imagine doing my work without the Internet. So I find myself in a dilemma when I go to the library, because I am cut off from my "place of work." I go into the stacks, perhaps with a scribbled note containing a call number, and I stand in front of shelves with fewer capabilities than I have in my own home office. If I don't find the book I want I can't check to see if I wrote the call number correctly; I can't look to see if there's a "second best" book that I'd like; I can't determine if there's another area of the stacks where I might find something else I'd like to read; and I can't search within the text of the bound volumes in front of me, even if digitized versions do happen to be available on-line. I stand there wishing I could go on-line.

Essentially, going into the library means leaving behind my ability to find. Yes, there are a few computers in the stacks, but they are too far away to make it possible to be usefully on-line and at the shelf at the same time.

Libraries made a great effort to get on-line and to reach out to users beyond their walls. What we haven't done, however, is to combine the on-shelf and on-line resources in a useful way. It makes sense to me that I should be able to stand amid bound journal volumes and do a keyword search. Or that I could pull a book off the shelf, see a citation, and check to see if the library has that item.

What would make this possible? First, many more access points within the physical stacks. Access to the catalog or other resources shouldn't be more than a few steps away. Heck, find a way to tie down one of those $100 computers at the end of each row, or create a place where a user can easily lean their laptop (and have the wireless access reach within the shelves). Instead of telling people to turn off their cell phones, remind them that if they have net access they can combine the power of the library's catalog, the library's on-line resources, and the items on the shelves. Encourage people to work with physical and digital resources together. If I could do that, I'd spend more time in the library.

Information architects v. librarians

I have discovered a key difference between information architects and librarians: information architects write books that you can find at a bookstore; librarians write books that you can only find (at best!) at the ALA store twice a year, assuming you attend ALA meetings.

There is meaning behind this statement beyond book distribution. It has to do with the insularity of the library world and our tendency to only speak to each other. It also reveals an underlying assumption that what we know and what we think isn't of interest to anyone outside of our profession. At least, I hope that's the reason, because another possibility, which would be even worse, would be that we don't think that anyone outside the library world is worth speaking to. That would be truly tragic.

MarcXchange

It had been announced a while back that folks from a Danish standards body were proposing an ISO standard for an XML version of ISO 2709, which is the ISO standard for what we think of as MARC. I couldn't figure out at the time why an ISO standard was needed since we have MARCXML. I found the draft of the ISO standard (ISO/DIS 25577) online, and learned some important things.

To begin with, I have never seen a copy of ISO 2709, even though the standard is referenced in just about every document that relates to the MARC format. In fact, you often see references to "Z39.2, also known as ISO 2709." Z39.2 is available from the NISO web site, and is the basis for what those of us in the U.S. think of as MARC. So I assumed that ISO 2709 was essentially the same as Z39.2. It turns out that there are some differences that are evidenced in this new standard. They may just be differences in terminology, but here's what shows up in ISO 25577:

• the "Leader" is called "record label" in ISO 2709
• the "control fields" (those beginning with "00") are called identifier field and reference fields in ISO 2709
• what we call "variable" fields in Z39.2 are called "data fields" in ISO 2709

I agree that these may be minor differences, but now I have to go back and try to fix the wikipedia article on ISO 2709. And I have no idea if there are other differences that didn't show up in this particular standards document. I am really annoyed -- no, more than annoyed -- that ISO standards are not open. (And if anyone wants to violate copyright and license and send me a copy of 2709, I will not tell anyone it was you.)

OK, over that hump, the MarcXchange (ISO 25577) is an XML format for ISO 2709. MARCXML is an XML format for MARC21. The difference is the ISO 25577 is much broader than MARCXML. Tags can be anything from 001 to 999 and 00A to ZZZ. And you can have up to nine indicators on a field.

The significance? Well, since you are creating records in XML, certain limitations in the ISO 2709 format do not exist (like field lengths). And you don't have the limitations of MARC21, like limiting tags to 000-999 or having exactly two indicators on every variable field. In this schema, you could create an instance that has no indicators on some fields, and the fields that have indicators wouldn't need to have the same number of them. Think of all of those fields where both indicators have been used and you'd like to add another one. (I don't have the schema in a machine-readable format, but it looks like indicators are limited to one character. I'd love to see that changed so you could have multi-character indicators -- hey, why not?)

No, I'm not advocating that we drop MARC21 for MarcXchange, but could we at least brainstorm on whether MarcXchange could help us out in expanding our bibliographic record where it's needed? No, you couldn't round-trip it, but eventually we have to move forward and quit circling back. Would something like this help us out?

Wish list: ONIX records

There are things that I wish existed, but don't, so I'm going to start posting my wishlist here, one piece at a time. Some of these things might not be possible for various reasons, and some may already exist but I'm just not aware of them (but I hope you'll clue me in). For those that could be done, let's talk about how we could make them happen.

The first one that I'm posting is a desire for a database of available ONIX records.

A few years ago I looked at some ONIX records that were being created for e-books and I have to say that they were so poor as to be almost unusable. Recently I've been reviewing some ONIX records received at the Internet Archive for the OpenLibrary project. There are only about a half dozen publishers represented there, but it's obvious to me that they are producing useful data. The basic bibliographic data is there, plus there is data that fits into the "book promotion" realm: blurbs, author bios, subject categories. This is data that is sent to online booksellers and to bookstores. It would be useful for libraries and for anyone else keeping data about books. But I don't know of anyone who is aggregating it, much less making it public.

What we need is:

• a database that receives ONIX feeds
• that keeps the records up to date
• that has a z39.50 capability and an API for retrieving data
• that can output in a couple of different common formats

It seems that this could be a great companion to CoverThing, a project proposed by LibraryThing creator Tim Spaulding (and perhaps in the works?) In any case, it's like there's a bunch of bibliographic data that is being created and then flushed down the drain. Let's find a way to save it and use it. (And I sure hope the publishers feel this way, too.)

Deceptive Copyright Notices

I have often pointed out some of the deceptive copyright notices that libraries and archives put on materials, such as the many statements on digitized public domain materials that tell users that they cannot make copies of the digital file without the permission of the holding library. (Yes, there is debate as to whether that constitutes a license and its agreement, but let's not go there for the moment.) I also have some wonderful examples of real-life copyright notices that are questionable at best, such as this notice which appears on the back cover of a... blank book:



Now an organization called the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) has filed a complaint with the FTC stating that NFL, NBC, DreamWorks, Harcourt, and others, are misrepresenting the rights of consumers through their copyright notices. They do have some delightfully egregious examples in their document, and the web site allows you to view the video-related ones, such as the NFL's statement that any "account of the game without permission is prohibited." Wonderfully, they posted those clips on YouTube. Included in the complaint are those "FBI" warnings at the beginning of DVDs. There actually are aficionados of the FBI warning screens and their variations over time (blue phase, green phase) as well as numerous parodies like this one.

At the meeting on copyright at the University of Maryland, Fred von Lohmann of the EFF (whose talk was outstanding, and sadly is not available online even though it was webcast) showed a video with a modified FBI warning that says:

WARNING. Federal law allows citizens to reproduce, distribute, or exhibit portions of copyright motion pictures, video tapes, or video discs under certain circumstances without authorization of the copyright holder. This infringement of copyright is called "Fair use" and is allowed for purposes of criticism, news reporting, teaching, and parody.

This perfectly conveys the message that seems to be sought by this complaint, which is to point out that the truth is very different from the messages that we see every day.

The complaint talks about the "chilling effect" of the false statements about copyright. I think there's also a numbing effect -- the ridiculousness of the claims means that we just ignore them all, and leads folks to see copyright itself as ridiculous.

The complaint's "Request for Relief" is mainly a call for the FTC to make the companies stop making these false and misleading statements about user rights. Like the "punishment" meted out to the tobacco companies, the complaint also calls for the offending companies to be required to engage in some honest consumer education about copyright. (Are pigs flying yet?) There's another relief requested that I probably shouldn't point out because I suspect it's the real payoff:

Order the Rights-holder Corporations to forebear from attempting to force consumers into waiving their rights through contractual instruments, including contracts of adhesion.

The FTC action would only be against the companies named in the complaint, but if it were to become common practice, libraries and archives would be among those who have to clean up their act when it comes to statements about user rights.

So who or what is this CCIA? The list of members includes Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, Fujitsu, Intuit, and many others. I admit that confuses me -- these are not the organizations that I would expect to engage in a campaign of this nature. The web site claims that the organization has existed for three decades, and it appears to be primarily a lobbying organization for "policy and legislation" on Capitol Hill. That part makes sense, but I'm baffled by their campaign for public rights. If they are trustworthy in this endeavor, I would like to see them prevail. But there's that "if" that nags at me.