No hairstyling tips, 1995

(The next few posts will be feminist in nature. If that type of thing annoys you, I suggest you skip them, and I'll be back to librarianship in a trice.)

There is a new generation of women dealing with the nature of computing culture. Fortunately, they have social media to help them cope. (Example1, Example2) Reading their posts reminded me that in the mid-90's I did talks about the portrayal of women in computer magazines, and that I might have some illustrations that were still usable. I have only a few since most of my examples ended up as black and white transparencies that aren't scan-able. But in the next few posts I'll offer what I do have, all from about 1995.

The above image is of a postcard that I received in the mid-nineties from a bulletin board system (BBS) called "BIX". BBSs were the only way to get online in those days, although by the mid-nineties most gave you a pass-through to the Internet. A BBS was a kind of mini-AOL: an online gathering and posting place that was a walled community. The first BBS I joined was CompuServe, since that was the main place for technical information about PC hardware and software. (Note: there was a little or no product information on the Internet, which in the 1980's and early 90's was strictly limited to academic activities and research.)

I must have gotten the BIX card because I subscribed to PC Magazine. The message, however, was far from inviting. Here's the back of the card:



The main text says:

No garbage.
No noise.
No irrelevant clutter.

Which, as the card illustrates, obviously meant: no girls.

I have more examples of this "boy's club" atmosphere in 1996 in my article in Wired Women: How hard can it be? (Available on my site.)

Models of bibliographic data

There are two main models of bibliographic data that most of us are familiar with today. One is ISBD, which models bibliographic description. ISBD is a flat list of data areas:

1. Title and statement of responsibility
2. Edition
3. Material type
4. Publication, distribution, etc.
5. Physical description
6. Series
7. Notes
8. Identifier

In part, the MARC21 record implements ISBD description because AACR2, on which it is based, is compatible with ISBD but includes additional data such as headings (also known as "access points"). While I haven't seen a diagrammatic visualization of MARC, I believe it would be flat, much like ISBD.

The other primary model is FRBR. There aren't yet many examples of FRBR-based data, although there are partial examples such as the Work views in WorldCat and the Work and Personal author views in Open Library. The most fully FRBR-ized data appears to be in the VTLS Virtual database and their RDA sandbox, but I admit I haven't spent much time looking at this as it is a "pay fer" offering.

The FRBR model isn't flat, but can be drawn as three groups of inter-related entities. The actual FRBR diagrams are too complex to fit in this blog post, but here's a simplified one that I have used in slide sets:

There is a certain amount of movement in FRBR compared to the flat models of ISBD and MARC. In particular, FRBR offers the possibility of creating paths through data by following the relationships of a single entity through the descriptions of different resources. It also allows something like a Person entity to be treated as a resource on its own and therefore to be the focus of attention for some data view.

The British Library recently announced free and open versions of their British National Bibliography, with records available in a linked data format. Their analysis of the BL data, done in collaboration with Talis, a UK library systems company that is very active in linked data space, resulted in a data model (PDF) that is unlike any we have seen before. What I give below isn't readable in its details, but I wanted to highlight the the key sections or groupings that are revealed in the analysis.


There are a number of interesting aspects to this. To begin with, just by virtue of the diagramming of entities (which each get represented by an oval) you can see how much of the record is represented by named and identified entities rather than plain text. The plain text fields are on the bottom right of the diagram in the lavender boxes. Presented this way, they seem to have less importance than they do in traditional views. In sheer diagram real estate, subjects come out as the largest group, and authors appear to be more substantial than they seem in MARC models where they are reduced to short strings.

I also find it very interesting that publication is represented as an event. This makes sense to me. In FRBR, publication isn't an action but a static description of when and where and who, and the various publications are treated as separate events unrelated to a history of how the Work resurfaces over time for new generations. I like the view that a work comes to us through a series of events, not separate and unrelated manifestations.

I would like to suggest that we explore a variety of models for our data. I don't think we have to adopt one single model, but we should design our data such that it can be used in different views depending on the service being provided. I also think that we should explore these models before we put all of our eggs in the FRBR basket. We might learn something vital that should be taken into consideration for our future bibliographic data.

Suggestions for HathiTrust UI

Here are my concrete suggestions for improvements to the HathiTrust user interface. This is based on my own experience and should not be considered to be complete or universal. These are simply the things that would have made my experience better:

On the home page, there should be two links:

• member login
• guest login

By each there should be a link to help (one of those question mark circles, for example).

Member help will explain: that you must be someone associated with one of these institutions (link) with an institutional id. Members can: [whatever they can do - view everything, download all PD materials, create bibliographies...]

Guest help will explain: that HT is a member-sponsored db. Guests can search and can view the full text some materials. A guest account allows you to create a persistent bibliography.

On the page for a work, do NOT say: Public domain, Google-digitized. Instead, say what the user needs to know:
Public domain; member-only download.
Public domain; anyone can download.

If you ask for a login at the time of download, ONLY ask for a member login since a guest login does not provide access at this point. The message ("member-only download") may be enough, but the login request could read: requires member login.

This was as far as I got in HT, and I'm not going to be spending much more time there, since as a non-member I am actually served better on other sites. It's a superficial look from a first-time, non-member user.

User-friendliness, a lesson

I was looking for Melvil Dewey's first published version of his classification system. My first instinct was to head to Google Book Search but I decided instead to use HathiTrust as a kind of gesture to non-commercial access. I did find what I was looking for, his 1876 pamphlet, opened it up in their reader and looked through it. I knew I'd want a copy, so I found the "download as PDF" link. That popped up a box telling me to "Login to determine whether you can download this book." The copyright is listed as "public domain in the United States." I don't see why I need to log in, and I downloaded it from GBS instead, without logging in but adding to the slime trail of my life that Google owns. The added step of logging in (to be started by creating yet another login on a system I will use only occasionally), for all that it may be no more or even less invasive of my privacy, is not user-friendly. It also didn't make sense to me at the time, and I was given nothing to convince me that logging in was beneficial ... to me.

Yes, it's all about ME, me the user, me the person at the other end of the connection. I'm also not just any user, I am an advocate of libraries, a librarian, and I made the effort to go to HathiTrust -- a site that has not shown up for me in search engines.

This seems to be such a basic lesson that I do not understand why libraries can't learn it. User-friendliness.

---

Ooof! It just gets worse. I decided to see what login is about. To get to login, you have to search, select a book, and click on login. On the book page, you may see that a book is "Public Domain" or it may say "Public Domain, Google-digitized". When you log in, you log in either as someone from a member institution or a guest. The guest log in form states:

Does NOT provide access to full PDF downloads of public domain & open access items where not publicly available

However, it turns out that it DOES provide access to PD books (see comment by anonymous) if the book is not digitized by Google -- but that isn't what you've been told. "... not publicly available" isn't what you see on the book page, you see "Google-digitized." The page on policies has two different categories, "Open Access" and "Open Access, Google-digitized." Nothing in the definitions of those categories mentions member and guest downloading.

Basically, HathiTrust turns out to be a tiered system with member and non-member access. You don't encounter this until you try to download something that is PD but not "publicly available." Nothing on the home page mentions that this is a member-based service, therefore you don't know that as a non-member you will encounter walls.

OK, it is resolved, that from now on I will always go first to the Open Library, a site where Open means what I think it should.

RDA in XML - why not give it a shot?

Example of RDA in XML / Example2 of RDA in XML

There's a lot of talk about what we will do with RDA as data - what format we will use, how it will look to users, etc etc etc. In fact, the options are legion. The key point is that we don't have to decide on just ONE WAY to carry and store RDA data elements, as long as we follow a few rules.

As an experiment, I have coded a very simple bibliographic record using two different possible ways to encode RDA in XML. For the XML data elements I use the RDA elements from the Open Metadata Registry. These elements are defined in OWL, and therefore are compatible with semantic web applications. Their use in XML (and by that I mean non-RDF XML) may be a bit questionable, yet at the same time XML may be a good transition format from our current data to a ful RDF-based implementation. I created two XML files: one in which I used text values, much as one would in MARC, and one in which I used URIs for values that have been encoded as vocabularies. Neither has a schema because creating a schema for RDA is a huge undertaking. If there is interest in this method, however, it might be worth... undertaking.

The resulting files don't fit well in a blog post, so I created a page with a side-by-side comparison. Please have a look. Feel free to comment or send me suggestions or corrections. or other ideas on how to do this better.

Unequal Access

With the recent indictment of an advocate for open information access who had set up a way to download about 4 million JSTOR articles, presumably with the intent to liberate them from their native closed access, we need to step back and look at how unequal information access is in this world. In major universities in the US, academics and students log on to their computers in their offices or at home and a whole world opens up to them. That's not some kind of accident. The prime goal of university libraries is to make good on "seek and ye shall find." The proof of the success of these libraries is that researchers are oblivious to the complexity of the system that serves them. I would guess that many members of the US university community have no idea how their access to journals is managed and controlled. They don't see the contract negotiations with information providers, the continual development of software that makes single-point searching possible, the multi-faceted delivery systems that blend (or attempt to) digital and paper resources into a single stream. And they don't think about how different it would be if they weren't members of that privileged community.

Contrast that to the access available to a member of the US public who is not part of this academic sector. Like myself. Like the majority of people in this country. There is no access to JSTOR. No openURL server gives me multiple access options. The local public library does have some electronic materials, but these are much less extensive (and less expensive) than the ones in academic libraries. I may have to wait weeks to get a book that isn't in my local library's collection, if I can get it at all. I am often in the embarrassing position of not being able to access articles that I would like to read or quote from, including ones that I myself have authored.

In spite of this, I know that my information access, as a mere member of the US public, is far superior to that found in other countries; countries where serious researchers struggle to participate in research because they do not have the access that many academics here take for granted. Two anecdotes:

-- When I lived in Italy in the 1970's my friends were mainly college students or recent graduates. University education was free, but it was generally accepted that the only way to complete ones final thesis was to be able to afford to go abroad for two or three months. The purpose of this trip was to spend time in a country with a good library system, since libraries in Italy were limited. This was not just for students studying foreign literatures, but even those studying sciences, history, and art. These kids were essentially "library tourists." I don't know if this continues today.

-- During the time I worked at UC I was in a conversation with someone involved in the licensing of databases. For some reason we got talking about enforcement of contractual clauses having to do with excessive downloading and/or piracy. This person told me that all access to one of the UC campuses had been cut off recently for a few days because it was discovered that someone was systematically downloading entire journal runs. When they found the student it turned out that it was a foreign graduate student who would soon be returning home. Knowing that leaving the UC system would mean losing access to the journals he would need to continue his research, he was making himself a copy to take home.

It occurs to me as I write this that the "Digital Public Library of America" could create an information revolution in this country by upgrading the access of the general public to that of an academic or student in a large college or university, without ever digitizing a single page. What makes Stanford "Stanford" or Harvard "Harvard" is not just its famed faculty but the full range of information that is shared by that community. Everything they do, every bit of research, every new idea, is facilitated by the library and its services.

The information access gap between a university researcher and the average person on the street is immense. We have an information elite that, like most elites, considers its position to be earned, just, and reasonable. Few in academia worry that the access they have isn't widely shared. If they did, they would hopefully decide that something should be done.

Opportunity knocks

There will soon be a call for reviews of the draft report by the W3C Incubator Group on Library Linked Data. As a member of that group I have had a hand in writing that draft, and I can tell you that it has been a struggle. Now we seriously need to hear from you, not the least because the group is not fully representative of the library world; in fact, it leans heavily toward techy-ness and large libraries and services. We need to hear from a wide range of libraries and librarians: public, small, medium, special, management, people who worry about budgets, people who have face time with users. We also need to hear from the library vendor community, since little can happen with library data that will not involve that community. (Note: a site is being set up to take comments, and I am hoping it will be possible to post anonymously or at least pseudonymously, for those who cannot appear to be speaking for their employer.)

In thinking about the possibility of moving to a new approach to bibliographic data in libraries, I created this diagram (which will not be in the report, it was just my thinking) that to me represents a kind of needs assessment. This pyramid is not just related to linked data but to any data format that we might adopt to take the place of the card catalog mark-up that we use today.

We could use this to address the recent LC announcement on replacing MARC. Here's how I see that analysis, starting with the bottom of the pyramid:

• Motivation: Our current data model lacks the flexibility that we need, and is keeping us from taking advantage of some modern technologies that could help us provide better user service. Libraries are becoming less and less visible as information providers, in part because our data does not play well on the web, and it is difficult for us to make use of web content.
  
• Leadership: Creating a new model is going to take some serious coordination among all of the parties. Who should/could provide that leadership, and how can we fund this effort? Although LC has announced its intention to collaborate, for various reasons a more neutral organization might be desired, one that is truly global in scope. Yet who can both lead the conversion effort and be available for the future to provide stability for the long term maintenance that a library data carrier will require? And how can we be collaborative without being glacially slow?
  
• Skills: Many of us went through library school before the term "metadata" was in common usage. We learned to follow the cataloging rules, but not to understand the basic principles of data modeling and creation. This is one of the reasons why it is hard for us to change: we are one-trick ponies in the metadata world. The profession needs new skills, and it's not enough for only a few to acquire them: we all need to understand the world we are moving into
• Means: This is the really hard one: how do we get the time and funding to make this much-needed change? Both will need to be justified with some clear examples of what we gain by this effort. I favor some demonstration projects, if we can find a way to create them.
• Opportunity: The opportunity is here now. We could have made this change any time over the past decade or two while cataloging with AACR2, but RDA definitely gives us that golden moment when not changing no longer makes sense.