Librarians and the JK Rowling Effect

I'm sure that by now you've heard the story: a book by unknown author Robert Galbraith got good reviews but made only modest sales, until it was revealed that Galbraith was a pseudonym for JK Rowling. Within days it was "#1 with a bullet" on Amazon.

The book had reportedly sold only 500 copies in the US. The publisher most likely did not do a large print run. The hard copy has not yet made the New York Times best seller list, which is determined by sales. However, it is #1 on Amazon due to the infinite expandability of Kindle ebook copies.

This may be a kind of watershed moment for ebooks, a proof that in this world of instant access the ebook is not only good for readers (as in humans who read), but they have definite advantages for publishers. The primary message here, though, is that reputation sells. This is something that advertisers have known forever. Therefore I was surprised to come upon a short article in The Nation magazine from 1897(*)  that blames librarians for making authors famous by naming them and clearly disdains this fact.

"The role of the librarians in this country as critics of literature and arbiters of literary reputation is growingly apparent. 'Poole's Index to Periodical Literature' is of necessity selective, and the selection from each periodical embraced in the Index appertains to the particular librarian or library assistant specially charged with the care of that periodical. In most cases, the name of the author is ascertained and appended to the title, and so the aristocracy of current letters is called into being. Writers in this way come to be known for their range of subjects and interests; their weight is suggested by frequency of titles; editors and publishers will naturally apply to them as authorities."

Not only did librarians select literature for the index, they actually created recommended bibliographies!

"Not satisfied with this control at once of fame and research, the associated librarians got up a list of works recommendable for a library of five thousand volumes... Mr. Melvil Dewey... 'submitted to the librarians of the State [of New York] and others to obtain an expression of opinion respecting the best fifty books ... to be added to a village library."

The author of the piece (not named, by the way, at least not in the pages that I retrieved) saw this as "a pretty generous advertisement." My concern about the influence of libraries and librarians is quite different: access to knowledge determines future knowledge. Well, perhaps "determines" is too strong of a word, but let's say that what we can produce as new knowledge depends greatly on which giants are available to us, in the Newtonian sense of "standing on the shoulders of giants."

Oftentimes, the library has a role in providing those giants. In a small library, what the library owns will necessarily be a subset of the knowledge on a topic. In a large library, where the number of documents on a topic is way beyond the capability of most researchers to absorb, the organization of the materials will determine what researchers discover. Even if collection development were a perfect process, with unlimited funds, unlimited space, and absolute neutrality, the library in some way has an effect on future knowledge.

In that sense, Amazon and other booksellers have it easy: all that matters for them is the simple measure of sales. They don't have to, and probably do not, wonder if the world is or is not a better place now that we have Fifty Shades of Dubious Personal Interaction, and a new JK Rowling bestseller. Ironically, counting sales or hits or links is considered "neutral" while attempting to make a selection of the most important works in a subject area within a limited budged is looked at askance.

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* The Nation. vol. 64, no. 1663, May 13, 1897, p. 860

FRBR and schema.org

The FRBR structure for what it calls the Group 1 entities (Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item, hereafter written as WEMI) presents quite a few problems for data modeling. Of the many issues this brings up, there is the fact that this division is not universally recognized, not even in library data, and definitely is not recognized outside of libraries. This has particular impact for library data as part of the linked data space, where a primary goal is interlinking with data from diverse resources. It is unlikely that online bookstores or academic citations will begin to use the WEMI structure.

One area where library bibliographic data and bibliographic data from other sources may mingle is in schema.org markup in web pages. Schema already has a basic class that can be used for bibliographic data, called "CreativeWork." Creative work contains the common elements for this type of description, like author, title, publisher, pages, subject, etc. Problems arise, therefore, when trying to express either WEMI or the simplified BIBFRAME Work and Instance (hereafter bf:Work, bf:Instance) in this model. CreativeWork is a unified model that includes all descriptive elements in a single set; BIBFRAME separates those elements into two entities, and each entity contains only a defined set of the descriptive elements. Thus, where CreativeWork will have information for author, title, publisher, pages, subject, in BIBFRAME author and subject must be described in the bf:Work entity, and title, publisher and pages in the bf:Instance entity. Between MARC, FRBR, BIBFRAME, and schema.org, a full bibliographic description may require one, two, or four separate entities.

The OCLC report on BIBFRAME and schema.org proposes that one could use CreativeWork for different FRBR (or presumably BIBFRAME) entities, making the determination based on what fields are present:

"In this scheme, it would be possible to say that when only titles, subjects, and creators are mentioned, the description for a Schema:CreativeWork refers to a FRBR Work; and when copyright dates and genres are present, the description is equivalent to a FRBR Expression." (p. 14)

While that makes sense from a pure logic point of view, and would probably work in a library database, it has problems within the web and linked data contexts of schema.org. I should note, before going on, that schema.org is metadata markup for any web site, and CreativeWork will be used for books, films, music, art, and other forms of creation by anyone and everyone on the web. This is not a library-specific standard.

First, there are many sites that have a search response page with limited information about the item, requiring the user to click through for details. A search results page for books on Amazon or Ebay gives only the author and title, but does not represent the Work -- it merely doesn't give the user the full data on that page in order to fit more results onto the page. Therefore, the lack of information on one web page does not mean that the description there is complete.

Second, there is no "record" in schema.org, merely a number of coded statements with values within a web page. Any web page can contain information about any number of "things" and information about those things may be placed anywhere on the page, possibly far from each other and not coded as a single unit. It may not be possible to know how complete a description is.

Third, web site owners can opt to mark up only part of their data. In schema.org markup that I have encountered on commercial sites, markup reflects the owner's view. For example, Google (one of the originators of schema.org) does not mark up the bibliographic data in its Books pages, but instead emphasizes user ratings, images, and subjects. (This shows the markup using the Google rich snippet testing tool.) In comparison, the extracted schema.org elements for an IMDB page is much more detailed, an indication that it considers itself an information site more than a sales site.

Finally, although this is somewhat beyond schema.org, should the data in web pages be incorporated into the linked data space, it will go there as individual triples that are part of a huge graph of data. That graph is theoretically limitless and makes use of a principle called the "open world assumption." In an open world it is not possible to base your assumptions on what is missing from the graph. The open world does not have a concept of completeness because there is always the possibility that there is more information than what you are seeing at any given moment in time.

These may not be the only arguments against the use of CreativeWork for different FRBR or BIBFRAME entities, but in my mind they are sufficient to make the case that if it is desirable to encode FRBR or BIBFRAME entities in schema.org that they must be represented by different schema.org classes and cannot be inferred from data elements in CreativeWork.

Before I end, let me make clear that I do not favor an imposition of FRBR-like separations of bibliographic data on the linked data world. Even the BIBFRAME two-part bibliographic description will have problems interacting with the one-entity model that is used outside of libraries. I do think that we can find a way to talk virtually about works without stripping such key elements as authors and subjects from the description of the package that carries the content. That package is, after all, what I hold in my hand when I read something, and it is a whole, with author, title, subjects, pages, binding, publisher, etc. That is, however, a topic for another post.

Spying, the old-fashioned way

While the news debates the NSA's PRISM program, a massive collection of data points of electronic communication, the more human side of spying is being pushed to the background. Yet if you are fearful of privacy invasion, there is nothing more chilling than a reading of FBI files with accounts of informants and statements about "Communist leanings" and "pro-Russian" attitudes. You can get a taste for this in the FBI Vault, a public file of de-classified documents, most of which are revealed upon the death of the target. The A-Z list (which appears to be a selection, as other names can be found with searches) is full of famous names, from Al Capone to Al Gore, from George Burns to Marilyn Monroe, and from Helen Keller to Leon Trotsky. (The list is only marginally alphabetical, by first name, which is almost as shocking as the contents of the files.)

This is old-fashioned stuff for the most part. Type-written letters, lots of scribbled initials, and whole chunks of documents blacked out with what must be a special FBI-invented marker.

On a more modern note, who could resist adding their favorite FOIA file to Facebook?

Not everyone in the Vault is a potential "enemy of the state." Some are there because they were threatened, and the FBI was doing its "protect and serve" job. But coming to the attention of the FBI is often not a good thing. In the case of Bradbury, an informant tipped off the Bureau that Bradbury may have attended a writers' meeting in Cuba. This set off an investigation.

"Investigation conducted in the neighborhood of 10265 Cheviot Drive, Los Angeles, California, disclosed that a RAY DOUGLAS BRADBURY, date of birth 8/22/20, Waukegan, Illinois, resides at this address. He is a known writer and Los Angeles indices have numerous references on RAY DOUGLAS BRADBURY."

The report is itself a boon for any biographers (and Wikipedians). It gives his family history (back to 1630), location and occupation of all living family members, information about his spouse (including the location of the church where they were married), and of course his yearly income. Given that this report is from 1959, you can just imagine how much more information the FBI would have today. There are whole pages that would do a reference librarian proud: a list of his professional memberships, a complete bibliography, film credits. There is even some level of literary analysis:

"... BRADBURY was probably sympathetic with certain pro-Communist elements in the [Writers Guild of America, West]... [Informant] stated it has been his observation that some of the writers suspected of having Communist backgrounds have been writing in the field of science fiction and it appears that science fiction may be a lucrative field for the introduction of Communist ideologies."

Admittedly, this was high "red scare" time still, and Bradbury was working in and around Hollywood. However, the informant seems to have been unfamiliar with the work of L. Ron Hubbard.

Every file here has some gems worth reading. And don't forget to check the category "Unexplained Phenomenon".

BIBFRAME Authorities

There is a discussion taking place on the BIBFRAME listserv about the draft proposal for BIBFRAME Authorities. I've made some comments, but this is a topic that requires diagrams, and therefore doesn't work well in email. This blog post is an illustrated comment on the BIBFRAME Authorities proposal.

The way I read the proposal, this diagram represents the current thinking on BIBFRAME Authorities:

Here is an example of a BIBFRAME authority representation from the document:

<!--  BIBFRAME Authority -->
<Person id="http://bibframe/auth/person/franklin">
      <label>Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790</label>
      <hasIDLink resource="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043402" />
      <hasVIAFLink resource="http://viaf.org/viaf/56609913" />
      <hasDNBLink resource="http://d-nb.info/gnd/118534912" />
</Person>

It is unclear to me what role or functionality the VIAF and DNB links are expected to have, so that is a question that I have. I don't know what "hasIDLink" means - whether that is specific to LCNA or means: "this is the authority file." If it does not mean that, then this does not link the BIBFRAME name display form specifically to the actual authority file that defined it. If it does mean that, then the three authority files are not treated consistently.

In addition, it does not appear that alternate name forms are including in the BIBFRAME Authority, so they are not available for indexing. That could just be something missing from the examples, however.

It would make more sense to me that if a BIBFRAME authority is needed in the BIBFRAME structure, to make a few changes. First, the alternate name forms would be included in the BIBFRAME authority, primarily for indexing. The preferred form of the name is obviously there for the purposes of display and indexing. The alternate forms are not displayed, but should be used in retrieval.

Another possible change is to make a direct link from the BIBFRAME authority to the library authority entry, in this case LCNA. Without this, it isn't clear how the two will be kept in sync as the LCNA file is updated. Links to other library authority files would be from the authority of record, which is what they are "nearly equivalent" to:

Note that this still links the annotations to the BIBFRAME authority. Other libraries using the LCNA data would not necessarily have access to annotations linked directly to the BIBFRAME authority, but that depends on how those authorities are shared. The advantage of this is that it shelters the "true authority" from possibly inappropriate stuff that might be associated with the BIBFRAME authority.

<!--  BIBFRAME Authority -->
<Person id="http://bibframe/auth/person/franklin">
      <label>Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790</label>

      <altLabel>Franklin, V. (Venīamin), 1706-1790</altLabel>

       <authority resource="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043402" />
</Person>

<!-- LC Name Authority -->

  <madsrdf:PersonalName rdf:about="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043402">

      <madsrdf:authoritativeLabel xml:lang="en">Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790

        </madsrdf:authoritativeLabel>

      <madsrdf:variantLabel xml:lang="en">Franklin, V. (Venīamin), 1706-1790

        </madsrdf:variantLabel> 

      <hasVIAFLink resource="http://viaf.org/viaf/56609913" />
      <hasDNBLink resource="http://d-nb.info/gnd/118534912" /> 

  </madsrdf:PersonalName>

The last option that I can propose is that of simply using the library authority. I believe that the argument against this is that such data may not always be available for record displays but as far as I know nothing prevents caching of high-use metadata statements ("triples" because it's all just triples after all), and refreshing these periodically to make sure one has the latest. In fact, it is probable that the linked data space will take a lesson from the Domain Name System, where a system of mirrors and backups distributes the DNS world-wide, syncs changes, and provides almost 100% availability. In that case, there would be no reason not to use ones' stated authority, with similarly coded local data existing where the authority data does not exist for the occasional local need.

<!--  BIBFRAME Authority -->
<Person id="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043402"></Person>

<!-- LC Name Authority -->

  <madsrdf:PersonalName rdf:about="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043402">

      <madsrdf:authoritativeLabel xml:lang="en">Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790

        </madsrdf:authoritativeLabel>

      <madsrdf:variantLabel xml:lang="en">Franklin, V. (Venīamin), 1706-1790

        </madsrdf:variantLabel> 

      <hasVIAFLink resource="http://viaf.org/viaf/56609913" />
      <hasDNBLink resource="http://d-nb.info/gnd/118534912" /> 

  </madsrdf:PersonalName>

To be sure, I am making some assumptions that should be explicit.

1. It's all triples. It's easy to forget this when looking at graphs.
2. Availability is a technical issue for which there is an answer (or more than one answer)
3. The main action in a linked data space is a query. This is not only for traditional discovery, but also for forming displays. To display a person's name will be a query for a "label" linked to a URI. It doesn't matter whether the URI is a BIBFRAME authority URI, an LCNA URI, or a DNB URI -- each of those is a triple in linked data space.

The "Mellen Mess" and the changing role of publishers

Reading about the "Mellen Mess" -- the case of the publisher that is suing a librarian who criticized the quality of the houses's output -- I found the most interesting discussion to have taken place in the comments area of the original post (available via the Wayback Machine). One poster says:

On the other hand, I would say that few if any publishers do not publish a number of books that I would not buy.

To which Dale Askey replies:

The fact is, however, that libraries have to be able to trust presses to turn out good titles, or our work becomes impossible given the sheer global output of scholarship... libraries lack enough qualified subject expertise to make such judgments at the necessarily granular level, and the trend here is not encouraging. Subject librarianship is dismissed as a relic of a past age, and we now talk about “patron-driven” acquisition as if it were the Holy Grail. Having spent a brief but wonderful portion of my career as a focused subject librarian for an area where I have expertise, I know the benefit of reading substantive reviews and making intelligent choices about individual titles, but even that library no longer has the funds (or perhaps just lacks the will to commit the funds) for such esoteric enterprises.

What I think we see here is evidence of a substantial change in what it means to be a publisher in this age of "everyone can be a publisher." First, a little history.

Turin book fair, 2007

The first followers of Gutenberg were equal parts scholar, technician and businessman. There was never any question that producing print was a for-profit activity, and the same printers who turned out carefully edited classics also printed the first advertisements as well as a large number of indulgences to be sold to wealthy (but not well-behaved) Catholics. Well into the late 19th century, publishers were also printers, and often saw themselves as having a key role in scholarship and culture. The reputation of the publisher was what made the introduction of new, unknown authors possible.

Turin book fair, 2007

Although I am at my very core a "book person," I was unaware of the culture of publishers before visiting Europe and attending both bookstores and a few book fairs there. What struck me immediately was that the book covers represented the publisher more than the book itself. Near a university I found a bookstore that was entirely organized by publisher -- not by topic -- so that the only access other than "known item" was browsing by publisher.

 By my own observation, by the 1950's the role of the publisher in the US was subordinated to the book, preferably a best-seller. We could all name key books (Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), but I doubt if many of us could name the publishing house that issued them.

As Epstein and Schiffrin explain (see Further Reading), the purchase of publishing houses in the late 20th century by companies with a primary interest in profits, unhindered with cultural concerns, has made the publishing house no more than another business. From scholar-printer-businessman, only the latter role remains. If "best-selling" is your idea of quality, then these publishers can be considered consistent and trustworthy. If you are looking for greater cultural pursuits, you will probably be disappointed.

While that describes popular publishing, scholarly publishing has retained the publisher reputation... at least until very recently. While there still are known scholarly publishers whose output can be trusted sight un-seen (as Askey explains), there are many new entrants to this business area whose primary goal is income, not scholarship itself. This seems to be following a similar path to that of popular publishing, but with a twist: scholars must publish. The real culprit in this story is the "publish or perish" culture of academia. It matters not that there is no audience for a scholar's work; in fact, being actually read is rather icing on the cake. The main thing is that a scholar must get his or her work produced by someone acting as a publisher. It is therefore unremarkable that publishers have come on the scene to address this market.

The big "however" here is that while author fees may cover the cost (plus profit) of publishing an open access article, printed books still need to have some sales. Throughout the history of publishing, vanity books have been known as money-losers,* and some publishers have contracted with the authors to buy back any un-sold copies. This is more than an un-tenured faculty member can afford, however, so the business of publishing books by academics is one that wise investors would avoid.

The upshot of the story here is that we've gotten ourselves into an untenable position between the pressure to publish and the actual market for published works. Something has to give, and it has to give at both ends of the equation.

The next step, then, is improving the social media that the academic community uses so that the "post publication peer review" becomes the filter for quality and importance. 

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* I ran into a great rant by a 19th c. Italian publisher about vanity publishing while doing research on Natale Battezzati. I unfortunately didn't mark it, but if I find it again I will link it here.


Further Reading

Epstein, Jason. Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

Schiffrin, André. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London: Verso, 2000.

By way of explanation

“Readers who are familiar with conventional logical semantics may find it useful to think of RDF as a version of existential binary relational logic in which relations are first-class entities in the universe of quantification. Such a logic can be obtained by encoding the relational atom R(a,b) into a conventional logical syntax, using a notional three-place relation Triple(a,R,b); the basic semantics described here can be reconstructed from this intuition by defining the extension of y as the set { : Triple(x,y,z)} and noting that this would be precisely the denotation of R in the conventional Tarskian model theory of the original form R(a,b) of the relational atom. This construction can also be traced in the semantics of the Lbase axiomatic description.”
        From the RDF Semantics document

"Doubts about the ability to know the order of the world catalyzed a crucial change, away from taxonomic forms of information storage based on natural language and toward new ones based on a symbolic language of analytical abstraction. Mathematics promised a new vision of order for both the natural and the moral worlds, where confusion was resolved by jettisoning whatever could not be known with certainty."
     Hobart, Michael E. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. p. 90

“We could try to feed it algorithms for everything. There are only slightly more of them than there are particles in the universe. It would be like building a heart muscle molecule by molecule. And we’d still have a hell of an indexing and retrieval problem at the end. Even then, talking to such a decision tree would be like talking to a shopping list. It’d never get any smarter than a low-ranking government bureaucrat.”
     Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2, 1st Perenniel Ed., 1996. p. 78

Battezzati's Cartellini

Beginning with the first edition of the Dewey Decimal System and Relativ Index, Melvil Dewey includes this intriguing acknowledgment:

Perhaps the most fruitful source of ideas was the Nuovo sistema di Catalogo Bibliografico Generale of Natale Battezzati, of Milan. Certainly he [Dewey] is indebted to this system adopted by the Italian publishers in 1871, though he has copied nothing from it.

It so happens that I did some research on this in the national library in Milan in the mid-1970's and never published what I learned. This blog post makes use of notes and photocopies from that time.

There are a number of puzzling things about Dewey's mention of Battezzati's system. One is that it had little or nothing to do with classification. It was, however, an ingenious card system. The story, in brief, goes like this:

Natale Battezzati was a printer/publisher in Milan from the mid-1800's onward. The publishers had a bi-monthly publication that carried information on new books in print. The publication was used by booksellers and customers to find books of interest. However, unless a bookseller had a perfect memory, looking for a specific book or a book on a specific topic meant combing through numerous back issues of the Bibliografia italiana. Battezzati, a member of the Associazione libreria italiana (the Italian Bookseller's Association) came up with the idea of using reprints of the title pages of books on card stock that could be kept and interfiled as a kind of "books in print" card catalog within each bookstore.

The genius of the card system was that each card had printed on each of three sides:

1. the name of the publisher 
2. the name of the author
3. a subject classification based on Brunet

The cards could also have overprinted a table of contents or a summary of the contents. Each publication was also to be given, in the upper right corner, a number that could be used by the bookstores in ordering.

Thus, the bookseller would receive three copies of the card for each new book, and could create three card files. Battezzati's purpose was to increase sales by making it easier for a bookseller to satisfy the needs of the customer.

So much of this seems familiar to us today: a single "unit" card with multiple headings, a unique numbering system for books ... it's no wonder that Dewey was impressed, but it's still unclear why a reference to the system would be included in all fourteen editions of DDC that Dewey personally oversaw.

Of even greater mystery is a statement by Battezzati in one number of the association's journal that Dewey, sent by his government to the World Exposition in Vienna in 1873, saw the cards demonstrated there. This is probably a mis-interpretation by Battezzati of a letter sent to him by Dewey, since it is highly unlikely that Dewey, at the time a 22-year-old college student, would have been sent to represent the United States at such an event in Europe. It is more likely that Dewey saw the cards in the articles in the Bibliografia italiana, which was held by a few major libraries on the East coast (Dewey was attending Amherst College in 1873), such as the Boston Atheneum. There were other misunderstandings on Battezzati's part, since he referred to Dewey as the secretary of the "Associazione dei Libraj d'America" -- that is, the Association of American Booksellers.