hangingtogether.org

About a million years ago (okay, in 2002) RLG held a forum called “Sharing the Wealth.” We used the event to poke and prod — why don’t special collections lend materials? Of course, some institutions do lend from special collections, but most do not. Could we use those that do lend as exemplars and learn from their experience? Could we use the SHARES partnership to pilot some good practice in this area? Could we use digitization on demand to share (”too expensive!” said most participants). We raised more than a few hackles, and started some good conversations, but the idea didn’t exactly catch fire.

In a Shifting Gears world, with a greater emphasis on giving broader access to collections in the care of special collections, we’re raising this scary issue again. My colleagues Jennifer Schaffner and Dennis Massie are putting on a Webinar along with practitioners from the RLG Partnership: Emory University will speak from the perspective of an institution that’s been doing this successfully for years; University of Miami is new to the discussion and just starting to consider the issues involved before coming to any decision to make their treasures more widely available.

If you are a member of the RLG Partnership, I hope you will join us for this discussion (May 28th, 8 am Pacific / 11 am Eastern, etc.).

Contact Dennis, Jennifer, or me for more information. Also, consider signing up for one of our many Partner lists to receive information of this type more directly.

In a previous post, I’ve shared some background about the data analysis phase of our Museum Data Exchange Mellon grant, and posted some of the questions our museum participants wanted to have answered. In the meantime, we have created a spreadsheet [pdf] which captures our ideas to date of what questions we may want to ask of the 850K CDWA Lite XML records from 9 museums. Note that the methodology captured by this spreadsheet lays out a landscape of possibilities - it is not a definitive checklist of all the questions we will answer as part of this project. Only as we get deeper into the analysis will we know which questions are actually tractable with the tools we have at hand. I’d appreciate any thoughts on additional lines of inquiry we could pursue with our analysis, or other observations!

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Susan Hamson (Columbia) came out with this zinger. We were talking about public services and delivery for archives, special collections and rare books. I think the topic that day was ILL of special collections, a real hot potato.

How can we get more people’s fingers on the pages and in the boxes? Not just in reading rooms, but on the web? Over the past three months, the RLG Steering Committee for Special Collections Delivery tackled questions at the public services end of the lifecycle of unique material. Dennis and I listened in as Cristina Favretto (Miami), Mattie Taormina (Stanford) and Susan sifted through creative ambitions to “do it better.” The committee asked, “What is the collective mind? What to stop doing? Who has the most innovative practices?”

Mattie, Cristina and Susan each asked their administration what changes management could support. They settled on four projects for starters: sharing (really sharing) special collections, balancing copyright management and risk, tapping the expertise of users, and best practices for scan-on-demand and photography. If you want to participate in one of these projects, put your hand up.

I felt a bit as if I was watching Wall-E sorting through the detritus of past cultures, considering each piece thoughtfully and then picking up projects that could change the world, system-wide, for real. In every case, at least one or two of the trio had good reasons not to tackle the topic at their own institution, but agreed the project would have an impact. In a Friday afternoon email volley, Susan wrote:

“Are we representing the interests of our institutions or do we move forward representing the interests of the profession and the patron?  ILL is tricky, permission fees are too–but what are we doing if not pushing the boundaries to engage a debate and discussion?  We’re not establishing policy for our institutions, but we are professionals engaged in the work of exploration and, maybe, change.  If not where we sit but some place else.  We’re not proposing that our institutions throw caution to the wind and abandon all that it good and holy–we’re just pausing to think about something new.  Putting it out there doesn’t make it so (well…).

“Now I’m not comfy with the ILL thing, but I still want to put it out there.  We’re archivists, dammit!   We have super powers (my bone folder is the source of all my super powers).”

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A little over a year ago, I inherited a project that didn’t have much more than a name: “Explore and understand the place of large digital text aggregations in scholarship and research.”

I had several discussions with my colleagues about what this project might turn out to be. We had several ideas:

­– Create a shared understanding of the expectations that researchers and students bring to their interactions with large-scale text aggregations on the web and the requirements for making these collections fit for scholarly use.

­– Convene an invitational meeting of those already engaged in large-scale digitization efforts to establish a common understanding of scholarly use-cases and the core requirements for library-sourced research services.

­– Identify service capabilities (bookmarking, annotation, citation management, etc) that are required to support scholarly use of text aggregations.

­– Assemble a text archive for prototyping and analysis.

­– Investigate needs of scholars (via focus groups?)

­– Experiment with the metadata we get from OCLC’s e-Content Synchronization service to see how we can characterize the contents of book aggregations

­– Experiment with full text functionality we might be able to offer a) on a specific aggregation b) across aggregations

What we were exploring went beyond finding and using a single document. It was about identifying works from many silos to incorporate into a local environment. And it was about performing actions against an index (or multiple indexes) of aggregated digitized works. We could investigate how scholars would work with the range of book text archives, starting with use case scenarios of the types of queries (e.g., in areas such as linguistic analysis, lexical frequency, translation studies, edition comparisons, things like occurrence of geographic place names in fiction, and coincidence of events - like being able to explore how a race riot affected neighborhood population dynamics).
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After nearly eight months at OCLC Research, I’m finally doing my first blog post. Why am I so intimidated at the prospect? Finally, Merrilee can stop pestering me to get off the dime.

Some of you may be aware that OCLC established a WorldCat Local Special Collections Task Force last summer. This happened quickly after Matt Goldner, Executive Director of End-User Services, became aware from the special collections community that Local is missing lots of information that we need for both display and indexing. The group of experts that got together for this task worked industriously throughout the fall and submitted a detailed report to OCLC in December.OCLC has now sent its response back to the Task Force Both reports are linked from the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee website. 

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The logistical details of publishing the tools we have produced as part of the Museum Data Exchange Mellon grant continue to unfold in a slower fashion than I had hoped, but I am now fairly confident that you will find applications for download announced at some point next week – more when it actually happens!

In the meantime, the focus of our activity with the museum partners has moved from creating tools to analyzing the data they’ve shared while using them. We now have data from six institutions who have allowed us to harvest CDWA Lite XML records created with and shared through a combination of COBOAT and OAICatMuseum 1.0 (again, more as we release the tools), plus records from three additional museums who had other means of creating and sharing CDWA Lite XML at their disposal. A total of about 850K records are now sitting behind a firewall on an OCLC Research server, awaiting data analysis.

Our next big question is: how can we evaluate the data the museums have shared? While it uses the same data structure (CDWA Lite XML), all participants are aware that rules to populate that data structure with data content may vary considerably from institution to institution. Cataloging Cultural Objects is becoming a household name, but a good bit of the data shared probably predates the emergence of this data content standard, let alone its local implementation. What are the right questions to ask which would give the participating museums a sense of how well their records play with each other, both in terms of the institutional dataset as well as the aggregate resource?

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Richard Ovenden (Keeper of Special Collections and Associate Director, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) was the most recent speaker in our Distinguished Speaker Series. [If you follow the link you’ll find, in due course, a link to the session itself.]

Richard’s talk yesterday was centered around uniformity and uniqueness. Uniform resources (that is, books and journals, those things that are widely held) now have a shared set of tools for discovery and interaction. Google Books (which started as the G5 and has not expanded to the G23, or G28) first focused on basic logistics but has since shifted to economic issues. Richard wondered if Google will in due course acquire other digital libraries, or digital library resources, in an effort to expand the corpus.

Recent concentration of effort on uniform resources has lead to a new (or renewed) focus on unique resources, which Richard split into local unique (what’s held in the IR, university archives, research data…) and global unique (those materials that have global value, regardless of origin). As he was explaining this, I imagined a Venn diagram where there is an overlapping bit of materials that are both locally and globally unique.

Oxford has engaged in a variety of activities (tagging and markup, text mining) and have developed a range of business models (ranging from fully free to fully subscription access) around their unique materials. They are considering how to move forward in a digital age, with projects around personal digital collections, and how to deal with “hybrid” collections (those collections that are have both paper and digital components, which have an extent statement like “500 boxes of paper and two PCs”).

In an era of increasing digital (and increasing reliance on digital), Richard still sees that real materials still have value and even provide a lure. At Oxford, real materials are used in research training, in master classes. The opportunity to be in the presence of the original can be quite compelling: on relatively short notice, the Bodleian organized an one-day exhibit of the Magna Carta and drew a crowd of 800 (ore had to be turned away). As the Bodleian considers its physical future (the New Bodleian, or the Weston Library) with increased space for teaching, exhibits, and events based around collections that working with materials “in the flesh” is still important.

Returning to uniformity and uniqueness, as the flow of funding shifts from sameness to originality, he hopes we can use the scale we’ve developed with the uniform to develop efficiencies that can be applied to unique materials. It’s our role to maximize the exposure of our collections to scholarship.

What of the implications of Google? Google’s work has not been curated, and we need to be aware of what’s been left out. In light of Google’s efforts, the preservation and exposure of the unique is more important than ever. There are also questions about the future of the uniform. Who bears the costs of keeping physical print collections, for example?

I was struck by Richard’s observations regarding focus on unique materials. This is echoed in the recently issued “Taiga Provocative Statements,” which says (in part):

[In five years,] collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron-initiated. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives.

Our own Information Context document (written in 2007) is similarly oriented:

Within a generation the library’s information sources and delivery services will be largely virtual. Libraries will continue to provide direct access to physical materials but this will be very much focused on the special demands of their local constituencies. “Comprehensive” research collection building will be done by a very small number of institutions while special collections of the special or unique materials of research will be maintained and featured at many institutions.

[The emphasis in both statements is mine.]

While I don’t disagree with Richard about the continued primacy of the original item, not everyone has a Magna Carta to draw the crowds. It’s also important to make more proletariat (to use a Bill Landis term) collections accessible, and to recognize that the audience for global unique is, in fact, global, and that we can serve both local and global audiences through digitization. Then again, I’m reminded of the presentation by Lisa Berglund at the 2008 RBMS preconferencethat taught me that even “real” pedestrian collections are useful in instruction.

Interesting to note, the announcement about the Weston Library is dated today.

My conclusions from attending the panel were:

The book isn’t gone it’s just different.
Newspapers are dead.
Publishing models are in the midst of change; success will depend on adding new kinds of values.
Libraries won’t go away but they will be a different bundle of services lodged in a changing physical place.

The best comment during the Q&A:

“Starbucks succeeded because it provided a place for digital reading.” - Dan Clancy

The most provocative question with the most unsatisfactory answer:

“Why should there be more than one library?”

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences sponsored a weekend symposium here in Silicon Valley titled The Public Good: The Impact of Information Technology on Society. The closing panel was on Sunday morning at the Computer History Museum (CMH). (We got a private tour after the symposium but I didn’t get to see the Babbage Difference Engine in operation. Sigh) Read the rest of this entry »

The Brooklyn Museum, the Frick and the Museum of Modern Art have launched a shared catalog called “Arcade” with 800K records – take it for a spin here, and read all about it in this press release.

It’s a development I’ve been watching closely over the years, from the initial Mellon planning grant, the creation of the NYARC consortium (which also includes the Met), to the nascent efforts of involving other local public and academic libraries in collaborative efforts. OCLC Research supported this effort by analyzing the holdings of the four NYARC libraries, which provided a further impetus for joint work: when he crunched the numbers, my colleague Brian Lavoie found that 83% of the combined NYARC holdings were held by a single library (find the full report here [pdf]). From this vantage-point, providing better access to the combined holdings of these libraries creates a tremendously enriched resource.

A statistic of this sort (although not directly drawn from our report) also made it into the coverage of the New York Times, again testifying how this kind of evidence is seen as a major motivator:

“What’s interesting is that there is only about a 10 percent overlap in titles between the holdings of the museums,” said Anne L. Poulet, director of the Frick Collection, which runs the Frick Art Reference Library.”

Kudos to all of those involved in launching Arcade! I am looking forward to seeing the collaborative relationship among these New York City libraries deepen further as they continue their quest to better serve their users and reap economies of scale along the way.

At the ALA Midwinter conference last week, I had the opportunity to talk with several groups about some work that OCLC Research has taken up in the area of distributed print archiving.  Briefly, we are looking at various ‘lightweight’ approaches to enabling more effective disclosure of institutional print archiving commitments. The MARC 583 Action Note (for which a rich controlled vocabulary already exists) has emerged as a potential vehicle for this, not least because it is already indexed and displayed in a variety of OCLC management systems that are widely deployed across the library community.

As noted in a recent report on policy frameworks for shared print collections (which Lorcan mentioned here), the absence of any network infrastructure for disclosing archiving commitments is seriously hampering efforts to manage print collections as a collective resource.   And this is why I was making the rounds at Midwinter to get input from various key constituencies on a proposed solution based on use of the MARC 583.  Because there was general interest in the slides from presentations at the ALCTS CCDO, PAIG and CONSER gatherings, I’ve posted them on slideshare.

• Network Infrastructure for Cooperative Print Management (ALCTS Chief Collection Development Officers of Large Research Libraries)
• Preservation at the Network Level: Challenges, Opportunities (Preservation Administrators Interest Group)
• Extending use of MARC 583 to Cooperative Serials Preservation (CONSER At Large)

As we move forward with this work, we’ll continue to consult broadly with collection managers, preservation administrators, and the library cataloging community — but in a focused and pragmatic fashion, as we’re aiming to support disclosure of archiving commitments in WorldCat before midyear.  There’s nothing like a fire at your back to keep you moving forward…