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The RLG Partners working group that has been gathering and analyzing evidence over the past two years about MARC tag usage to inform library metadata practices completed its work. The 72-page Implications of MARC Tag Usage on Library Metadata Practices report was published on March 12 — with links to thirteen detailed data tables for those who love to immerse themselves in statistics. They’re spreadsheets, so you can also filter and sort the data as you like.

The working group’s studies focused on machine applications. This is an important user category that has generally been ignored in user studies.  MARC data is also used for machine matching and manipulations, linking, harvesting, collection analysis, ranking, and providing systematic views of publications. If we envision a future of linked data so that all the work information professionals have invested into creating and maintaining legacy MARC data are available to the rest of the information universe, machine applications will become increasingly important. Future encoding schemas will need to have a robust MARC crosswalk to ingest our millions of legacy records.

We believe that MARC data cannot continue to exist in its own discrete environment. It will need to be leveraged and used in other domains to reach users in their own networked environments. With the increase of digitized full text from various mass digitization efforts, we advise MARC practitioners to focus on authorized names, classifications, identifiers, and controlled vocabularies that key-word searching of full-text will not provide, rather than on “descriptive metadata”.

The working group held a Webinar on March 18, 2010 to discuss its findings and projections for MARC’s future with those interested. I was grateful that Catherine Argus at the National Library of Australia was willing to get up extra early to present her work, at 7:00 am local time, so that RLG Partner staff on the east coast of the US could join the discussion at 4:00 pm EDT. A couple of Catherine’s colleagues at the NLA also listened in. Lisa Rowlison de Ortiz (University of California, Berkeley), who collaborated on the executive summary which pulled together all our work and presented the working group’s views on MARC’s future summarized above, also joined the discussion. The recording of that Webinar will be available on the OCLC Research’s Webinars page soon.

The working group members each selected a topic to research, and then wrote a report summarizing the findings, which we presented during the Webinar:

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At recent meetings I attended in Washington D.C. there was significant hallway discussion about the Open Researcher Contributor Identification (ORCID) initiative. Given the science orientation of the meetings this initiative to resolve the problem of name ambiguity and attribution in scholarly publication was particularly welcomed. As you’ll see if you visit the ORCID site this is early days for this pre-competitive multi-publisher effort whose goal is to establish

“an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry’s de facto standard.” Their mission is “to resolve the systemic name ambiguity, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual’s research output, to enhance the scientific discovery process and improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration.”

Meeting one was convened by Thomson Reuters and Nature Publishing not long ago with the first meeting in November 2009. The roster of participants is impressive and the continued involvement of Elsevier made those with whom I talked hopeful that this would be as successful an effort as CrossRef has been. A recent editorial in Nature Credit where credit is due (pdf) is quite to the point about the implications of success.

My colleagues, Thom Hickey and Janifer Gatenby, have been involved. OCLC has much to contribute here given Thom’s leadership of the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) effort and Janifer’s in the development of the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). The scope of ORCID is narrower than ISNI as the latter is intended for the identification of “identities used publicly by parties involved throughout the media content industries in the creation, production, management, and content distribution chains.” This goes across all fields of creative activity not just science. As Janifer said,

“ISNI could become a cross domain identifier so that a researcher who also plays in a rock band (and wants it known that he is one and the same) can be identified.”

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Best wishes to our readers from all of us at hangingtogether and OCLC Research. We’re grateful for the attention you give our thoughts and hope to continue contributing to the design of the future library, archive, and museum.

As a final thank-you for the year I urge you to install Readability in your web browser. It makes reading on the web much more comfortable by removing all the clutter from those crowded web sites that studiously avoid everything Jakob Nielsen has tried to teach web designers.

I’ve promoted it before in the commentary of our Above the Fold newsletter (to which you should subscribe; we work hard to find relevant articles that you might not see in the ordinary course of professional reading).

I was motivated to offer it up here because it made David Pogue’s Best Tech Ideas of the Year 2009 column in today’s New York Times. Here’s what he said:

READABILITY The single best tech idea of 2009, though, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability. It’s a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar (get it). When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. Times Square just goes away.

You wind up with a simple, magazine-like layout, presented in a beautiful font and size (your choice) against a white or off-white background with none of this red-text-against-black business.

You occasionally run into a Web page that Readability doesn’t handle right — no big deal, just refresh the page to see the original. But most of the time, Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place.

Go forth and install it.

Here’s to a clear-eyed and comfortable time in 2010!

Research assessment is a very big deal in some countries. Countries whose university systems are largely publicly-funded routinely check up on the research quality of individual universities to ensure that they are squeezing the best possible performance out of their systems. They do this because they see a link between high-quality research and economic development. The economic potential of research is growing in importance as national ‘knowledge economies’ recognise the need for international research excellence, and see universities as a key driver.

We have just published a report which reviews the research assessment regimes of five countries, and the role of libraries in the processes of assessment that exist. This report was produced by Key Perspectives Ltd, a UK consultancy, and it surveys the research assessment situation in the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK, Denmark and Australia. We chose countries that we knew were doing interesting things in assessment – or in preparation for its introduction. The high political stakes involved were evident even as the report was being written. In the UK, the pilot exercise for the system that will replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) ditched one of its proposed new thrusts (bibliometrics) and found another (economic impact) for the country’s universities to stress about. In Australia, a recent change of government led to temporary abandonment of a system that tied assessment outcomes to government funding, and arguably lost the country some ground in the international scramble for both reputation and economic advantage.

The Review provides a fascinating account of different cultural understandings of the purposes of assessment, and a glimpse of the trend of concentrating research excellence in a small number of top universities that is now taking shape in many countries, as the competition for research income, top faculty and students becomes one that occurs within a single international marketplace. We found countries that tied research assessment to large amounts of government funding, and others that did not (yet); countries that operated systems based on bibliometrics and others that mistrusted them; countries that devised league tables of journals and awarded points to researchers on those they published in – and others that assembled national panels of experts to determine the rankings.

Libraries are involved in these assessment exercises in a range of ways, from the clerical (data entry) to the highly strategic, and from the specialist (bibliometric expertise) to a role as providers of general infrastructure (institutional repositories). Whatever differences there may be in the assessment systems adopted by different countries, they all share a focus upon the research outputs produced by their researchers and faculty. These outputs are managed by libraries – both indirectly (via publications) and, increasingly directly (via arrangements with the authors themselves at pre-publication stages). Does this suggest that libraries play a central role in research assessment within their institutions? Or that they should? At the very least, shouldn’t libraries seek a shared view on this question?

I’ve recently returned from the Netherlands (Holland as the locals call it and Rotterdam to be more specific) where I attended the 2009 Digital Strategies for Heritage Conference (DISH2009). The main organizers of the conference are the Netherlands Institute for Heritage and the DEN foundation. The latter organization, Digital Heritage Netherlands is the Dutch national knowledge platform for information technology and cultural heritage run by my long-time friend and colleague, Marco de Niet. I was on the advisory board for this biannual event and chaired a panel during the conference.

It was very well-done. I believe that this gathering has now become the most important heritage conference for Europe (it would be the equivalent of a combined WebWise and Museums on the Web in the United States). There were over 600 delegates from twenty-three countries in attendance. They were a good mix of digital heritage practitioners, project leaders and administrators and they approached the conference from a shared vision of mobilizing heritage materials on the web that doesn’t exist in the US.

There were a small number of American attendees most of whom had keynote or other significant roles on the conference program. I think that some of them didn’t understand the extent of the investments that have already been made in the Netherlands and more generally in Europe nor the extent to which a shared motivation has taken hold. This was not an audience that needed to be hectored about the need to present their collections and their institutions on the web or the imperative of a user-centric perspective in doing this work.
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At the RLG Partnership Annual Meeting in 2007, Timothy Burke told the assembled research librarians ‘you have to figure out how to be hydraulic engineers of information flow rather than the guardians of the fortress’. It’s an image that has stuck with me. Everywhere now in our professional literature we see the challenges of our work represented by the imagery of flow and fluidity. We try to scope and identify workflows that are changing or need to change. The platform of the web dips and peaks faster and differently than we can predict, and as it does so content suddenly flows in different directions, taking new channels. Stability in this environment is rare, and a relief when we find it, even though it may lie in places that librarians take some time to trust – like Google and Wikipedia.

I often show a slide produced by Rick Luce, Vice-Provost and Director of Libraries at Emory University, when describing the territory of our Research Information Management (RIM) programme. This appeals to me because it indicates that library attention needs to be focused on the workflow layer, rather than the repository layer that sits below it.

Understanding the particular environments of researchers, and the flows that matter to them, is perhaps not a new challenge for research libraries, but it is a newly urgent one. In the pre-digital world the flows were not digital flows, with the capture challenges and opportunities that now exist. The library dealt mainly in the solid world of published literature. It collected from the physical outputs that emerged at the end of flow processes, and could structure its operations around that bounded reality (within its ‘fortress’ print stores, to use Tim Burke’s analogy). Now, we see potential for library services everywhere, because we have systems that capture flows, and allow them to combine, split and replicate wherever it is useful for them to do so, and legal barriers do not obstruct. But to do so optimally, we need to understand researchers’ worlds at a level of detail that is still not familiar to libraries. Read the rest of this entry »

Support for the Research Process: An Academic Library Manifesto (PDF) was just released by the RLG Partnership Research Information Management Roadmap Working Group. You don’t need to nail it to your library’s door, but you might want to think about how many of these things you currently do, how many you could do, and what you could stop doing (or streamline) so that you can better support your institution’s research mission.

The Virtual International Authority File continues to both grow and improve. In July the sixteen source files together had 10,759, 910 usable name records, and 70.31% had related bibliographic records for matching. 30.33% of the name records matched at least one other source. Compare to April, where nine source files had a 28.36% match rate.

It’s human review that shows where the matching algorithms need tweaking. I had spotted that source records for Laozi were not matching up.  My colleagues Thom Hickey and Jenny Toves identified the problem and fixed it. The number of headings retrieved for Laozi was reduced from 108 to 3. Jenny provided these before and after screen shots, an indication of improved matching for others like it.

Before (screen shot taken 2009-07-01) – click to enlarge image

After (screen shot taken 2009-08-10) – click to enlarge image