On 2/19/2016 10:15 PM, Tennant,Roy wrote:
> You created a plausible outline that I'm afraid is missing a rather large and important step. For the lack of a better term I'll call it "entification," which is what we call it around here.
...
> I get the sense sometimes that the library community doesn't fully grasp the nature of this transition yet, and it worries me. We need to shake off the shackles of our record-based thinking and think in terms of an interlinked Bibliographic Graph. As long as we keep talking about translating records from one format to another we simply don't understand the meaning of linked data and both the transformative potential it has for our workflows and user interfaces as well as the plain difficult and time consuming work that will be required to get us there.
>
> Sure, we at OCLC are a long way down a road that should do a lot to help our member libraries make the transition, but there will be plenty of work to go around. The sooner we fully grasp what that work will be, the better off we will all be in this grand transition. No, let's call it what it really is: a bibliographic revolution. Before this is over there will be broken furniture and blood on the floor. But at least we will be free of the tyrant.
I completely agree that the library community doesn't fully grasp the
nature of the transition. We are only at the beginning of a "long,
strange trip"--and the resources of some libraries (and librarians
themselves!) are almost exhausted already.
All of this in the pursuit of a highly abstract goal: an interlinked
bibliographic graph. I haven't come across that term before, but I guess
it is a take on the "Giant Global Graph" of Tim Berners-Lee that many
people consider to be the ultimate goal of linked data. To achieve this
goal of an interlinked bibliographic graph, we see that much will have
to be sacrificed, but the revolution will be worthwhile because we will
be free of the "tyrant". Once again, I am not sure precisely what you
mean here, but I assume the tyrant is the MARC record, which is a
"unified bibliographic record" that contains all of the information for
a bibliographic item. (I prefer to call it the "unit record" or the
traditional catalog card, which was made to deal with the 19th-century
transition from the earlier book catalogs, which were structured quite
differently)
The unified bibliographic record found in MARC must undergo
"entification," which again, I assume means to turn as much as possible
of the current, unified bibliographic record into entities, i.e. URIs,
that in turn can be linked to--by anyone, I guess. (that is, if it is to
be linked OPEN data. Linked closed data is an entirely different matter)
In any case, if all this is done, I completely agree that the data that
is now in our bibliographic records will become almost infinitely flexible.
There are a few questions of course. Chief among them, the obvious one:
1) Is this what libraries signed up for? What will be the final costs in
terms of budgets, careers, redoing so much yet again? And how long will
it take?
2) It remains to be seen whether any of this is what the public wants. I
guess I'm just an old-fashioned kind of guy, or maybe just naive, but it
seems to me that when people come to a library (either virtually or
physically) they come to use the items in the collection, and not to use
the catalog. In other words, people do not come to a library, or the
library's website, just to look up something in the catalog and then....
go home. They use the catalog to get into the materials in the library's
collection. If they already know what they want and where it is, they
ignore the catalog. (Maybe they shouldn't but they do)
The best catalogs are those that I can use as quickly and as easily as
possible so that I can spend the least amount of time with the catalog
and spend the most amount of time in the items I find in the collection.
This is why I personally prefer Google. It is not that I spend a great
deal of time on Google, but paradoxically, I spend the *least* amount of
time there compared to the other search engines. That's why I prefer it.
So, even if we make the "100% entified, interlinked bibliographic graph
tool" that brings in information from hither and yon, that gives me
charts from the IMF and images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, the
latest news from Bing, plus of course, all the Wikipedia info, along
with the library materials--and I'll assume here that it will even be on
the specific topics I want, that might be great. Pardon my skepticism: I
think lots of people would still like to see it in action before
concluding that it really is great.
It may be that the idea is to get rid of or replace the catalog
completely, but I think the public will continue to demand a quick and
easy-to-use list to get into the materials in a library's collection.
The proposed linked data tools do not provide this but only adds
complexity to the catalog by adding more and more stuff into a search
result. It seems to me that we can entify things until Doomsday and it
still won't make it one bit easier for the public to find materials in
library collections.
The problem is: our catalogs have never been easy-to-use, and they blew
out even worse when they went online with keyword. There are tons of
problems and those issues have yet to be addressed. But just because the
public doesn't like to use library catalogs doesn't mean that they do
not want a "listing of materials" in the collection they are using. And
that list should be made as simple to use as possible. Such a listing
is also called a catalog. A lot could be done to make it easier to use
than it is today. But nobody seems to be talking about that.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the public doesn't want an easy-to-use
listing of materials in a library's collection. Like I said, maybe I'm
just an old-fashioned kind of guy, or just naive.
James Weinheimer [log in to unmask]
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