 |
 |
All, First, thanks to everyone--especially Karen, Jörg, Amanda, and Amber-- for schooling me so thoroughly about current BIBFRAME thinking and initiatives. My deliberately provocative initial email has elicited the thoughtful responses I had hoped for. While I can’t respond point-by-point to everyone, I wanted to follow-up briefly, beginning at the “end,” so to speak, with the message sent by Sharon this morning, in which she says: “The whole point of RDA and BIBFRAME is moving to Linked Data community for better information retrieval and connectivity on the Internet.” This, I think, we can all agree on. What troubles me (and this will be a major thrust of my presentation) is the vast disconnect I see between two fundamentally different kinds of discovery, or, if you prefer, use cases for the retrieval and use of information. As someone who has worked in an academic research library as (mostly) a cataloger for 27+ years, I realize that, with the dawning of the Internet age, our collections have become, over time, simultaneously more discoverable and less accessible. There has been an enormous shift from print to electronic, and whereas anyone can walk in off the street, discover, and access our print content (though not everyone can check it out), our electronic content, for which we spend millions of dollars every year (not to mention the costs of maintaining it) is accessible ONLY to patrons affiliated with our university (with a few minor exceptions). As our collections have moved online, we have unwittingly contributed to the de-democratization of information. Let’s imagine a time in the (near?) future in which BIBFRAME and Linked Data principles have been fully embraced and implemented by the library community (as well as others); systems have been built and tweaked to accommodate the new data models and linkages. Will the content discoverable in the new ecosystem be accessible to users? Or will they be continually crashing into firewalls? Finally, I would like to mention what I think is perhaps the most extensive and thorough implementation of linked data in the libraries/archives context: data.bnf.fr, created by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. I mention it for a couple of reasons: 1) it leverages existing UNIMARC data (FRBRized using software written specifically for that purpose) and 2) the BnF--and French libraries in general--have not adopted RDA. Why have they not adopted RDA? Quoting http://www.transition- bibliographique.fr/enjeux/position-francaise-rda/: “l’abandon pur et simple des normes actuelles de catalogage françaises pour ce nouveau code de catalogage international s’avérerait coûteux, contre-productif, voire constituerait une régression." [purely and simply abandoning current French cataloging standards for this new international cataloging code would be costly, counter- productive, and would even constitute a regression.] Further on, they note: “Adopter RDA en l’état constituerait donc une régression par rapport à ce qui fait la force des grands catalogues français, à savoir précisément la gestion de ces liens." [Adopting RDA as-is would therefore constitute a regression with respect to the strong point of the large French catalogs, to wit—the management of these links.] The links in question are the ARKs connecting their bibliographic records with their authority records. They have effectively been using a form of linked data for 40 years. [Two brief asides: for a skeptical view of RDA, see Karen Coyle and Diane Hillman’s opinion in D-Lib Magazine from a decade ago (!): http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/coyle/01coyle.html? ref=SaglikAlani.Com; also, Amber, to respond to your question about failure of many libraries to adopt RDA—there was a recent straw poll on AUTOCAT, with the results clearly showing that many smaller libraries had neither the time, the resources, nor the will to move from AACR2 to RDA.] BUT, and this is a major point (now quoting Gildas Illien, formerly at the BnF and now at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle): “Data.bnf.fr does not mean to replace the existing catalogs and other silos it exploits, but to provide some ‘glue’ between them.” In other words, at least in the case of data.bnf.fr, neither the non- RDA, UNIMARC-based catalog (http://catalogue.bnf.fr/index.do) nor the BnF’s silo for digitized collections (http://gallica.bnf.fr/) goes away as a result of the implementation of Linked Data. This concerns me because cataloging/metadata departments, at least in US academic libraries, are losing resources to other initiatives, even as they are being asked to create and maintain metadata not only for catalogs, discovery layers, digital repositories, and institutional repositories, but now, also, for Linked Data projects. Whence some of my skepticism of RDA, BIBFRAME, and Linked Data more broadly. Too many generals, too few foot soldiers. Thanks again, Jeff