A Different Kind of Schema

Tonight in class, Dr. MacCall talked about ways to automate, or partially automate, metadata entry in digital libraries. While highly sophisticated automation is beyond the scope of our class project, it's useful to be aware of the possibilities in case we need them later in our careers. Using our football image library, Dr. MacCall suggested as an example that perhaps instead of manually typing in a whole, possibly difficult-to-spell name (e.g "Baumhower") every time, the image cataloger could instead type in the player number (in this case, 73) and lookup software would provide the correct name.

Of course, it couldn't really be that simple, and the discussion quickly turned to all the ways it could go wrong (reassigned numbers, duplicate numbers, partial numbers, and so on), as well as the myriad rules for uniform numbers allowed on the field every game. I never realized that football uniform numbers were so complicated!  Furthermore, that complicated uniform number system would have to be written into the rules of the number-to-name matching software.  Thus numbering rules intended to reduce confusion on the actual football field would be re-purposed as a schema intended to reduce errors in a virtual library of football images. How wonderfully poetic to think that the rules and structure of the game itself could become an integral part of creating a football image library!

ER&L 2015

I really enjoyed Adam's post on ARLIS 2015. It sounds like he had a great time and got a lot out of his conference experience.  I recommend to everyone to try to get to a library conference if you can, and I also totally recommend the smaller, more narrowly focused conferences.  If you're a first-timer, the smaller events are much less overwhelming, you'll have a better chance to meet people in your chosen field, and like Adam, you'll probably find that a majority of the presentations are directly relevant to your interests.

I also thank Adam for reminding me that I could blog about my experience at ER&L 2015. I won a travel grant from Taylor & Francis that paid my way to Austin for this great conference on Electronic Resources and Libraries. The conference had a nice mix of programming, with a lot aimed at new electronic resources managers, as well as a healthy number of presentations on more advanced topics. Discovery was a hot topic, with several presentations and two different panels, one comparing experiences with different systems, and another analyzing products to see if they favored one publisher's or platform's content over another's (happily, they didn't find evidence of favoritism). Lots of presenters mentioned metadata in a variety of contexts--usage data (improving standards, collection assessment), journal metadata (TRANSFER and PIE-J and "publishers, whatever you do, please stop with the retroactive title changes"), user data and privacy (analyzing data, new NISO initiative), discovery (which system delivers the best relevancy ranking for results?), altmetrics (measuring the impact of scholarship), and interoperability (what were the challenges of migration to this next generation system?). Of course I couldn't get to everything I wanted to hear, but I had a blast trying and would recommend ER&L to anyone starting or considering a career in electronic resources management, collection assessment, or a related job.

What do libraries want? It's the metadata, ALL the metadata.

This post was inspired by a suggestion from Damen:

"As I thought about metadata, reclined in my seat at the Intercontinental Chicago, watching the cars and people hurry about on Michigan Avenue, I realized that this had a lot to do with metadata, and ordered another steak from room service."

As I thought about metadata, slumped in my seat at the Hilton, after yet another full day of library software demonstrations from vendors I'm not allowed to name, I realized that this had a lot to do with metadata, and wished I could order a new set of vendors from room service.

For three days, I paid close attention, took good notes, and dutifully listened as the vendors demonstrated their systems according to our requested scenarios.  They tried their best.  They sent their biggest guns.  Their systems all looked fantastic ... if it was 2005.

They all had workable models for dealing with print.  They had terrific print circulation statistics, which they wasted far too much time in demonstrating.  But the closer to present needs they got, and the more they had been called upon to serve our future needs, the less they had, and the less they even seemed to grasp what we wanted. So many things were still in development, or on some vague roadmap, or minimally coming "in 2016," and we're talking functionality we need RIGHT NOW TODAY. One even prefaced his recitation of potentially supported COUNTER usage reports with the word "NISObabble."  I can't even conceive of a professional situation in which that kind of snark would be appropriate, but in my mind it absolutely summed up where their development priorities lay. In sum, those three days were more dispiriting than I could ever have imagined when we began this process well over a year ago. Maybe this process will end in a deal, and maybe it won't--I'm not in a position to vote--but whatever happens, I can see it will be a long road before we have the system we actually need.

So what do our campus libraries want?  And why do we want it?  Maybe we didn't make it clear. This is my view and only my view, informed by what our system discussed, but I do not speak for that system. I also won't speak to which vendors may or may not meet these needs, or in what way.  One thing is obvious in looking at our needs: it does indeed have a lot to do with metadata.

• Tools for working with the print collection must reflect the reality of shrinking holdings. They must support shared collection management, robust resource sharing, and easy flagging of last print copy. Special collections and digital libraries must be supported and foregrounded. This means shared, standardized metadata for bibliographic holdings, patron information, and loan rules; the system must support ways to ingest and/or discover metadata related to digital libraries, institutional repositories, and other locally-held content.
• Tools for acquiring new materials must support a high degree of automation and have the flexibility to handle individual and package purchases and subscriptions, as well as titles and packages procured through multiple consortia or demand-driven programs.  This means support for EDI, KBART, and other major standards, and metadata exchange partnerships with vendors, aggregators and publishers, especially in scholarly fields.
• Tools for electronic resources must recognize the scale and complexity of academic collections.  Many campuses are adopting "e-preferred" collection policies, and purchasing e-books on a scale unheard of in the days of print. The "million volume" e-book collection is already attainable. This means that systems must be able to handle the tasks of activation, linking, authentication, and collection maintenance with minimal intervention from library staff. Ideally, consortial purchases should be maintainable at the consortial level, while still allowing for local additions and control.  Electronic collections should be easily compared to existing print collections. Vendors should work with publishers to ensure that metadata standards and codes of practice such as KBART, TRANSFER and PIE-J are followed by all parties, and holdings data exchange should happen at the vendor-publisher level. Holdings metadata for both e-journals and e-books must be exportable in a useful format for use in 3rd-party applications such as RapidILL; direct partnerships would be even better.  Finally, easy linking and authentication through course reserves and course management systems such as Blackboard and Moodle are a must.
• Tools for analysis and assessment must privilege electronic usage. As collections trend ever more toward electronic, development priorities need to emphasize more than print circulation statistics. While e-book usage and print book circulation are not directly comparable, each reflects a valid and important aspect of library usage; however, as libraries purchase more of their new materials in electronic formats, print usage moves to the "long tail" where it reflects niche collections and older volumes, and often becomes a tool for weeding rather than guiding new purchases.  Usage for electronic resources is the new circulation count, informing purchases through a variety of evaluations--overall usage, cost-per-use, use by discipline, use by publication date, and attempted use ("turnaways").  Academic libraries spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on e-resources, pushing evaluation beyond collection development practice into important discussions regarding budgets and justification to campus stakeholders. This means at minimum that library management systems must support all reports designated standard under COUNTER release 4, for e-journals, e-books, databases, and multimedia, for all forms of usage including attempted usage.  They must allow for those reports to be combined with cost data and discipline for thoughtful analysis, and they must be flexible enough to take advantage of the additional information present in reports showing usage of older or open access content.

Bottom line, libraries need to manage, share, and assess their entire collections.  In the current state, and in the foreseeable future, no system can call itself a complete solution if it doesn't support all three of these needs.