Weibel Lines

Roll over, George

Jonathan Rochkind made some thoughtfully peevish comments on my previous post on RDA and the Futures report which drove me (perish the thought) back to the document itself.

...I'm confused by your apparent sympathy with the Working Group
recommendations to suspend RDA work...

...That recommendation seems to instead be based on the fantasy that we need to spend lots of time 'testing' FRBR, at the end maybe deciding that FRBR is no good at all

I don't see this in the recommendations at all.  What i read (in recommendation 4.2.1, p 29) is a clear mandate to resolve the existing ambiguities in the FRBR model in order to:

provide a more robust framework for the creation of  the resource description and access rules that will be used in the future to support a broad range of searching options (also on page 29). 

This is essential, and should be undertaken in the light of functional pragmatism, not ideology.  And certainly I agree with Jonathan that there is little time to waste.  The Futures report does not impugn the value of FRBR, but simply recognizes that we as a community do not agree about the importance of Expressions.  If it is critical in other ways, I missed it.

There is much stronger concern expressed in the report about the uncertainties of RDA, having to do with unsubstantiated benefits, alignment with existing standards, and the business case for it (see the bottom of page 24).

The subsequent recommendation (on the next page: 3.2.1) is stated more strongly than I might have chosen.  But the heading (Suspend Work on RDA) is elaborated with untils, and makes clear that useful work has been initiated with JSC and DCMI, and should continue.

But any assertion that debates going on on the RDA list represent progress towards these goals is, in my view, whistling past the graveyard.

And as for Jonathan's generous remark:

In fact, I feel like you've expressed well the argument that I'd want
to submit as comments to the Working Group

I know that at least one of them reads my blog ;-)

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yes... THAT George Boole... taken in Cork, at the end of the DCC meeting on persistent identifiers in 2004

In fact, specifically, THIS George Boole: http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n83-144364 (thanks, Thom)

Thrashing in the Fields

There are clues that tell us that a 'dialog' is out of control on a listserv.  Mine are (1) nested inclusion brackets and (2) "X wrote...y wrote" on successive lines. Recent discussions on the RDA listserv have tumbled deeply into that territory.

My contribution to the confusion includes the following assertions:

There is exactly one candidate for a content model that captures the relations among salient bibliographic entities that are needed to anchor library assets in the larger information sphere: FRBR.  It feels roughly right to most, though it would be unwise to underestimate the time we can (ill-afford) to spend on thrashing around in the details.

There are, unhappily, several candidates for syntactical models (variously called, schemas, data models, and abstract models). These models are indifferent to what is encoded; rather, they define the permissible structures that can be encoded (think of sentence diagramming).

To choose an idiom foreign to the Web for such encoding will assure the irrelevance of library data on the open Web. Recasting MARC in XML is, in my estimation, exactly such a choice.  It masquerades as Web-friendly, but the result is simply more-parseable confusion for any but cataloging geeks.

The strongest alternative candidate is the Dublin Core Abstract Model, born of a decade of wrangling about data models in the web-metadata context.  Please do not confuse the data model with the element set.  I am not suggesting supplanting MARC cataloging with DC.

I am asserting that embedding the library in the open Web demands:

1. A coherent model of what we are describing and the relationships among those entities, and in which each entity is identified with a URI (FRBR, or something very like it).
2. A carrier syntax that lives comfortably on the Web (the DC Abstract Model is my candidate)
3. Rules for populating agreed structures (that at which RDA seems to be failing so earnestly).

There is some urgency at agreeing on (1) and (2) before (3) can be achieved.  The recent Library of Congress Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control has committed the heresy (for some) of suggesting that RDA work be suspended and FRBR be subjected to more rigorous testing in order to increase the prospects of achieving our Web-destiny. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I am convinced that our objectives will not be met through wrangling on mailing lists.  A coherent, well-funded community-grounded research and development program is in order.  All the innovative OPACs, Web-services, and Web-2.0 social networks will avail us not if we fail to achieve this coherence.
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DC mavens will recognize the 'sentence diagramming' metaphor as originating with Tom Baker
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An early morning view from my rooms with a view in Seattle

Digital Preservation: How will we know we've succeeded?

My esteemed colleague of many years, Priscilla Caplan, offers a perspective on the past decade of digital preservation in a recently published editorial in Library Hi Tech.  Priscilla is among our community's most able leaders, unafraid of the future and eager to help create it.  She has a depth of knowledge on the subject of digital preservation far deeper than my own, and shares the perspective of that experience in this editorial. 
Part of her theme is familiar to me from my own efforts on the international infrastructure and standardization circuit.  She alludes to the relative strength in Europe of centralized support for infrastructure development and broad-based training for information professionals who become the reservoir of expertise on which our standards float (or fail to). 
In the states, by and large, there is greater focus on competitive research grants, a different set of incentives with which our discipline has never been entirely at home.
I can't say which approach is most productive, in spite of struggling with the difference for a long time searching for sustainability models for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.  As it happens, I am currently engaged in thinking about sustainability in connection with the NSF DataNet solicitation.  Different domains of digital preservation, but a lot of the same problems, and the National Science Foundation is not lobbing soft pitches here, either.
Reading Priscilla's editorial, I found myself looking for evidence... does the idiom of centralized infrastructure support and aggressive promulgation of training result in more effective curation?  It is clear that Priscilla thinks so, and I have no evidence that she is wrong... or right, for that matter.  Quite possibly this is because of my own lack of knowledge, but intuition tells me it is probably too early in the digital content era to be very sure of either conclusion.   So, in another decade, will we know?  What evidence will we bring to bear on the question?

Thanks to my colleague, Brian Lavoie, for bringing this editorial to my attention.

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The view from my room with a view, 3800 Aurora Avenue N., Seattle