That's So 1998

"...cracking our brains to force everything into this 19th century view of the world of information called FRBR is a lot like forcing a square peg into a round hole. It just doesn't fit. So, instead of whittling the peg down, or boring out the hole, we should open our minds to new horizons because it's a big world out there."

James at First Thus posted this little snippet the other day. It made me laugh and laugh, because: TRUE.

And it got me to thinking about something I put in my notes at the Karen Coyle webinar. Namely, that FRBR's structure doesn't jive with how we see the "future" of information relationships. Everyone is talking about how information should be a 'web', with everything having the same importance and availability. FRBR doesn't do that, though. From the models I've seen of FRBR, it seems that the relationships only flow one way. Instead of subjects having potentially the same importance as a book itself, subjects are always subservient to bibliographic data. Afterthoughts, add-ons. I know that it's been said that people are working on this aspect of FRBR, presumably to change it, but to me that seems to be a basic building block of how FRBR treats information.

FRBR *is* kind of 19th century. Or 20th century even. I mean, it's a really recent concept that information can reside outside a physical object. When FRBR was published (and let's keep in mind that FRBR was in the works for several years before 1998), the idea that you would put information on the web and nowhere more "permanent" was still nascent. Why would anyone do such a thing? If you had a big idea, why would you just put it out into the ether and not try to get it published, recorded, or printed? Today, that doesn't sound ludicrous at all. But it was only twelve years ago.

New Models of Metadata Throwdown

I don't usually start writings with this, but: OMG.

I (virtually) attended the first of three webinars yesterday on RDA and the new directions in metadata creation. It was entitled New Models of Metadata and Karen Coyle was the speaker. She was great, of course. I like her writing; she was also a very good speaker.
Anyways, you were probably there, too. There were 300 participants at this thing. At first, things were pretty quiet. Webex offers a chat window in their interface so you can have side conversations or ask questions or whatever. I left at the stroke of 3, when the thing ended, and people were still going on and on about the logistics of changing over from MARC to whatever we may end up with. It was insane. To me, it seemed like everyone was asking Karen herself to explain how SirsiDynix is going to implement RDA. What a ridiculous and useless thing to ask. How could she possibly have any idea?

Also, best moment, which I will recreate here in a vignette:

Attendee: So, are you saying that MARC is dead??
Karen: Yep.


Awesome.

So, I left the webinar feeling very angsty about my fellow attendees, because I thought we got way off track with asking questions about logistics, when Karen was there to talk about new models of metadata. I really wanted to hear her talk about the web structures and how metadata theory is changing. She did get to talk about that, but I feel like the conversation devolved a little.

Now, with the distance of a day, I get it. People are scared. Change is hard emotionally and intellectually, and we're looking at a real sea change in how we create and manage information. MARC has been the only format going for a long time, and AACRII has been the only standard going for a long time, and Karen said yesterday that we're looking at getting rid of BOTH. For many catalogers, who have never dealt with anything else (like, say, EAD and DACS), they can't really even imagine what a different standard and different format would look like. Some of the attendees were having trouble even dissociating the two, often confusing MARC for a standard. There's a lot of education to be done in order to help everyone move forward.

The Philosophy of the Book

I've been inundated today with the question of "what is a book?" I heard a piece on the radio where the commentator asked this question. I of course started yelling at the radio: "Librarians have been asking that questions for years, stupid! ASK A LIBRARIAN!" Then once at work in the library, the ILL librarian comes up and we have a talk about connecting traditional philosophical ideas of physicality and reality with FRBR. I don't know if anyone's done this, or if we've all moved way beyond traditional philosophy and just reference our own works now with nary a thought towards the people who spend all their time asking "what is knowledge?". I'd be interested in reading something that connected the two areas of study.
And THEN, another librarian (from acquisitions this time) came in to say that she saw an exhibit by Steve Wolfe that looked like he framed book jackets, and hung paperback novels on the wall. But it turns out that he actually painted those book jackets, and the "novels" are just woodblocks made to look exactly like a book. Objects that are books to the naked eye, but have no knowledge in them.
The universe is telling me to think about this issue. I like it when convergences occur like this, but I'm having trouble even articulating what I'm grappling with today. It obviously requires a lot more thought, but I don't have time to think about these things, either (cataloging awaits me!). What is a book? Is it just information? God, am I turning into Michael Buckland??

FRBR and FRAD and RDA, Oh My

If any of you are also lurkers on the DC-RDA listserv, you've seen this discussion that has bloomed up over the past two days. For those who are not on the listserv, this discussion is totally worth throwing out to the masses.
Here's the deal, from the end of the conversation: FRBR and FRAD do not actually define a person in the same way. In fact, their definitions of a person seem to be opposed to one another. (If you don't want to read the definitions, but would rather see the color commentary, skip down to below the dotted lines)
=================================================================
4.6.1 (FRBR):
"A person may be known by more than one name, or by more than one form of the same name. A bibliographic agency normally selects one of those names as the uniform heading for purposes of consistency in naming and referencing the person. The other names or forms of name may be treated as variant names for the person. In some cases (e.g., in the case of a person who writes under more than one pseudonym, or a person who writes both in an official capacity and as an individual) the bibliographic agency may establish more than one uniform heading for the person."
FRAD:
"Person : An individual or a persona established or adopted by an individual or group. [FRBR, modified] : Includes real individuals. Includes personas established or adopted by an individual through the use of more than one name (e.g., the individual’s real name and/or one or more pseudonyms). Includes personas established or adopted jointly by two or more individuals (e.g., Ellery Queen — joint pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee). Includes personas established or adopted by a group (e.g., Betty Crocker)."
================================================================

As smarter people than me said on the listserv, if you read these closely, with an eye towards personas (think Mark Twain for Samuel Clemens), you will quickly see that these two standards (which came out of the same institution!) are not similar, and deal with the idea of personas quite differently.

The issue, then, is...RDA is only taking its person definitions from FRAD. For me, this is just another signal that RDA, which is kind of supposed to be based on FRBR, is falling farther and farther away from FRBR, while all the regular librarians out there are still trying to wrap their heads around FRBR in a vain attempt to understanding how RDA will work when it comes out. How gratifying it will be when RDA comes out and all the people who thought they understood what was coming, don't.

Yes, I'm a naysayer. But this little issue (which is not actually little at all) worries me.

Conversation with a Serials Librarian

It went like this: I sent our serials librarian the link to the "FRBR for serials" paper (pdf!), which is apparently quite the rage at the CONSER operational meeting. She said, "oh, yeah, it's nice to see CONSER taking this on, since ever since FRBR came out, it hasn't addressed serials."
Um....?
And THEN she says "It took them about 40 years just to address serials and continuing resource questions in AACR! That's the whole reason CONSER exists."

The more we talked, the more we both came to the conclusion that FRBR is, as the serials librarian said, "a fancying up of old ideas." When I think of FRBR and I think of all the examples that FRBR has been used to describe, it's still based off the basic idea of one work that can be expressed in multiple expressions/manifestations/items. But it's still ONE WORK that was created by ONE person/group/corporation. Serials are just not like that, so it falls to CONSER to (yet again) make their own rules, and tweak concepts, just like they had to do when the library community ignored their needs back in the mid-century with AACR. I don't have a problem with FRBR being tied to traditional ideas of bibliographic control, but they should probably acknowledge that straight off.

This goes back to something I wrote about awhile ago--that archives and museums will have no interest in RDA. And it's dawning on me as to why (besides the obvious one that RDA is kind of imperialistic). If RDA is based off the conceptual framework of FRBR, and FRBR starts everything off with the term "work," we're automatically shutting out everyone who is not part of the one-book-one-author universe. Archivists, curators,and serials librarians just don't respond to that kind of terminology. It doesn't really matter if you have "addressed" their needs--you're starting from the wrong place.

I think that our serials librarian is right, in a way. FRBR, even though it seems to be trying to philosophically embrace all kinds of information, just doesn't do that. Where do archival collections fit into FRBR? Serials? Pith helmets? They don't fit, and will never fit. And that's ok. Because I'm not saying that FRBR isn't an excellent way of conceptualizing the creation of creative works. It is! But if the concept doesn't even fit one of the largest "anomalies" in the library world (serials), then why are we using it as a base to build a new set of rules about cataloging?

Define Yourself, Sir

When I took early modern philosophy in college, one of the main problems that we ran into between any two philosophers was their difference of definition. Kant might have meant one thing by his use of “mind” or “knowledge”, and Leibnitz would have a very different meaning. And then if you threw Berkeley into the mix, well, you had a rumble on your hands.

Just kidding. Philosophers do not have fistfights.

Anyway, this is a major problem in most fields, because if you don’t define your terms, no one is ever going to understand you. The beauty of FRBR, for example, is that they defined the shit out of everything. You might have to read it five times to get it, but they DO define their terms.
The problem that I’m seeing more and more and more in blogs and in listservs, is that librarians are not defining their terms and therefore make themselves completely unintelligible to anyone who wants to understand them. They also simultaneously make themselves completely dismissible by anyone who doesn’t care to listen to them.

A good example is this listserv I'm on. I subscribe to it, mostly just to read all the smart people’s contributions. I am, unfortunately, a listserv-lurker. Anyway, there has been this discussion about non-literal vs. literal strings. Don’t ask me to explain what those are, because I can’t. But someone decided to try to explain the basic difference, finally, after about 5-6 emails had already bounced around that used the terms without definition, and what happens? An email immediately comes through from someone saying “Thank you!” for explaining the terms. It took 5-6 emails for that one person just to understand the terms...not the argument about the terms, just the terms themselves.

What is it with people? Is it that hard to understand that you might not always make sense? Especially when you’re talking about very difficult concepts that only use words as placeholders and not as describers? I mean, if the person were using “literal” in the literal sense…well, I have no idea what that could mean in relation to “non-literal.” This is one of those times when you absolutely have to define yourself, or everyone’s eyes will just glaze over and you’ll never get anywhere.

To extrapolate this further, one of the biggest issues I see in blogs is that people won’t define their terms, and let’s face it, the library world is really not that well-defined. Yes, we have standards and we have codes of ethics and we have conferences, but we still insist on using whatever term our local database has contrived for a “work” or a “bib” or a “title” (all the same thing, by the way—just different terms, all dependent on your ILS). FRBR tried to help us out by changing some of the ways that we think about conceptual objects in the library world, but I don’t think that most librarians are well-versed in that FRBR world, and don't use those terms on a regular basis. And since RDA apparently isn’t even using all of FRBR's concepts to write their manual…well, I don’t exactly see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Creating meaning

I've been reading up on RDA, FRBR, and metadata more generally over the past week (I have such a cool job). Anyway, as I was reading, and reading, and reading, I saw some things that grabbed my attention.

A lot of people who talk about RDA (and FRBR) talk about how these new concepts and new shifts in understanding are going to help us create meaning for our users. Instead of cataloging in a vaccuum, treating each piece as separate islands, we're going to be creating the connections between ideas and users and creators.

Now, shift over to TWO weeks ago, when I was trying to learn about our new big metadata project. I was talking to the project manager, and we were discussing how our group would assign subject headings and geographical placenames. The more we talked, the more I realized that the focus of this project does not lend itself to "traditional" ideas about assigning metadata.

In my other job as a cataloger, I might catalog a book about Nabokov, and then a book about English Victorians. These two things will have no relation to one another, and my job is not to try to find a connection (although in this particular example, what a great challenge!).

The thing is, in this metadata project, that is EXACTLY what they need. They need this map to be applicable to this book, or this book to remind a user about that manuscript. We're actively trying to create meaning for the user. Now, this is easy for us in this case, because everything pulled for the project is swirling around a central research topic. So it's not as if we're going to be using the entire LCSH in order to do this project. Instead, we're using just a small, interrelated fraction of that. So when I tell the other catalogers that we need to keep connections in mind, they totally get it, and its easy.

RDA and FRBR have a great ideal in place, and I love it, but I think that RDA is missing something really central in their thought processes. Even if you use machines to pull a lot of this data, and we use publisher information, and we stop caring about grammar and punctuation, it is still a ridiculously high expectation to put on catalogers to "create meaning" for the entire scope of human knowledge. I think its daunting for us to be doing this for researchers in a relatively narrow application, because we're never going to understand what those researchers really want. Maybe its time for librarians to adopt the archival perspective: We can't know what the user wants, so we give them the best we can give and they just have to figure out the rest. In that light, the ideals don't look quite so daunting.

RDA, FRBR, and other acronyms

I am SO GLAD that Karen Coyle gave her talk at Code4Lib on RDA. I myself have been asked to do a powerpoint presentation on RDA/FRBR for the cataloging department, and the points she’s raising are insanely useful (although also scary). She makes a good stab at talking about weaknesses and strengths of RDA without coming down on one side or the other.

Of course, in this blog, I don’t really feel like being unbiased. I will be for the powerpoint presentation, but not here! One of the useful things about being a nobody.
The thing that really gets me (and I commented on the FRBR blog about this), is that the RDA creators seem to be getting farther and farther away from what they said they would be doing, and that may force librarians to dislike RDA.

Some of the professed goals of RDA:

1. Create a more streamlined standard.
800 pages later, I’m questioning that one.

2. Hold true to the FRBR ideal.
They don’t use the attributes in FRBR to describe things in RDA. Why, I don’t know.

3. Make things easier for the user to find what they need, in the context of all knowledge.
RDA doesn’t address subject headings. And no one has ever heard of FRAD except the people on the RDA/FRBR/FRAD groups. And FRAD doesn’t do anything, anyway. It’s conceptual, just like FRBR.

4. Make the focus the content of the record, not the display of the record.
This is all well and good, but telling a cataloger not to standardize their records is like asking a fish not to swim. We’re trained this way! Taking the display rules out won’t automatically make us stop thinking about it.

5. Create a standard that archives, libraries, museums, and creators of digital materials can use.
No one except librarians is talking about RDA. I don’t see a lot of discussion (well, ANY discussion) from archivists or curators about RDA. Is this one of those “it’ll be for their own good” kind of initiatives? I think we all know how well MARC for archives turned out.

Francis Miksa

The FRBR Blog just posted up a thing on Fran Miksa. Follow the links and listen to him speak! I listened to him for quite awhile as my cataloging professor. Miksa is still the most coherent organizational theoritician I've ever heard (or read). For those who do not know, his father was an amateur mathematician, who worked for the phone company during the day and worked on magic squares at night (sounds very super-heroey, doesn't it?). Incidentally, his name was also Francis. Makes for some confusion at UT Austin, where the elder Miksa's papers are housed at the Center for American History.
Anyway, Fran Miksa's daughter Shawne is also a cataloging professor, at the University of North Texas. You can see the progression here? A family of like-minded people.
Miksa takes organizational theory to places that few catalogers dare to tread. I remember him talking about FRBR, not understanding half of what he said, but his passion for reform was palpable. It was one of the only times I've ever been excited about FRBR. He was also the first person I knew to condone subjective cataloging. One student in particular in my class would constantly ask "is this right?" whenever she made a decision about her cataloging. Finally Miksa told her that she should stop comparing herself to Job; God wouldn't strike her down just for making a call how whether to put in an added author or not. I believe that Miksa was also a seminarian.
Anyway, go listen to him. It's nice to see that Miksa is still getting the recognition that he truly deserves.

The Problem with Blogs by Catalogers/Techies

I really like reading blogs by other catalogers and by technology people. They can be informative, and insightful, and give me links to more good things and more NEW things.
However, they also tend to use tech terms and cataloging terms to the extreme. This is related to the problem I have with FRBR (the "new" cataloging standard). If I am not an experienced cataloger, or a tech guru, some, nay, MANY of these blogs are completely unintelligible to me. Thus, they are useless! I think that one reason Lawrence Lessig has enjoyed such ridiculous success with his articles, and blogs, and books, is that he is accessible to almost everyone. He doesn't dive into minutiae; he keeps it general and smart and, most importantly, relevant to a broad audience. Jim over in your cataloging department who has "the coolest blog about cataloging!", cites people you've never heard of, terms you've never used, and programs you would never want.
Now, I'm a fairly experienced cataloger and organizer. I know what they're getting at, most of the time. But sometimes I feel like a kindergartener, and I don't think that is my fault.
I'm going to use the example of FRBR again. I use AACRII, and am comfortable with the terminology of AACRII. I'm even somewhat experienced in FRBR terminology, since my cataloging professor has been part of the movement to change our terminology to encompass all kinds of materials (books, web sites, journals, antelopes, etc).
But when I go to almost any website that talks about FRBR, I'm lost almost immediately. Who is that person they're touting? What article? What the hell do you mean by manifestation? How do I apply that very abstract term to my own concrete stack of books and cds and multi-volume treatises that are sitting on my desk? Does anyone know? Does anyone really care?
I know how whiny this all sounds...gee, what a freaking complainer, why not just find the defintions of terms for FRBR and get it figured out?

Well, I would, if I could find anything that acts as a cross-walk between FRBR and AACRII. As it stands, I merely tread water and do things all the old-fashioned way. Which for a 27-year-old database administrator/cataloger, is saying something.