BIBFRAME

Well, it’s officially been what? a year and a half since I last posted on this blog. I’m back in the library world after a hiatus due to babies, and of course I have things to say about things again. And since this blog was just sitting around and not doing anything (figures…lazy blogs), I decided that I can start using it again for my blatherings.

And do I have something to blather on about?! Yes, yes I do.

There was a Webinar. Hosted by NISO and by DCMI, it featured Mr. Eric Miller and he talked for 90 minutes about BIBFRAME (which I hear has its own website now checkitoutlook!).

I am so excited about BIBFRAME that I actually went home and told my husband all about it. I never do this, by the way, because he’s a very nice man and also an attorney who doesn’t even know who Tim Berners-Lee is. Anyway, so I went home and started to explain why we are in the position of needing a new metadata schema for bibliographic entities, and I only got to the point of explaining MARC and he said “that seems clunky—why don’t they just make it so that the records can be searched by Google?” And then I had to say “you ruined my whole story.”

That is what BIBFRAME, if and when it gets on its feet, is supposed to do. It’s going to open up bibliographic data to the World in the form of tagged data that can be searched by the search engines on the internet. I’ve been telling all my (non-librarian, non-cataloger) friends about this, and they all get wide eyes and go “Ohhhhhh! That’s a good idea! I would love something like that.”

Yeah, no kidding.

I also had a thought regarding the paradox of vendors who say “we will change the metadata schema for bibliographic records when our customers demand it” and the customers (libraries) who say “We can’t change schemas until our vendor changes it, and every time we ask if they’re working on RDA, they say they are but we have no evidence of this!” Eric Miller seemed to suggest in that webinar that what should happen is that the librarians should march on the vendors and demand a change. And everyone in the room with me when he said that literally laughed out loud like crazy loons. So I thought to myself: wouldn’t it be more beneficial if Eric Miller went to the vendors and said “I have a solution to your problem with implementing RDA. It’s called BIBFRAME and it’s going to rock your socks.”

Last one, I Promise

I've been hard on RDA in the past week or so (Sorry, RDA. I know you're doing your best). However, I just had to post this picture. Backstory: I told my boss, as I was leaving the library, that the new RDA print manual was on my desk, and if he was so inclined, he should take a look. This is what I walked into the next day:

My Continued Intellectual Wrestling Match with RDA

When I first read through the drafts of RDA, I didn't think it felt very different from AACRII, and I seem to remember telling someone that at the time. It set them at ease, which was nice I suppose. It made me very uneasy. Because there are only two paths from there: either I am an idiot incapable of understanding how fundamentally this is changing everything (terrifying), or there's not that much change yet an extra 500 pages of material (unlikely?). I really hoped that it was the former.

Then someone posted in the comments a few days ago that they didn't think that RDA changed much in the way that we catalog, day-to-day (they were apparently part of a testing site). I don't like that, because if it doesn't, does that mean we didn't need RDA in the first place, but rather a reinterpretation of the rules of AACRII? Or does it mean that once we get something more flexible and attuned to RDA than MARC, the whole game will change again and we'll need to reinterpret RDA again? Either way that comment made me uncomfortable because it just reinforced what I already felt.

I really want RDA to be different. I want it to do all the things that the visionaries want it to do. But I also have this feeling that we're all so entrenched in the traditions of cataloging that we're almost incapable of making fundamental changes to our rules. Maybe we should start an Ender's Game-esque school for kids, where they do whatever they want, without foreknowledge of the rules, and teach us all a lot about military strategy cataloging.

A Shoutout on RDA

I got a whole bunch of hits on my post yesterday about how terrifying RDA is. I'm really, really interested in what people are thinking about RDA. I've been to the webinars, I've talked to people, but honestly, if you have an opinion on RDA, could you please post it in the comments of this post or the last? I have very mixed feelings, but I'm not gonna be at any focus groups anytime soon, so I'd like to hear what you all are thinking.

You're Killing Me, RDA

We received our very own paper copy of RDA in the mail last week. Along with it came the FRBR guide for the perplexed, and Introducing RDA: a guide to the basics. One of my library friends was very amused by the latter ("only librarians would make a guide to the guide about making guides"). I finally sliced into the packaging this morning, as I prepared RDA to go into its own "little" binder (3-inch D ring). RDA is BIG, y'all. I know that anyone reading this probably knew that already.
What got me is that there are whole chapters that just have one page saying "to be developed after the initial release". I'm not sure how many of them there are, but they are depressing to look at. You mean that this binder will at some point need to be EVEN LARGER?
This is all just my way of saying that RDA scares me. I know that fear isn't a reason to not learn something, but seriously, it's daunting. Can you imagine the poor little library students, getting their first glimpse of RDA? No one will ever go into cataloging again. :)

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.

Getting ready

So, I'm way behind the times, and I know it, but I started reading the drafts of RDA last week. I'm not really that far in, and I know that it's only rough drafts, but I figured I might as well start, since at some point this is going to be a Big Deal.

Want to know what I've found so far? I may be simplifying (God knows I'm good at doing that), but I didn't find much that was earth-shattering or worldview-changing. The terms are a little different, but the rules themselves are pretty much the same, at their core. I could still use MARC. There are still statements of responsibility. There is no hand of a Library God touching down to wreak havoc upon us all.

Now, I haven't been through all of the draft documents yet, so maybe at some point I'm going to be blown away. In fact, I'm sure that will happen. Because I haven't gotten to any place yet where RDA starts looking like a FRBR mechanism. Right now it just looks like AACRII. I could only be so lucky.

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)
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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.

RDA and the Mystery of the Old Clock

So. RDA.

In case you didn't already know (and for my own memory later), there has been a lot of activity in the past week or so regarding RDA. Let's see, first LC, NLM, and NAL issued their statement about the Final Report from the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (you can read it here if you haven't read it yet; it's the only place I can find it all written out fully. Which is odd.). It's been a long time coming, but it was good to see it, I suppose. They're basically saying that RDA should get published first, so that a "systematic review" can be attempted. Ok. Yawn. Apparently the implementation of RDA into the Big Three won't happen before the end of 2009, and that's assuming that all the usability testing and whatnot go smoothly.


Also, a lot of vocabulary from RDA has been coming out. I have to be honest, I've doing a lot of actual work lately, and so haven't been paying much attention to the vocabulary lists. But you should go look at them if you have the desire and/or time.

(Sometimes I wonder if the reason that these new schemas and things come out at all is because librarians are far too busy with their actual jobs to be bothered with this kind of stuff. I think I wrote a long time ago about this. I don't see how anyone gets a job where their only responsibility is to go out and make up policy for other librarians. I can't imagine any job being like that. It sounds cool, though.)

Devil's Advocate

Ranganathan once wrote, of Charles Ammi Cutter's Rules for a Dictionary Catalog: "Rdc is indeed a classic. It is immortal. Its influence has been overpowering. It inhibits free-thinking even today." (Headings and Canons)

Ranganathan saw something in Cutter's rules that I think most people don't even see today: that we're still going in the same directions we've been going since Cutter wrote his rules, and we're not somehow coming to a new dawn of cataloging when we talk about FRBR or RDA. Now, lots of cataloging scholars also see this (William Denton's chapter in Understanding FRBR is a great example of this--his whole chapter is about how FRBR developed out of the past).

But I feel as though a lot of OTHER people just aren't seeing this relationship to the past. Many librarians are very worried about RDA, just as FRBR worried them 10 years ago. Why are they worried about RDA? Because it's being touted as this new, groundbreaking initiative that will change everything about cataloging as we know it.

Except that it won't.

Ranganathan's words still ring true. Cutter's rules, lo those many years ago, set us up for using card catalogs, author and subject indexing, and helping the user to find what they need. LC based most of their standards on Cutter's work, and the ALA based most of its work on LC standards, and let's face it, Cutter wouldn't find very much to be shocked about in the AACRII.

RDA likely won't be THAT shocking, either. I mean, to look at it from an outsider's perspective (say, the serials cataloging community), it's just more of the same, wrapped up in new terminology. Will the new terminology help us to catalog various formats better? I have no idea, although from looking at the vocabularies list that came out recently, I suspect it will not. They have a separate term for music publisher numbers. No term for other kinds of publisher numbers, though. Where is the overarching idealism in something like that?

I frequently worry that the library community has been stuck in a classification rut for over a hundred years, but that the reason no one is truly willing to step out on a limb and create something totally new is because it's just easier to do everything like we've been doing it**. As the amount of information increases, and we become more and more invested in one system, it gets harder and harder to scrap the concepts. When I even think about conceiving a new classification system, I usually end up (mentally) drawing away from the idea. Dr. Miksa once bemoaned the lack of true theoretical learning in the cataloging world, telling us that one big reason we would never change our systems is because we're no longer training anyone to do it. We're just training everyone in the same traditions, and letting everyone go along thinking that this is the only way to organize information. He mused that when someday a new format comes along that everyone wants and it doesn't fit into any of our organizational schemas, there will be no one to make the leap and conceive of a new system. We've been very resourceful so far, fitting the new formats into our old ways of doing things, by renaming or expanding or just tweaking the same concepts over and over. But it may not always be enough. And I feel as if I (and others, of course) have been led to believe that RDA is supposed to lead to some new, more open era of cataloging. But the more I think about it, the less I believe it.




**(this is not a new idea, by the way...somebody very recently was saying that the reason people don't want RDA is because it will lead to a change in our system requirements, and that change will cost money that people don't want to spend)