Reflections on ALA MW and OR 2007

Attending ALA and Open Repositories back-to-back has provided an excellent perspective on the full spectrum of activities in the library world. The average attendee of ALA is a librarian with an ML(I)S, trained in the traditional library model, with many years of professional experience. While there are plenty of librarians at OR, most of the presenters at OR come from a computer science background. The common factor among all of these professionals is that they are dedicated to the idea of stewardship of knowledge: preserving it, providing access to it, understanding the culture and context of knowledge.

On the morning of the last day of this week-long conference extravaganza, I discussed the major themes of these conferences with a colleague who is the incoming Head of Cataloging and Metadata Services at an ARL library. Her comments are in italicized text.


RDA is controversial

Frankly, it is being criticized from multiple perspectives, including traditional catalogers as well as digital library developers. Personally, I think that it will be helpful for recognizing the common ground between long established cataloging practices and emerging organically-digital practices. However, I have a feeling that because it will be so comprehensive and complex, it will not be fully and wholly adopted by most institutions or even communities of practice. Rather, practitioners will pick and choose parts of it to adopt for their own needs. Perhaps this is not a sign of weakness in RDA, but a reflection of the increasingly divergent granularity, needs, and practices in the whole "information space."

I would say RDA is struggling, and it is frustrating to see so much effort by highly knowledgeable professionals go into developing - and then defending - what is essentially a very incremental change in the way we do business. RDA's core cataloging audience feels that it makes too many unwarranted changes, and the metadata community feels that it doesn't move far enough from the MARC model to be relevant outside the traditional catalog. What RDA does right: It separates the bibliographic metadata from ISBD formatting. Our systems should enable us recombine parts of the bibliographic record for different needs, and it's good that our content rules are changing to reflect this (we need to lean on our OPAC providers to recognize this as well). What RDA does wrong: It is hopelessly complex. One idea floating around at ALA was the notion of making RDA a set of basic rules, and then allowing communities of practice (i.e. map catalogers) to build out more complex rules for collections and institutions that need them. I wish RDA had gone this way instead of trying to be all things to all constituents, because this would have been a more agile solution in the short term and more sustainable in the long term.


Open Repositories come of age

Open Repositories 2007 was an exciting conference. The OR community is vibrant, bold, and innovative. It was evident to me that DSpace, Fedora, and Eprints are maturing. These repository systems are enjoying wide adoption, rapid development, and are quickly increasing in the utility they bring to adopters. The OR program featured a rich spectrum of topics which were uniformly interesting. There was a spirit of cooperation and discovery among all participants and a genuine excitement about the future.

It was interesting to see FRBR in the context of a digital library (The Eprints Application Profile: a FRBR approach to modelling repository metadata, Julie Allinson, UKOLN). The FRBR discussions at ALA and other library conferences are very catalog-focused, and it would be nice to have more sharing across information communities. In some ways, it seems like digital libraries are better positioned to adopt the FRBR model because they are dealing with smaller collections and immature systems.


Institutional repositories: systems or services?

I'm not crazy about the "Web 2.0" moniker, but I think the user-oriented services that can now be applied to all kinds of different systems - library websites, OPACs, IRs - are the most exciting development out there right now. In terms of IRs, the technologies have existed for a while, but they have not allowed a lot of flexibility from the metadata and customization (library) side and are incredibly difficult for the end user to adopt. The next generation of these systems have a dramatically improved service layer that makes it possible for "regular" libraries (i.e. without a squad of programmers) and end users to make much richer use of the technology.


Top topics of the week:

• Web interfaces for repositories, especially Manakin (DSpace) and Fez (Fedora)
• Needs of librarians vs. needs of users in repositories (they are vastly different)
• Repository as system vs. repository as service (the second is more important)
• The direction of RDA and applying the FRBR model to repositories
  
• Metadata is important, but there is tension between simplicity and complexity. And who the heck is going to do it?
• The development of fully realized cyberinfrastructure, emphasizing preservation (iRODS)
• Incorporating intellectual property management into the repository workflow
• Storing data sets in repositories, and what to do with it after you have it
  

Implementing RDA

The RDA Update Forum on Saturday morning provided additional insight into the JSC's plans for implementation.

Beacher Wiggins, Director of Cataloging at the Library of Congress, discussed RDA implementation from the point of view as an administrator of a major cataloging department. He was concerned about the resources that will be required to transition to RDA, and he emphasized that the implementation time line needs to go according to schedule: the longer it lasts, the more painful the transition will be. He hopes the implementation will not be as challenging as the transition to AACR2.

Marjorie Bloss, RDA Project Manager, discussed implementation in terms of project management. Her goals are to deliver RDA on time and under budget, to meet the stakeholder needs, and to manage outreach. RDA will primarily be an online product, with a "suite" of different versions developed later. A demonstration version of RDA is available online at www.rdaonline.org. There is a lot of discussion about how training for RDA will be developed and provided. At this time it is hard to say how training will be handled until it is finished. She believes that Part A (Description) will require more training for experienced catalogers than Part B (Access Point Control). Trainees should become familiar with the FRBR and FRAD models prior to training.

RDA and the Future of Cataloging

The first rule of ALA conferences is...be flexible. I'm sitting in one of many, many hallways of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, right across from room 615, location of the ALCTS Cataloging Norms Discussion Group. This is the first meeting I'm supposed to be blogging, but I'm not even in the room. So many people showed up for the meeting that the audience is spilled into the hallway. Fortunately, this morning I attended another excellent meeting, the Electronic Resources Interest Group (ERIG), so I'll write about that instead.

The ERIG meeting featured four speakers, all of whom are leaders in cataloging and metadata practice: Barbara Tillet, Murtha Baca, Sara Shreeves, and Mary Woodley. While I could write at length about any of their presentations, the most significant in my mind was Barbara Tillet's presentation on RDA. She provided a summary of the development of Resource Description and Access, the sequel to AACR2. In her incredibly rich presentation, she provided a vision of the future of cataloging. Essentially, RDA is being developed with the digital environment in mind and will represent a major change in direction from traditional cataloging. It is currently slated for release in 2009. Here are just some of the changes she presented:

• RDA is a standard for the content of bibliographic records, but not a standard for the display of bibliographic information. Because of this, the traditional punctuation currently used in cataloging records (a.k.a. ISBD punctuation) will no longer be mandatory.
• RDA will move away from using terminology and practices that were developed for card catalogs. In some cases, the terminology is changing. For example, the term "access points" will be used instead of "headings." "Authority control" will change to "access point control." "Preferred title" will be used instead of "uniform title."
• Some traditional cataloging practices will go away, including the main entry. The general material designation (GMD) is going away, but this information will be captured in more detail in various fields that describe an item's format.
• The rules for transcribing information will be greatly changed to a "Take what you see" approach. This means that catalogers will be encouraged to transcribe descriptive information mostly verbatim, including capitalization, abbreviations, even errors.
  
• The rules for transcription will vary for different types of resources. Transcription is more important for resources than others. For example, it is very important for unique print resources, such as rare books, but less so for digital resources.