Lettertray

[A contribution to the Hacking the Academy book project.]

In the United States, over the past century, the practice of health care has transitioned from being a largely distributed and generalist profession to a much more corporatized and specialized one. It is a change that many greet with regret, despite the obvious advances in health care. One of our cultural touchstones is a romanticized image of the doctor or caregiver tending to patients in their homes, a leather satchel containing crucial instruments nearby. Still, we acknowledge a new reality - of health care as a consumer product: tranched and parsed into products designed for maximum efficiency. Home health care is considered a scarce and expensive resource. In other sectors, we see a similar trend. Local mechanics, hardware stores, and groceries are disappearing in favor of one-stop box stores. Geek Squad and Facebook are replacing specialists who used to fix computers in the home or provide websites for small businesses.

Academic libraries are different. They are, and have been for a long time, highly centralized institutions whose services and organizational structures are often designed to reflect a certain order that is perceived to exist within the broader institution. Departments have liaisons, collection development often falls along disciplinary lines, and the library is treated as a destination - a physical and virtual domain - out of which the tools for scholarship will be doled. Academic libraries are faced with a challenge that is the inverse in other sectors: we are faced with a digital scholarship environment that screams for decentralizing many library services. And in order to do so, we must overcome a static cultural momentum.

In 2002, the American Library Association launched the massive Campaign for America’s Libraries. The centerpiece of the campaign was a new marketing effort built around the slogan, “@ Your Library.” According to the ALA website, the purpose of the campaign is:

• Promote awareness of the unique role of academic and research libraries and their contributions to society;
• Increase visibility and support for academic and research libraries and librarians;
• Help librarians better market their services on-site and online;
• Position academic and research librarianship as a desirable career opportunity.[2]

While these are mostly admirable goals, they betray the extent to which the library profession, as represented by the ALA, is willing to respond to the challenges of the digital era by simply marketing traditional services more aggressively. This approach is flawed; not because patrons do not value traditional library services, but because the services no longer reflect the character of the institutions that they serve.

When the traditional disciplines engage more with digital technologies, the familiar practices become fragmented and less familiar – a phenomenon that Wendell Piez describes as akin to “a field where native plants and wildflowers are overtaking a tidy lawn.” [1] This unruliness disrupts the mappings that libraries have traditionally applied to the disciplines. Instead of designing liaison, cataloging, and collection development services that support a predictable mode of scholarly work, libraries need to support scholarship that emerges from a state of relative entropy. The new mapping, in other words, is not to make traditional library services more “digital,” but rather to explode them out into a complementary state of entropy.

The entropic library is one in which the library is not only a physical destination and an institutional cornerstone, but also is a gravitational force in the digital scholarly life of the campus. It is a force that is exerted by library staff acting as consultants, software developers, funders, PIs, data curators, and mad scientists. It acts as a resource for the university’s scholars by helping to shape and support new digital methodologies, which it channels into programmatic activities when there is a potential benefit to the wider university community. Its first concern is not to get digital things into the library as new collections, but to get the library to where the digital things are being used, and make them accessible and sustainable.

Embracing entropy is difficult for an institution whose identity has been defined by its advocacy of order. And it can be difficult for lovers of libraries to see entropy as anything but a threat to everything that we cherish in our libraries. Our romanticized image of the library tends to be of the library as a destination. In this image we might imagine the cloistered stacks, the hours spent ingesting the wisdom in the books, and of the boundless potential in the unread volumes. It is a powerful image, and it is made more poignant by the sensory associations we often have with the library: the smell of the bindings, the muted sounds in the stacks, the concentration evident on the faces of readers. It is understandable that libraries, faced with the emergence of digital technologies in the 1990s, would design services that attempt to preserve the appeal of that library. Reference areas crammed with tables, lamps, and books transformed into computer labs, but the space retained its purpose as a destination for study and work. Card-catalogs were replaced by Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs), which were largely digital renditions of the same tools that libraries had always offered. Print journal collections thinned as digital subscriptions became more cost-effective, although real challenges to the academic publishing paradigm would not gain traction for at least another decade. And the roles of librarians largely remained the same - as gatekeepers and guides for information resources housed within and, to a limited extent, outside of the library’s physical and digital bounds.

Creating digital surrogates for traditional services was a necessary, evolutionary step toward modernization. But, there remains a chasm between the notion of the modern library as a purveyor of traditional resources delivered digitally, and the entropic library, steeped in and defined by the new digital scholarship. The entropic library needs to cultivate physical spaces in which to do scholarly work using digital media. But it is no longer a font from which information flows. It is a kaleidoscope of data, knowledge, and interaction, brought together by the scholarly primitives and crystallized for moments in the physical spaces that the university contains.

 [1]Piez, Wendell.  ”Something Called Digital Humanities.”  Digital Humanities Quarterly.  Vol.  2, No. 1.  (Summer, 2008).http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/002/1/000020/000020.html

[2]http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/advocacy/publicawareness/campaign%40yourlibrary/academicresearch/academicresearch.cfm

This past week, a bunch of smart folks came out with a preliminary specification for integrating diverse scholarly digital objects across repositories. Check out the announcement here.

The Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) spec is, in my opinion, an enormous development. Scholarly technologists, librarians, and researchers have been circling around this idea of a truly semantic, services-based environment for a long time. It is great to see an architectural model that people can begin to discuss, rather than seeing more ad hoc development and tepid experiments by technology vendors.

The ORE working group describes their results like this:

“ORE will develop specifications that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their constituent digital objects. These specifications will include approaches for representing digital objects and repository services that facilitate access and ingest of these representations. The specifications will enable a new generation of cross-repository services that leverage the intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of hosting repositories. “

The also recommend an Atom-based model for packaging and delivering these representations of digital objects via syndication:

“These specifications describe a data model to identify and describe aggregations of web resources, and the encoding of the data model in the XML-based Atom syndication format. ”

Incidentally, my forthcoming article, “Syndicating Rich Bibliographic Metadata Using MODS and RSS”, Journal of Web Librarianship, Vol. 2 Issue 1, 2008, explores some very similar ideas, but as a proof-of-concept exercise applied to objects in library collections. Either way, it is really exciting to see the same vein of investigation happening at a much more prominent level.

It is pretty clear to most everyone that the old model of digital repositories - silos of data waiting for serendipitous discovery - is played out. Dan Cohen says it much more eloquently than I can, but suffice it to say that technology is just beginning to allow digital scholarship to more closely model the actual process of scholarship, in all of its complexity, nuance, and imprecision. It is pretty awesome.

Dealing with ILS (Integrated Library Systems) is probably the most drab and tedious part of my job, and, unfortunately fairly integral (ha ha). I find discussions about ILS issues to be generally uninteresting, hence a lengthy blog post about them.

Marshall Breeding, of http://www.librarytechnology.org, just posted the results of a survey he conducted about the level of satisfaction among ILS customers in regard to their respective systems. The report is available at http://www.librarytechnology.org/perceptions2007.pl. The most sad/interesting thing from my perspective is that Voyager, which is the system I work with, is waaaaaaaay down at the bottom of the list - as is its sister product, ALEPH. It’s no surprise to me - Voyager is poorly designed, poorly supported, and generally crappy product. What is interesting too is that the most enthusiastic supporters of open-source ILS projects are those from libraries running these crappy systems.

Part of the problem, in my humble, is that librarians still have a very consumerist attitude when it comes to their technology. The catalog and the technologies that support it, are products that you buy and then you make an effort to live with them. Ten years later, you repeat the process. In my mind, this mentality is akin to our culture’s adherence to the gas-combustion engine and coal-derived electric prower for most of our infrastructure needs. In the days of nanotechnology, ultra-efficient electronics, and ubiquitous computing, it is absurd that we cling to century-old technologies for our most fundamental needs. But we do. It’s also absurd that libraries - institutions that should be much more agile - still cling to this notion that their core technologies should take the form of large, unwieldy, local databases provided at enormous expense by private companies who really have no financial interest in improving their ILS products for more than half of their life-cycle. Once a product is 5 years old, the number of new customers dwindles and cash flow becomes scarce until the next generation comes out 5 years later. I would be very nice if libraries, collectively, put an end to this industry for good, and embraced systems that could be developed continuously, for the common good.

I’m a bit of a hypocrite, because I don’t know if I’d be able to sell that idea to our administration when the time comes to ditch Voyager, but it’s something to shoot for I guess…

Continuing the theme of divergent vocabularies in libraries, I was in a meeting last week with some other library folks from all over the spectrum, and we were brainstorming what we’d like to see in a next-generation library system. It was one of these management-nouveau exercises in which we put our ideas on little scraps of paper and pasted them to the wall. Occasionally there would be some discussion to clarify a point or develop the conversation a little further.

Somebody wrote “Good Metadata” on a piece of paper and it sparked a bit of a discussion. I don’t remember exactly how the conversation unfolded, but it became clear that I and some others in the room assumed “Good” metadata meant that it was non-MARC, XML-based, and highly customizable. I was quickly corrected by someone who told me that “Good” metadata meant complete, rich records using a controlled-vocabulary. The conversation moved on pretty quickly from there and we didn’t belabor the debate, but it once again highlighted for me just how fractured the library world has become in figuring out what our job is. The fact is, “Good” metadata is probably both of the things mentioned above. Nevertheless, we have a lot of work to do to reconcile the new work to-be-done with the work we’ve traditionally done, and, well that’s a lot of work.

I’m pretty sure that last sentence was stolen from one of Dubya’s State of the Union addresses.

I started experimenting with using Ruby to mash up some of the WorldCat.org data with Google Maps. It’s a fun project - it has probably been done 50 times in better and more useful ways, but as an exercise in web services for libraries it seems worthwhile. The aim is to develop some rudimentary sample applications that can be used to demonstrate the potential & power of Web Services to non-techno librarians. But more on that later when I have something worth posting.

What I really want to say is that since I have only recently really started using Ruby, I have found it surprisingly difficult to reverse-engineer my learning to fit into the Rails framework. Rails is so completely out-of-the-box and turnkey, and I tend to like to start with the ‘Hello World’ exercises when learning new technologies. So, instead of saying, “Hey I’m going to create a web application that does X, Y, and Z and I’ll use Rails to do it,” I said, “Hey I want to write a Ruby program that does X, Y, and Z.” Once I had the program working, I realized that fitting it nicely into the Rails framework was less intuitive than I thought it would be. What I’m doing at this point is just using a controller that calls my Ruby program, like this:

class SandboxController < ActionController::Base

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/myProgram.rb'

  def input
  end

  def get_addr
    @city = params[:city]
    @state = params[:state]
    @location = Array.new(search_worldcat_registry(@city,@state))
    [do_some_stuff, etc...]
  end
end

I have no idea if this sort of thing is best practice with Rails. My impression (possibly wrong) is that most developers approach a project with Rails in mind and then design in that context. Maybe next time around I’ll try it that way, but I suspect that this approach will, after a long slog, end with my having a much greater appreciation for how the Rails framework really works. I guess we’ll see…

I spent alot of time today in meetings to discuss the future of our l0cal Union Catalogs. It has really highlighted the way in which the library world has split into two camps (at least), neither of which seem to be well aware of the other.

On one hand, we have the technology folks - people like Roy Tennant, the Code4Lib bunch, and the countless number of library-employed developers who are applying a fairly non-traditional ideas to next-generation systems. These are the folks who see collections metadata as one part of a contiguous whole - an academic infrastructure made up of diverse yet coherent data sets. The idea of the ‘catalog,’ much less the Union Catalog, in this model seems pretty irrelevant, though in my experience everyone in this world is very keenly interested in presenting users with a coherent and useful public-service interface.

On the other hand, we have the approach common to MLS-educated mainstream librarians. At the risk of lumping this extremely diverse group into an artificially homogenized whole, please bear with me. Librarians are, mostly, still thinking of catalogs. They may be feature-rich and easy on the eyes (though probably not), but they are still catalogs. Locally managed, meticulously manicured, completist documents that are, by definition, tied to the physical buildings in which their collection resides. This isn’t to cast librarians as stodgy Luddites, nor to declare library technologists as revolutionary geniuses - in fact, I think the differences in philosophy are pretty easy to work around if we all get to using the same vocabulary. But what strikes me is that these conversations are largely occurring in parallel, rather than across organizations.

At last year’s Code4Lib 2007 conference , I was surprised at how few ‘official’ librarians were in attendance. But what I experienced was unbridled enthusiasm for the academic mission of the library, coupled with incredible talent and tons of promising new initiatives & projects. I think it made a pretty good (and pretty well-trodden) case that the MLS is superfluous to innovative library work. But I was dismayed that so much of the work emerging from this community, or many others like it, is almost completely unknown to the typical working librarian. Just because it is on a computer doesn’t make it somebody else’s domain anymore, and I think if we’re going to get this next-gen thing right, we’re going to need to accept it.

Incidentally, I don’t think I’ll be attending Code4Lib 2008 for personal reasons, which makes me sad. I hope to get involved more in years to come…

I’ve been working lately on some pilot projects using library data in Web Services (big “W” and big “S”, mind you) repositories. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around REST, or rather what it means for the real-library world. I like it. A lot. The crazy thing is that libraries really haven’t even caught on to the Web Services bandwagon, much less gone through the whole RPC/SOAP/REST soul-searching to discover what we want our next generation technologies to look like. Instead we still get into debates about MARC fields and unfixed bugs in our dying ILSs and such. Sigh.

Thankfully there are a bunch of community-based projects that are exploring some of these issues. I’m think of Evergreen, which is building in some really nice features for supporting web-services calls against catalog data; OpenSearch, which is attempting to standardize some ways to share search process data; and more broad protocol-type projects like unAPI. My problem with this is not that these projects exist - they’re terrific. The problem is that the issues, & technologies that make these projects terrific have failed to become a part of librarians’ vocabularies. Many of the folks who are developing these systems do work in the library world, but many of them are programmers/techies first and library people second. For a profession that has always clung desperately to it’s own sense of relevance, why are librarians merely becoming consumers of information-management technologies and not designers, researchers, and zealots?

It isn’t that librarians should all become programmers - we shouldn’t (at least not all of us). Nor should librarians’ central concern be about bleeding-edge technologies. But the fact is that we already spend massive amounts of time, energy, and resources dealing with and learning about library-centric technologies that are either dead or might as well be. What is the catalyst that brings us, as a profession, back to a place where we’re not merely digesting interfaces & services that are served to us by vendors, but actually dictating the terms of how our collections should be made accessible long-term and across the web?

None of this discussion is new, and folks like Roy Tennant have been talking openly about these issues for years and years. I think that is what is so frustrating. Librarians, as a profession, are aware of these issues, but we have such poor leadership and we’re such a highly-stratified profession that we haven’t been able to gain a consensus about how our technological existence can evolve.