Lettertray

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.

What a lovely, grey December day.

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 moved this blog to my own domain (lettertray.org, in case you hadn’t noticed).  It took about 3 seconds, literally, to dump the old Wordpress.com blog and import it here.  Now granted, these are two flavors of the same product, but it seems that Wordpress has made it just as easy to do the same with a whole bunch of other blog software stuff.

Why can’t all data be this easy to move around?  It can, but then a lot of people would stop getting paid.