By: Karen Calhoun and John Chapman

 

Staff from OCLC's WorldCat and Metadata Services Division just finished two well-attended webinars regarding RDA (Resource Description and Access). The webinars--consisting of similar content delivered on October 27 and October 30--were designed to let the community know what we are thinking about RDA and also to gather information about what our members are doing or thinking about in relation to RDA.

 

OCLC has been actively participating in the process that is producing RDA through a variety of groups and task forces. In addition, cataloging staff in OCLC's cataloging services division will be participating in the testing that has been organized by the three U.S. national libraries. Hosting the webinars was a way to share ongoing work at OCLC that relates to RDA as well to gauge the level of awareness and learn about the interests of OCLC members in aspects of the new code as it emerges. 

 

One thing that can be said with certainty: there is a huge amount of interest in RDA.  These were the most widely-attended webinars that OCLC has ever held. There were 1017 webinar logins at the October 27 webinar and 832 webinar logins on October 30. Attendees--largely practitioners in U.S. libraries, doing cataloging and technical services jobs--also included staff from other types of institutions such as governmental agencies, publishers, archives and museums.  Our sense is that webinar participants included not only some who frequently travel to conferences where RDA is discussed, but also many who do not generally get to travel to these events. For some, the webinar appeared to be their first exposure to RDA.

 

During the two webinars--to which Ted Fons, Jean Godby, Glenn Patton and I contributed content--we asked a few polling questions. Based on the webinar chat at the October 27 webinar, we revised the questions and slides somewhat for the October 30 presentation. 

 

At the October 30 session, we asked the following questions about attitudes and preparations for  RDA. The first question asked participants to choose the most important benefit from a list (all the choices are benefits that have been publicly discussed or debated by members of the library community). The following chart shows the results of the webinar polling. 

 

 

 

 

  

 The clear first choice was RDA's promise for better support of the FRBR user tasks and the objectives of the catalog as stated in section 4 of IFLA's statement of international cataloging principles. The results of this question may be of interest to anyone who cares about RDA.  But I think it's especially so for those who wish to better understand what practicing catalogers believe is most important about the new rules. One may also speculate, based on these results, that the other choices--all intended outcomes of RDA adoption--are not being communicated or understood as clearly by catalogers.

 

The results of the second question are shown below. Because we asked people to parse out their "some combination of the above" answers, and many did, we were able to break those votes out and add them to the results. The 573 responses ended up representing 717 "votes". That is why the results add up to more than 100%.

 

 

 

 

 

Based on these results, catalogers' primary activities are information gathering and waiting to see what others do--suggesting early days in the process of understanding and adopting the new rules.

 

We are well aware that many in the library community are paying close attention to what OCLC does with respect to RDA. While it would not be appropriate for OCLC to dictate that all our cataloging members adopt RDA, we fully expect that some will, so we want to be ready. We agree with Barbara Tillett and others who speak of a "bridge" or RDA transition period during which the cataloging environment will be a hybrid one of records described under a variety of rules, evolving workflows, crosswalks and mappings. As the availability of RDA draws near, we anticipate that we'll be collaborating with a number of key partners to help introduce RDA to OCLC cataloging members. 

 

Thanks to the many individuals who joined us for the two webinars and told us what they think and want to know about RDA. In response to requests, we're repeating the webinar "RDA and OCLC" on November 19 at 1:00 pm U.S. Eastern time. If you were unable to attend last month, we invite you to register.   

 

 

The newly released Library of Congress report "Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace," by Ruth Anderson and Rick Lugg of R2 Consulting, is a major addition to the ongoing professional conversation about what libraries do, should do, and will be doing in the future. Its narrow scope works to its advantage in some areas and to its detriment in others.

The strongest part of the report is its description of "economic confusion" regarding the market for MARC records. The report describes a market that incorporates suppliers, customers, and other players who operate under two sets of values: community values and commercial values. While in most situations, these values do not lead to conflict, in some cases they have.

R2 points to one influence on this disconnect - the lack of knowledge about the costs of creating catalog records. The distorting effects on the market by certain forces - the Library of Congress' subsidy of MARC cataloging, the availability of free records from some sources and not from others - are poorly understood or inaccurately discussed due to this blind spot. The report suggests that increased visibility and honest discussion of the economics of the marketplace - starting with the acceptance of speaking about library work in those terms - is necessary to move the profession forward.

Below is an intriguing diagram, from page 32 of the report,  showing different "tiers" of the marketplace. Of particular interest is the fact that many institutions span more than one tier, making interactions between and among them more complex. [click image for a larger version in a new window]While the report makes a reference to a guiding assumption that MARC records will remain important for "5-10 years," it does treat the cataloging world as somewhat of a fixed entity. The current developments in RDA and catalog front ends mean that discovery is changing; analysis of web traffic shows that users prefer means other than MARC records for access to many types of materials; and seismic changes in delivery, storage and availability of information resources mean that the paradigm of the local catalog is under stress as well.  Even granting the assumption that MARC will remain relevant in the next decade, it is clear that the relationships between record, cataloger, catalog, and user will be in flux.

Navigating these changes will require a clear view of the forces at work. The Library of Congress should be applauded for taking steps to illuminate this area, and R2 commended for their excellent report.

Edited 31 October 2009 to correct link.

The Spring issue of NISO's Information Standards Quarterly (ISQ) journal [http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/18606259] has two items dealing directly with the creation and use of book metadata. However, their perspective on the topic may be unfamiliar to many in the library world.

The first is an extract (p. 33) from the joint NISO/OCLC white paper, written by Judy Luther, on metadata workflows [http://bit.ly/NISO_OCLC] . The extract has an excellent overview of the metadata activities that happen outside of library cataloging departments, including the roles played by booksellers, wholesalers, and publishers.

Another item of interest in the issue is the report from OCLC's Renee Register on the March OCLC Symposium for Publishers and Librarians on Metadata (p. 40). This symposium brought together two groups that normally don't communicate, and the resulting areas of inquiry are a good reminder of the room for improved efficiency at multiple points in the metadata creation process.

The publication of Resource Description and Access (RDA) is imminent. The standard is planned for formal release later this year. Owing to the important role OCLC services take in descriptive workflow in libraries, we have heard many questions about OCLC's involvement in the standard's development and testing.

Last month, at the American Library Association's Annual Meeting in Chicago, Ted Fons gave a presentation entitled Beyond the Record: OCLC and the Future of MARC.* I wanted to call attention to two slides within that wide-ranging presentation that are a succinct digest of that involvement. The first slide indicates external activities:

• Committee Contribution:
• ex-officio membership in the ALA Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access
• MARC Advisory Committee
• Staff Participation:
• Joint Steering Committee's two RDA Examples Groups
• RDA/MARC Working Group
• Representation on ALA ALCTS RDA Implementation Task Force
• Various program sessions

The next slide indicates the internal activities relating to RDA:

• OCLC Internal Activities:
• Discussions with the three U.S. national libraries to plan for the testing/evaluation period (late 2009)
• Planning for MARC21 format changes to support the testing/evaluation period
• OCLC Contract Services to staff have been selected to participate in the testing/evaluation period.

In the presentation, Ted notes ways in which OCLC has already moved beyond MARC record structures. Our work with a hub-and-spoke metadata crosswalking scheme and with modeling FRBR work sets, has informed our ability to absorb new formats and metadata standards. It has also directly informed our thinking about entities and relationships, most notably in WorldCat Identities. This work allows us to offer the features and functionality necessary to respond to the needs of our member libraries as they begin to test and use RDA.

For a fuller description of OCLC's RDA-related activities, please see Glenn Patton's  authoritative statement, available here: http://www.oclc.org/news/announcements/announcement386.htm.

In addition, Karen Calhoun is organizing an OCLC webinar on the topic of OCLC and RDA to be offered sometime in the fall. Anyone may register and attend. Please watch for an announcement on the OCLC webinar page at http://www.oclc.org/us/en/news/websessions/default.htm.

*Ted Fons' full presentation, which also discusses OCLC metadata crosswalking, and FRBR works, is available from ALA via: http://tinyurl.com/FonsMARC

With so many travel budgets (including OCLC's) slashed to the bone this year, the new or formerly well-traveled professional turns his or her thoughts toward alternative means for networking, sharing and keeping up with the latest. Webinars are an obvious choice, but IMO many tend to be dull for the presenter and audience alike. So some OCLC colleagues and I decided to try something new--an experiment with the more interactive features of the webinar software we use here in the Ohio offices, Webex. But first we had to choose a topic.

I've been an admirer of the usability studies that OCLC's Christie Heitkamp and her team have been undertaking, partly in collaboration with early adopters of WorldCat Local. For my part, some of you may be aware that over the past year I worked with members of Janet Hawk's market research group here at OCLC to investigate what data 'quality' means to a variety of constituencies of library online catalogs. This spring we published our study and over the past few months we have been disseminating the results.

Christie's team is concentrating on making the end user's experience better through the interface; my team's focus is to learn how to optimize the utility of the data underlying the interface (can't have one without the other--both data and interface are important). We thought an exploration of our two studies might be an interesting topic for our first try at a more interactive, dare-I-say more 'usable' webinar.

The resulting webinar, "Online Catalogs: Designing with Users in Mind", recorded Aug. 13, 2009, was designed to elicit more engagement with attendees (there were 228 of them representing a wide range of types of libraries and librarians/staff). Our purpose was to create a two-way learning environment. We tried out the polling and chat features, opened the chat and full screen views to all attendees, paused at several points for Q&A, and solicited direct feedback at the end of the session. The technology cooperated, shall we say, some of the time, so it was necessary to ask for attendees' forbearance on several occasions. Our post-event analysis of the chat suggests that many were willing to bear with us as we learn the ins and outs of these new methods to communicate with one another. Christie and I (and our teams) certainly gained numerous insights from what attendees had to say.  

For your reference, you can link to the recording of the event, in which Christie and I report on their online catalog research findings, discuss user and usability studies, and describe resulting changes made to WorldCat, WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. We've also made the chat dialog available for reading (the chat also contains our answers to questions, added after the event), as well as the polling results. 

We welcome your comments on the chat transcript, the recording, our reports (see links below), the webinar format ...as well as your suggestions for future webinar topics.

For more about our research:

An 8-page paper on Christie's team's research is available from  http://www.oclc.org/worldcatlocal/usability. 

My team's study of what users and librarians want from online catalogs is freely downloadable from http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/onlinecatalogs/default.htm.  For those not ready to sit down with a 50-plus page report, there is also a two-page executive summary.  Watch the page for our forthcoming 15-page synopsis as well. 

By Janifer Gatenby, OCLC

OCLC has extended the xOCLCNUM API to include the OCLC work identifiers (OWIs) in addition to OCLC record identifiers (OCNs) that correspond to manifestations. For several years now, WorldCat has been organised according to the FRBR model[1] that allows grouping of various editions of publications (e.g. reprints, translations, performances, digitized copies) into works. Sometimes users require particular manifestations and sometimes not, so it is desirable to cater for both needs by allowing navigation from works to manifestations and vice versa.

The expanded xOCLCNUM service now returns variant manifestation level identifiers (OCN, ISBN and LCCN) and the OWI. In addition to starting with an OCN, ISBN or LCCN as an entry point into the API, OWI is now permitted as a starting point. For details and examples, see the xOCLCNUM web service documentation page [2].

Systems using the service are able to expand displays using the identifiers returned in the API: for example, the API could be called behind a button labeled "find alternative editions". The service could also be used by systems wishing to cluster search results by work, though performance requirements may preclude the option for clustering larger result sets on the fly. In anticipation of this, OCLC has a prototype service to complement the API that provides a machine readable table of OCN and OWI specific to a catalogue's subset of WorldCat. The OCN / OWI identifier combination is important as a means of linking records for particular resources as they occur in multiple databases. Only 30% of resources in WorldCat have an international identifier such as ISBN, and a recent study has shown that this applies to recently published materials as well as those published before international identifiers came into being in the second half of the 20th century. For example, in between 1970 and 1990, there are on average 9 million records per decade without international identifiers. OCLC is continuing to evolve its identifier services and encouraging adoption of its identifiers by external databases. In this way the identifiers can be used for navigating among web databases, without necessarily passing via OCLC, acting as a linchpin for mash-ups.

[1] http://www.ifla.org/en/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records
[2] http://xisbn.worldcat.org/xisbnadmin/xoclcnum/api.htm

ELAG  2009 - Metadata highlights, by Janifer Gatenby

 

This year's ELAG (European Library Automation Group) was held at the culturally and historically important University Library in Bratislava, Slovak Republic, located in the heart of old Bratislava.  The title of ELAG's 33^rd seminar was "New Tools of the Trade" and the conference was full of stimulating and relevant content, with a focus on re-mixing data.

Map metadata is going to get much easier to create and much richer.  Petr Zabicka and Petr Pridal from the Moravian Library in Bruno, Czech Republic,  introducted us to their web site oldmapsonline where there are open source tools for the scanning, metadata creation and adding geo references to maps.  Their open source Map tiler provides an easy interface for assigning a geo bounding box that makes the map compatible with Google maps so that maps can be overlaid, e.g. for "then and now" comparisons. Geo coordinates are more important than traditional access points for searching maps.  They also recommend  zoomify which zooms any image.

To open the main theme of the conference, Karen Coombs gave a rich key note address and animated the mash up work shop. Check her presentation and her workshop notes, both of which are full of useful examples and tips.

Table of content metadata is being harvested and made available for reuse.  This was reported by Lisa Rogers from Heriot-Watt University in the UK with her overview of TicTocs and Golddust. TicTocs aggregates RSS feeds from more than 12,000 journals and then makes a data set available for mash up.  Peter Van Bohemen from Wageningen University has made very rapid use of this service to display the contents of the lastest issue of a journal when a full record display of a serial is requested in the Wageningen union catalogue.  Gold dust is an SDI service using Tictocs and user profiles. 

There were two reports on systems with a new approach to the generation of recommender data.  Marcus Spiering of the University of Karlsruhe reported on Bibtip, which is a recommender system based on evidence from an anonymous session based cookie that looks for "co-inspections" (full record views).  This metadata is harvested from the usage information collected from a library's online catalogue and thus it works for all material represented in the catalogue.  This contrasts with recommender systems based on circulation based usage which only look at the physical collection and systems based on resolver usage which only look at electronic material.  Tamar Sadeh from ExLibris announced bX, a journal article recommender system based on traffic from harvested logs from SFX resolvers. It also looks for "co-inspections" within a session and is based on research from Herbert van de Sompel's Los Alamos lab.  ExLibris will be running this as a chargeable web service.

Thom Hickey and I gave a presentation entitled "Opening Library Data for Web Scale and Re-mixing" . Tom talked about our data resources and how OCLC is both growing and enriching them, with examples from WorldCat Identities and VIAF.  I stressed the importance of identifiers in re-mixing data, alluding to GLIMIR (Global Library Manifestation Identifier:  see my post in January 2009 on the importance of identifiers) and presented an outline of OCLC's identifier services and data APIs.  From the discussion that ensued, we gathered that work identifier services are in demand. Increasingly, metadata specialists are recognizing the importance of manifestation level identifiers as well.  See, for example, the post this week by Jonathan Rochkind.

I've given here an overview of just some of the presentations that are particularly relevant to metadata.  There were other excellent contributions which can be found on the seminar web site.

The catalog-centric model of library use is pretty straightforward. A user consults a shelf list (most likely through a topic, author, or title index), takes note of a shelf location, and then goes physically to that location to find the resource. The networked world has changed certain dynamics of this model, most notably the depth and accessibility of the indexes, but the model of delivery - the last step described above - has really fundamentally changed only very recently. One of OCLC's strategic moves has been to collect and provide holdings data, so that libraries can share in the strength of a unified catalog while still providing local utility to users seeking a physical resource.

However, in research, or where known-item searching is not the norm, there is one step remaining. Once the user has access to the contents of the resource, there is an evaluation process: "Will this suit my needs, or should I look for something else?" In full-text environments, this rapid compression of the time required for the delivery and evaluation phases is substantial. Accordingly, the delays to the evaluation phase in the traditional library delivery model are increasingly unacceptable to our users.

A newly available study on WorldCat data quality, OCLC's "Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want" [http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/onlinecatalogs/default.htm] suggests that the user seeks above all not rich bibliographic information but rich availability data and evaluative information. Libraries have not traditionally provided evaluative materials to their users in systematic ways; however, they have maintained such aids (book review indexes, etc.) for expert users and for collection development purposes.

The newest mode of providing evaluative content is a game-changer: the provision of full text.  Aggressive moves by for-profit companies in the digitized full-text market are no secret. They bear none of the costs or scarcities of delivering physical books, instead delivering texts. From the user side, the entire process of determining suitability-of use is extremely foreshortened.

As the research and evaluation process is further influenced by the availability of full text, libraries will need to pay attention to the most user-friendly and popular methods of accessing these texts and provide helpful links to them from their discovery tools. (Libraries have some relevant experience with this in the area of referring users to licensed content through link resolution.) The successful integration and synthesis of multiple types of evaluative information is a central challenge.

Popular alternative discovery platforms for information resources (Amazon, tagged personal collections, etc), in addition to using simple holdings and/or sales data, tables of content, and reviews, have approached the evaluation problem in new ways.  One is subcollections - either curated actively or casually through tagging. Another is leveraging user-behavior data such as browsing behavior or "fulfillment" - circulation or purchase. OCLC's new record display in worldcat.org (and WorldCat Local) uses a variety of tools, including user reviews and behavior data, to provide evaluative information. For an example, see http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/61479616 .

OCLC will continue to develop and leverage internal systems and to seek out external providers of licensed content to enhance the evaluative richness of WorldCat. We invite you to share your thoughts on the new record display.

In my November 24, 2008 post to this blog, I alluded to a research project examining what is most important about WorldCat metadata to a range of audiences, both end users and librarians. My research team and I have now published the findings that are likely to be relevant to library catalogs in general. Our report, Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want, is available as a freely downloadable PDF from http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/default.htm.  There is also an executive summary. Your comments are welcome.

In a Feb. 12 entry on this blog, we announced OCLC's Expert Community Experiment, which creates a wiki-like environment around WorldCat cataloging records so that anyone with an OCLC full cataloging authorization can participate in making records better. The experiment began the week of February 16; it will continue for 6 months. To participate, you need nothing besides your OCLC full level cataloging authorization. More information is available on the Expert Community Web pages.

A month into the experiment, I thought there might be intereest in an update on participation.  Registration for the Expert Community Webinars is breaking OCLC records for participation in our webinars--more than 900 sites participated in the four sessions offered in February. If you missed these, there is another Webinar on March 24 for which you can register. Alternatively, you can visit the Expert Community Web pages and click on the Webinar recording available in the right frame.  

Here are some statistics that suggest that the OCLC cataloging community is becoming more engaged in collectively improving WorldCat. The statistics compare master record improvements during the first four weeks of Expert Community Experiment activity with improvements made one year ago (March 2008).

   

Besides the brand new Expert Community updates to master records, it seems possible that the experiment is yielding an uplift in database enrichments and minimal-level upgrades as well.