Karen Coyle presented this excellent keynote to begin day 2 of the the 2011 LITA National Forum.
She began by expressing a key sentiment from the prior day's keynote, that we are getting toward the end of
something and the beginning of something else. Below are my notes expressing many of the key concepts:
“If Moses were to
come down from the mountain today he would have to come down with
comments enabled.”
Wikileaks and bloggers are examples of
actors who are changing the balance of power. Print isn't going away
but it is waning. Print will become analogous to electronic like
live performances are to recordings. We haven't managed to progress
beyond filenames on computers – we don't see title and author
information when we look at what we've downloaded.
The world where books are written and
other books are written later to respond to that book are
disappearing. Our conversations have become faster and shorter.
Coyle sees a new media now is dominating old media. Informal
communication is becoming formalized. With Facebook, Twitter and
email we've lost our ability to be off the record.
There are two primary activities that
libraries are engaged in that can help. One is the FRamily (FRBR,
etc). The second is linked data. This is the year that linked data
is going big and several libraries in Europe are already implimenting it in their catalogs.
Linked data is a metadata format that
is designed for the web, and the web is where we need to be. It
provides a flexibility that you can't get with other formats and an
expansion of your metadata in a non disruptive way. Linked data can
be built up incrementally without having to change your technology.
The MARC record is comparatively all or nothing. With the use of
identifiers multiple language displays are easy.
The Semantic Web vs. the Pedantic Web.
Library catalog data can be cryptic
“xii, 356 p.; 23 cm.” What's 23 cm? What does xii mean?
“Library cataloging is like the secret language of twins.” It
doesn't make sense to put this out on the web. We're too focused on
our stuff, not on our stuff as to be organized as knowledge.
Neither FRBR nor RDA address the isssue
of subject headings and organize information topically. Search
engines do keyword rather than topic searching because it's easy.
The simple search box puts a big burdon on the user to figure out
what they should put in that will match what they are looking for.
“At the same time, it is known that users in their attempts to
search by subject sometimes find themselves at a loss for words” -
Elaine Svenonius. Searching for concepts or things with common terms
in their names causes problems with the simple search box.
Wikipedia is organized information and
has concepts that don't appear easily in a keyword search, which is
part of why it's so important in Google searches. Keyword searching
is like dumpster diving or dynamite fishing for information. We pay
attention to what's right in searching and ignore what's wrong.
Even tagging is not a good answer. We
are using Victorian era knowledge schemes – Cookery has finally
become Cooking, too little, too late. We can use computing to do a
lot of interesting things with faceting – things that were worked
on by Raganathan and others in the past, but were too complex to be
implemented in an analog fashion. We tend to be good at helping
people find a title, but not so good at finding a concept.
Users need to use information, not just
find it. Use is an information activity and we should be available
to support information activities. Linked data can help.
The library catalog needs to become a
backroom database, not what gets shown to users. We have to move
beyond the catalog. It may be wasted time to try and make the
catalog better. It may be better to figure out how to make that
information useful to people where they do their work.
The concepts behind FRBR were find, identify, select,
and obtain. We need to really focus on find and make that the priority,
and then add on a major focus of use. If FRBR and RDA are going to
support this need to change radically and evolve. There are data
points that we need that are not included in these standards.
Users flock to Wikipedia because the
knowledge is organized and they can understand it.
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