Digiblog: ALCTS and the Future of Tech Services

Speakers:
Beacher Wiggins, Library of Congress representative to the Committee of Principles.
Marjorie Bloss, RDA Project Manager
John Attig, ALA Representative to the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA
Diane Hillmann, CC:DA Liaison for Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)

Summary:

Beacher Wiggins gave the "staying the course" talk, basically describing RDA as on course and under control. The main four members of the Committee of Principles (Library of Congress, Collections Canada, British Library, and National Library of Australia) are about to officially issue their statements of support for RDA and their intention to begin working on coordinated implementation projects.

Marjorie Bloss talked mainly about the planning for products, the visible outputs of the RDA project. The primary product is the RDA Online web resource. Marjorie gave details about the product (see below), and told the group that an RFP is in process and a vendor will be chosen by mid-July. A print version of RDA will also be created, by popular demand.

John Attig is the new ALA representative to the JSC. John gave the clearest vision of RDA that I've ever heard, linking RDA chapters directly to FRBR user tasks and stating clearly that RDA is intended to be a set of data elements plus a community application profile. He also talked about traditional cataloging details, like uniform titles and headings for the Bible, that are being discussed by the RDA members. His talk showed that the issues that come up in library cataloging are essentially unchanged, although the structure that records those decisions may be significantly different. One will still ponder access points, primary and not, and struggle with all of the nitty gritty details. John does an excellent job of marrying metadata and cataloging -- the data and the activity of making decisions about the data.

Diane Hillmann talked about the results of the April/May meeting between members of JSC, DCMI, the IEEE Learning object community, and the World Wide Web consortium. At this meeting it was decided that there will be some joint work between JSC and DCMI to create a formal declaration of the RDA data elements, that is to pull the elements out of the text of RDA and make them machine-actionable declarations. This may be the most revolutionary technical decision by this community since the decision to standardize the placement of the hole in the catalog card.

However, after all of this positive reporting, the few questions that we had time for showed that there is still an undercurrent (or maybe a good-sized wave) of discontent within the cataloging community. Some of this might be seen as obsessing on the part of catalogers (the obligatory complaining about ISBD punctuation), but not all. An attendee sitting near me stood up and stated that RDA, as currently in draft, is not usable as cataloging instructions. After we broke up, others came up to him to thank him for voicing what they, too, feel. Even members of the RDA process have said similar things off record. It would be interesting, at one of these large meetings on RDA (this one was standing room only, probably 250-300 people), to take a straw poll to ask people in the audience how many of them see RDA as a positive development. I think the number would be small. So we are still in the worrisome position of going forward with a significant piece of our librarian's bag of tricks that may be going in the wrong direction. But the ship sales on.

Detailed raw notes follow:

Beacher Wiggins

Representing the sentiments of LoC and CoPs.
Gives the make-up of CoP - oversees the work of JSC for development of RDA. NLAUSTRALIA is the newest member. Current chair of JSC is from Australia. The is evidence of the CoPs intention to internationalization and to expand RDA and its use. Focusing on expanding RDA and participation by other countries and libraries. No more members will be added to CoP before the issuance of RDA in 2009.

German library has stated that it will adopt RDA.

April meeting they got commitment of the four major libraries (Collections Canada, British Library, Library of Congress, National Library of Australia) to plan a coordinated approach to implementation. The first step is a joint press release to announce their support. Want to coordinate activities such as training and implementation.

This is the official statement of support.

Marjorie Bloss (RDA project manager)

Since we last met, a lot of good stuff has happened.

Progress of "RDA Online," which is the focus of the work, and on outreach.

Name change from JSC for Revision of AACR to JSC for Developtment of RDA. (Approved by CoP at April meeting.)

Product Development:
RFP has gone out for RDA Online, and in mid-July a vendor will be selected for the product. There are two components: 1) an authoring system so the JSC can input the data (will also be used for updates so they can get out faster) 2) RDA Online itself.

RDAOnline:
- views of RDA content
- Navigational screens (four of them)
- access to content through task-specific functionalities.

Protytpe is available

- Full view = all RDA instructions
- Concise view = abridged RDA
- Custom view = users can create their own view

Navigation:
- browse
- search
- advanced search
- saved searches
- help function for commonly encountered problems

Task functions
- step-by-step, based on pre-defined search criteria
- smart sheet, which is a link to related rules (e.g. worksheets)

Are investigating what people want in a print product and everyone says they do want a print version. Survey on this at http://www.rdaonline.org.

Famed meeting with RDA, DCMI and IEEE-LOM, at BL April 30/May 1
RDA will be represented at the upcoming DC meeting at Singapore
Will be represented at IFLA in 2008

ALCTS CCS RDA Implementation Task Force just formed. Having their first meeting tomorrow.

Pace is accelerating now that people are thinking about implementation. Moving from "will" to "is."

John Attig

Goals: a standard designed for the digital environment. Meaning: will be a web-based tool, it addresses cataloging of digital resources, and it will result in records designed for the digital environment.

Think of it as a content standard (like DACS or cataloging cultural objects). RDA is more than that: it is also a metadata schema and an application profiles.

Is a metdata scheme:
Organized as a list of data elements
based on FRBR and FRAD
Structured: elements, sub-elements, and element sub-types.

This provides basic structure for metadata based on RDA. New document RDA Scope and Structure, with mapping to FRBR.

RDA is an application profile:
- elelemtns and terminology of a community
- interpretation of FRBR/FRAD, which are community models

RDA as content standard
- designed primarily for use in libraries
- based on AACR, FRBR/FRAD
- applicable to a variety of media and formats collected by libraries
- developed for use in English language environment but could be adopted in other language communities
- independent of format in which data is stored (RDA is not MARC any more than AACR is MARC), but MARC is not the only application that could encode it.

Recognize that there are other tasks beyond resource discovery, but concentrating on this now.

Gives outline, with FRBR user tasks associated with each chapter.
Part A is essentially Identify and Select, although 6 & 7 are related to FIND

Another revision of Chapter 3 now out for comment. First version was in December of 2005.
[At this point, John began going through the details of each chapter. This was more detailed than I could capture, but I got the feeling that cataloging is still alive and well and highly debated. There were discussions of things like headings for the Bible, the use of uniform titles, and the decision for determining primary access points. There were some cries of dismay from the audience, which shows that there is passion about the cataloging activity.]

Diane Hillmann

Turning points are usually only recognized in retrospect. But the Data Model meeting was one where you could see a turning point as it happened.

Members of JSC, IEEE-LOM, DCMI, W3C were at the meeting

3 important recommendations:
1) agreement to work together on metadata
2) recommendation that CoP and DCMI seek funding to develop an RDA application profile
- RDA element vocabular
- RDA DC application profile
- disclosure of RDA vocabularies

Will use RDF/SKOS, undernearth SKOS is Z39.19, just in an updated format.

There was "small" criticism of RDA (laughter) - that there was a lot of info embedded in the instructions in RDA that wasn't actionable by machine - was intended to be read by humans and acted on by humans. That's not good enough today, when we need to use machines to

tasks will pull out of human-readable instructions those pieces that will make the data machine-actionable and understandable by other communities. Makes our data accessible to people who don't call a title "245". In the future we might be speaking "RDA" because we'll have data elements we can talk about. People don't speak AACR2, and don't quote rule numbers.

What has happened since the meeting:

• Now a task group under DCMI co-chaired Diane and Gordon Dunsire.
• Have a list, a wiki.
• Have a proposal to get some initial funding to do two of the tasks. The application profile task will be harder. Will hit the ground as soon as someone writes a check.

Also thinking about next steps - lots more to do: community building, reaching out. (And look at how many people are in this room today: there's is obviously interest and excitement.)

Application profiles:
What are they? A community consensus about how they want their data to look and what they want it to do. Then you document it. Then how you communicate your consensus and your documentation to other communities. This gives you ways to validate data, to measure its conformance with the ideal, ways to figure out how to improve it.

DC conference in Singapore in August there will be JSC representation and the theme is "Application Profiles."

Libraries are starting to participate in some very exciting work that will help us to meet our goals better.

Questions

The first question is about ISBD punctuation. John stated that RDA is neutral on ISBD -- that is an implementation decision. Diane replied that punctuation is something that systems can derive from data elements, if the elements are properly defined.

The next question is about implementation planning. A new group is forming to discuss implementation, but their first meeting is tomorrow and it's just an organizational meeting.

There was also a statement from a member of the IEEE/LOM community about keeping things simple (presumably NOT what library cataloging is about in his mind), and one from a member of the library community on the difficulty of using RDA for actual cataloging.

The last speaker stated that RDA is NOT usable as cataloging rules. He didn't get a chance to say why, but the audience stirred at this.

How do you feel about the following controversial statement? Do you agree, disagree, or have a different take on staffing for technical services and collections work?

In the rapidly evolving information environment, those staff who are not prepared for and able to cope with continuous learning and constant change will either become increasingly compartmentalized or be left behind altogether.

What do you think about this?

In the new information paradigm, there will be very little distinction between book vendors and subscription agencies, whose services will be very different than in the past.

The second of four controversial statements that will be used by a panel as part of the ALA Midwinter 2007 symposium entitled "Definitely Digital: an Exploration of the Future of Knowledge on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of ALCTS" follows below. Individuals who have registered for the symposium, as well as others who are interested in the subject matter, are invited to post comments regarding either Statement 1 or Statement 2 on digiblog. The program planners and the panelists would like to know what librarians, others in the information industry, and even library users think about these topics.

Controversial Statement 2

As information resources go digital, the "units" of information discovery and delivery will become wildly variable and blended, making past patterns of collection development, acquisition, and cataloging inadequate and unscalable.