PLA Blog

Stephen Abram is a can’t miss panelist. He accepts, more fully than anyone else I’ve seen present at a library conference, that public speaking is theater, and theater benefits from the play of opposites, from presenters willing to play the foil. And so, last Saturday for the LITA Internet Resources and Services Interest Group’s “There’s No Catalog Like No Catalog: The Ultimate Debate on the Future of the Library Catalog,” Abram played Oscar to Joseph Janes’s Felix, Goliath to Karen Schneider’s David, goon to Karen Coyle’s Gretzkey, and Steve Ballmer to Roy Tennant’s Ray Ozzie. Which is to say, Abram affected boorishness, grandiosity, combativeness, and even defended proprietary code—in part because it brought out the best in his fellow panelists, in part because overstatement plays well in a crowded theater, and in part because well behaved librarians rarely make history.

The following are a few of the many highlights from this program. Listen to the MP3 for more.

What are catalogs good for? What are they not good for?

Coyle: The original card catalogs were the Google of their day. Now just 3% of all searches start at the library.
Abram: Catalogs are everything we want, nothing that users want. Librarians aren’t going to give you what you want, they’re going to give you what they’ve got.
Coyle: Why shouldn’t users discover library resources on Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, etc.? And why is the library catalog a dead-end, a place that has links to it, but no links out?
Abram: Why don’t you have a Meebo widget or another live Ask a Librarian option on every failed search?

What about WorldCat Local and the Open Library: the one big catalog in the sky approach?

Coyle: One big catalog is nonsense. All data should be exposed on the web, not as an inventory, but as a bibliography consisting of a million little catalogs, all resource-oriented. Do not start with place. And we need to let other people do things with the data, even things we don’t like.
Schneider: I envision lots of big catalogs. But sometimes place does matter. Sometimes you want to go into a building and check out a book.
Abram: WorldCat is not a catalog. It’s a registry for data.
Janes: WorldCat is a catalog. It’s the University of Washington catalog.

What should catalogers do going forward?

Schneider: We need to celebrate what is good about cataloging. So many techies end up reinventing cataloging.
Janes: I taught the class that resulted in the founding of the Internet Public Library. As it grew, we needed metadata and better organization. There was a computer science student in the class who handled the back-end. Basically, he ended up reinventing Dewey.
Abram: Catalogers have reinvented themselves over the past 20 years. They’re informing Google, Yahoo, etc. But not library interfaces.
Coyle: We’ve forgotten why we do what we do. For instance, why don’t we use title case? Are the things we’re doing serving our needs today?
Schneider: This is part of a larger problem. Libraries are dogma driven. Very little that we do is based on evidence.

What would you like to have happen in the library software market?

Schneider: I’d like it if every product were open source.
Abram: I’d like everyone to catch up with the latest release of the software they’re running. You need to upgrade every year.
Coyle: I’d like systems to separate library management from user services.
Janes: I wish the market were bigger, because greater demand would increase the supply of good stuff. Much of what we use feels homespun. Shouldn’t we merit major software players’ attention? I’m talking Apple. Nintendo. Our largest enemy is indifference.

---

There are few subtleties in Abram’s panel performance. One is that he takes it and takes it and take it—occasionally pausing to defend his positions or his employer—but he never dishes it out. The other is that, until you read the transcript, you aren’t fully aware that, in the continuum of librarian attitudes, Coyle, Janes, Scheider, and Tennant are far more like him than not like him.

If there’s really an anti-Stephen Abram, it’s Martha Yee. Quiet and dignified, a cataloger’s cataloger, Yee can work an ALCTS room into a hand-clapping, foot-stomping frenzy by pushing up the sleeves on her cardigan or asking if anyone might like some tea. At least that’s how it feels. And when you’re sharing a stage with futurists like Jennifer Bowen, Dianne Hillman, Tim Spalding, and Roy Tennant (along with moderator Robert Wolven), as Yee did at last Sunday’s “Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging,” sometimes you need someone who speaks for the people, who shares their past, who lives in the moment. However, while Yee is anything but a techno-utopian, she is also anything but reactionary.

Her presentation was on the Semantic Web. To her credit, she’s put more time into figuring out how RDF really works, instead of how it promises to work, than anyone else I’ve encountered. And she has questions—smart, thorny questions. They aren’t intended to derail the project, but to make it better. Her most important: Can all catalogers do be reduced to a set of pulldown menus? (Queue thunderous applause.)

Tennant presented on WorldCat, Bowen on the eXtensible cAtalog pRoject, Spalding on LibraryThing, and Hillman on how catalogers need to reinvent themselves as metadata librarians. Each presentation was strong, though in each case I’m sure you either already know about these projects/movements or you don’t much care. Rather than summarize, I’ll finish with a few highlights:

Tennant: When I’m looking for a library book, I want to know: How many clicks am I from having the book sent to my house?

Tennant: Data is a collective asset. OCLC is a membership collective for this data.

Yee: You need to tie the acquisitions budget to the processing budget or you get a backlog. Digitization only magnifies this relationship.

Bowen: We need to distinguish between granularity and complexity. We need to create interoperable granularity.

Spalding: The tag war is over. Tags are not better than subject headings, but they’re useful. We have ample evidence.

Hillman: The day of the ILS may not be entirely dead, but it’s on life support. We’re looking at the disintegrated library system. Discovery is the first piece that’s being dis-integrated. Soon metadata will be managed in different databases.

Yee: Good metadata is never going to be free. We have to figure out who is going to be paid for it.