More and more I come to the conclusion that in the linked data space the thing we seem to focus on today, descriptive cataloging, will be less useful than the entities that are represented by our authority data.

The Document Availability Information API (DAIA) defines a data model with serializations in JSON and XML to encode information about the current availability of documents. This document defines the serialization formats DAIA/JSON and DAIA/XML and a HTTP query API to query DAIA information.

Archivists and librarians contribute to discovery when they discard illusions of neutrality and express their excitement for the materials and their opinions about their significance.

MARC formatting conventions and US practice put romanized forms in the ”regular” MARC fields, with parallel fields for the original scripts to support systems with the capability to handle one or both scripts. However, most library systems still cannot accept the entire Unicode “repertoire” of characters for all scripts and some still cannot accept any non-Latin scripts.

This browseable 75-topic dynamic topic model of the Journal Science (1880-2002) is part of the on-line supplement to the submission "Modeling the Evolution of Science." This browser allows a user to visualize the dynamic topic model, and use the hidden topics that it has uncovered to guide an exploration of the original collection of documents.

...librarians must begin to de-emphasize the value of access in general and re-emphasize their role as research assistants. We need to provide our patrons with the reader advisory services that were once a core element of our work. In academic libraries, this can be done most readily by creating guides to the literature, but those guides need to go far beyond what we see in most guides.  They need to be more than simply lists of useful databases and video tutorials on using various search tools.  They need to do such things as introduce patrons to the nature of the field of study, provide a history of its devepment, and identify its most important figures, and its classic and important current works.  Library administrations will need  to hire subject specialists with significant expertise,  who are potentially capable of teaching courses in the departments they serve. 

Of course, this presents a challenge to our desire to remain “neutral” or “unbiased” with regard to the subject matter that we make available, but we need not shy away from the challenge. We must conscientiously identify the information that we judge to be most worthwhile, while remaining reasonably humble about our abilities to discriminate the wheat from the chaff.  We need to exercise our  right to the freedoms that our teaching colleagues have in expressing our views about our fields of expertise.  We owe it to our patrons to apply our professional judgment about the value of the resources available to them and not simply serve as human cogs in an access providing machine.

Only a small subset of MARC 21 fields are used in WorldCat. Even when considering the MARC fields that are heavily used in non-book formats, there are
only 21 to 30 tags that occur in 10% or more records.

Austin et al. point out that the statistical methods that are at the heart of data mining are not able to distinguish real from spurious associations. Data mining employs the automated examination of enormous bodies of data. Its usefulness is thought to be proportional to the size of the data set that it collates; however, as the data set becomes larger and as the number of attributes that serve as potential relata increases, the number of potential relationships increases exponentially. Importantly, the number of spurious associations also increases. With enough data, no significance test will be stringent enough to provide assurance against the kind of results found in Austin et al. What is needed, according to Austin et al. is a “pre-specified plausible hypothesis.” For statistical analysis to be useful, the researcher must begin with a hypothesis, preferably a plausible one, if the research is to be valuable.

What exactly is a pre-specified plausible hypothesis and how can we generate it if data mining can’t do that for us? The question was posed some sixty years ago by the philosopher Nelson Goodman using different terms: Goodman believed that a critical question for epistemology was to distinguish between “projectible and non-projectible hypotheses.” One can more or less replace “pre-specified plausible hypothesis” with Goodman’s term “projectible hypothesis.” According to Goodman, when we seek to understand what hypothesis is (or is not) projectible, we do not come to the problem “empty-headed but with some stock of knowledge” which we use to determine what is (or is not) projectible. Projectible hypotheses will be those which do not conflict with other hypotheses that have been supported in the past. They will commonly use the same terminology of previously supported hypotheses. The terminology appearing in the hypotheses will have become “entrenched” in the language. This goes a long distance toward explaining why we don’t find the link between one’s astrological sign and medical conditions plausible. Twenty-first century Western medicine is not accustomed to linking astrological signs to ailments and so must find any hypothesis that does so implausible.

If Goodman is correct, then data mining is of little use without an historical understanding of the field of science to which the data pertains.

...

Here, we have another argument for allocating library resources to pay for librarians with deep subject expertise. As e-science develops, vendors will make more and more data sets available, regardless of their actual worth to researchers. To effectively choose the data sets that are of value, librarians must have a thorough understanding of the research needs of their patrons. To do this, they must have a deep understanding of the field. Unfortunately, with the excitement swirling around e-science, the mere access to large data sets threatens to become the be-all and end-all in collection management. If we aren’t careful, we may find ourselves with mountains of data from which everything and nothing can be concluded.

Washington DC--The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Digital Humanities, SPEC Kit 326, which provides a snapshot of research library experiences with digital scholarship centers or services that support the humanities (e.g., history, art, music, film, literature, philosophy, religion, etc.) and the benefits and challenges of hosting them. The survey asked ARL libraries about the organization of these services, how they are staffed and funded, what services they offer and to whom, what technical infrastructure is provided, whether the library manages or archives the digital resources produced, and how services are assessed, among other questions.

This survey revealed that library-based support for the digital humanities is offered predominantly on an ad hoc basis. However, as demand for services supporting the digital humanities has grown, libraries have begun to re-evaluate their provisional service and staffing models. Many respondents expressed a desire to implement practices, policies, and procedures that would allow them to cope with increases in demand for services.

This SPEC Kit includes documentation from respondents that describes the mission or purpose of digital humanities centers, the services offered, policies and procedures, examples of digital projects, fellowship and grant opportunities, promotional materials, and repositories for digital projects.

Michael Buckland's notes on Paul Otlet, with links to other Otlet resources.

"Paul Otlet (portrait) was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1868. His monumental book Traité de documentation. (Brussels, 1934) was both central and symbolic in the development of information science - then called 'Documentation' - in the first half of this century. In addition, it reminds us of something that has been too widely forgotten: That this field did have a lively existence in the early decades of this century and a sophistication concerning theory and information technology that now commonly surprises people."

Key recommendations of the report are:

That library leaders identify sets of data as possible candidates for early exposure as Linked Data and foster a discussion about Open Data and rights;
That library standards bodies increase library participation in Semantic Web standardization, develop library data standards that are compatible with Linked Data, and disseminate best-practice design patterns tailored to library Linked Data;
That data and systems designers design enhanced user services based on Linked Data capabilities, create URIs for the items in library datasets, develop policies for managing RDF vocabularies and their URIs, and express library data by re-using or mapping to existing Linked Data vocabularies;
That librarians and archivists preserve Linked Data element sets and value vocabularies and apply library experience in curation and long-term preservation to Linked Data datasets.

This document, a deliverable from the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, is an attempt to identify a set of useful resources for creating or consuming Linked Data in the library domain. It is intended both for novices seeking an overview of the library Linked Data domain, and for experts in search of a quick look-up or refresher. The final report of the Incubator Group suggests that the success of Linked Data in any domain depends on the ability of its practitioners to identify, re-use, or connect to already available datasets and data models. Library Linked Data is not an exception. Such an identification effort is crucial given the complexity and variety of library data resources, many of them already available as Linked Data at the time of writing this report. We hope that this document will help those who undertake such tasks.

The cira library collects, preserves and makes available a collection of books, periodicals and documents in all languages concerning the anarchist movement, its history and ideas. It was founded in Geneva in 1957.

Please note that the final report is not officially published yet. This will happen in the second half of September, at a different place on the W3C website, after some final copy editing has been made!

The number of influential libraries publishing their metadata onto the web as linked open data, which is the heart of the Semantic Web, is growing at a dizzying rate. To further this trend, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a major nonlibrary organization that supports the technologies that undergird the Semantic Web (or the Web of Data), will release a new report in September devoted to library linked data (LLD).

As part of Google’s propaganda tour selling their proposed book monopoly, a surprising and seemingly hypocritical theme emerged loud and clear. Straight from the “have cake and eat it too” department, Google’s senior traveling digital book salesman, Dan Clancy, professed his undying commitment to the legislative process as it relates to orphan works.

At a Computer History Museum event last week in Silicon Valley, Clancy suggested that the best way to address the orphan books issue is for Congress to pass legislation, and that Google is not only supportive of this effort, but pushing for it.

Well, we’d like to take Google at their word and hope that they live up to that commitment. And we hope that they do it in a way that is honest and forthright, not self-serving and diversionary. At the Internet Archive, we believe that the right way to gain access to orphan books is to not break the law while you are doing it, and to work through Congress to ensure that the people’s voice in copyright is articulated the way the system was designed to work, not through a private, secret deal that we’re being assured is in our best interests by Google. For the browsing, lending, and vending of digital books, the Archive is seeking an open and competitive market with appropriate safeguards for readers, not a monopoly bookstore created by the biggest online advertising company in the world.

No one elected Google to write copyright law for America. And the Author’s Guild and American Association of Publishers simply do not accurately represent the diverse cross-section of those communities. If Google is really interested in honoring our legislative process, let’s acknowledge that Congress is the path that our government chose to make copyright law and codify its exceptions — instead of crafting secret deals through class action settlements.

To that end, we are calling on Google to petition the court and seek a delay to the October hearing regarding the settlement. Furthermore, we demand that Google publicly demonstrate their leadership and influence in DC to immediately fuel the legislative process on orphan works. That way, they could be part of a truly “non-exclusive” deal by ensuring that all stakeholders are provided the same set of rules from Day 1.

We await Google’s response.

I’ve written frequently about how the shift from accessing information in offline spaces to online spaces has particular privacy implications. For example, strikingly different privacy norms and expectations emerge when comparing information-seeking activities in libraries vs. bookstores vs. Google Book Search.

Today, Fred Stutzman revealed a particularly troublesome example of how relying on the “My Library” feature of Google Book Search might mean you have even less privacy with regard to your online intellectual endeavors:

I was shocked to find out that saving a book to your library requires that the book be added to your “shared library”, a public listing tied to your Google account.

There is no way to save a book privately in Google Booksearch.  As Google writes in their FAQ, “When you add reviews, ratings, notes, or labels to a book—or when you add a book to your my Library page—that information will be publicly displayed on Google Book Search.”  They go on to write that “No matter where you use these features, the information you submit will be displayed publicly.”

I couldn’t believe it either.  If you want to set up a Google Library, even if it is just for convenience sake, you have to show the world what you’ve been reading.  As far as I can tell, there’s no good technical or legal reason why one can’t save a book privately, or limit their book-sharing to a group of friends.  This decision seems arbitrary and downright scary (or at least terribly ill-advised).

Stutzman points out the incongruence between Google’s policy and the American Library Association’s longstanding code of ethics, bill of rights, and core values, including their commitment to protecting patron privacy:

I must wonder why Google is not adhering to ALA policy, and the broader cultural norm of protecting library patron privacy.  As Google partners with large institutions and attempts to monetize Booksearch, failing to respect patron privacy seems foolish and potentially dangerous.  A patron researching a sensitive topic, or a topic that reveals information about the patron (for example, books about a health condition) will have their information revealed publicly if they add such a book to their library.

I also suggest a read of the comment thread on Stutzman’s post, where a suggestion has been made (channelling Zuckerberg) that all your favorited books should be public in an ideal world. Stutzman aptly counters such a proposition.

This is a serious design flaw (or a seriously flawed design decision). Google must act quickly to give users control over which books in their library are publicly viewable.

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