Cataloging Futures

Peter Brantley: "We are all presses now"

Been reading about the future of print newspapers lately. I really like this post by Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation: Getting it out together. He has some interesting things to say about library standards:

As I listened to these reporters conceive new stories, wondering where they could obtain the technical expertise to help them build narratives constructed from linked data, I began to understand something new: all of us – museums, libraries, newspapers, archives – we are all presses now. We are all working with this explosion of data, some of it our own, some of it (much of it) outside of ourselves; figuring out how to link these data together, or permit others to link it together, so new stories can be told.

We must tell stories for everyone, not just for ourselves. And for libraries, that means staying away from baroque library standards; weird metadata protocols and data exchange standards that no-one else uses. It means taking only the best of what we’ve developed, the work that is most flexible and lightweight, such as OpenURL, OAI-PMH, and Dublin Core, and integrating it with RSS and ATOM; OAuth and OpenID; Sitemap and OpenSearch. [emphasis mine]

Anything that is complicated must be left behind. Anything that serves only our own needs – such as complex inter-repository sharing – cannot be a priority. Those needs, important as they remain, must be met more simply. Most important: exposing as much of our data – stories, reporting, datasets, archives – as we can, and working to enable the integration of other data residing outside ourselves—that is the work of libraries. Museums. Archives. Presses.

Our job is not to deliver packaged information to carefully chosen audiences; our job is to enable information and data to be used by the greatest possible public.

It means libraries not only working among themselves, but making themselves available to journalists in new ways, not merely through their collections, but through their data, through their people and their skills, all working together to enable the telling of stories. Libraries should reach out to the new generation of public presses, local museums, and archives: not wait to be contacted. Because we are all presses now.

If we can't provide access ... there's no point!

Some interesting blogging coming out of the Summer Institute for Chinese Studies Librarianship. One blogger, Dawn Lawson, writes:

Dr. Allyson Carlyle, associate professor at UW's own Information School, spoke to us for two hours about providing access to digital materials, which in another age would have been referred to simply as cataloging. Listing the acronyms of the topics covered--FRBR, FRAD, FRSAR, DCMI, RDA, IME ICC, etc--belies the fact that these are, in many ways, the most exciting and relevant topics of all! We can talk endlessly about  selecting, acquiring, and preserving electronic resources, but If we cannot provide ready access to them, there is no point! [emphasis mine]