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.

Comments

[Irvin Flack]

I'm thinking through the implications of staying away from baroque library standards. That means dropping AACR, RDA, MARC, FRBR, LCSH, DDC, LCC, MODS, etc.?

[Chris]

Hi Irvin,

I've been sick the last four days, so I'm just getting back into things. Your question is exactly what I've been wondering--what exactly are the baroque library standards? I've been meaning to write a comment on Brantley's post.

[Irvin]

Peter's point seems to be: 'if it ain't baroque, don't fix it!' RDA can certainly be baroque -- eg I've just been reading through the JSC updates from John Attig including debate about whether fictitious characters like Miss Piggy can be considered authors(!) -- but replacing it with, say, the core 15 DC elements would be tossing the baby out with the bathwater.

[Chris]

Yeah, I find the core 15 DC elements so limiting for describing library resources. There's got to be some middle ground.