Burn it all down

Imagine a colleague. She’s been hardworking, loyal and dependable her whole working life. Unfortunately, other than a late-career attempt to retrain, she more or less performs the same functions in the same way she did when she joined the library way back in 1968. That was the same year COBOL was standardised, just 16 years after Grace Hopper created the very first compiler. Your colleague had already been working for thirteen years before MS-DOS was released, and in her fourteenth year of employment the Commodore 64 became the hottest thing in computing. Her career predates nearly every programming language, every metadata standard, and every email ever sent. That’s right, I’m talking about MAchine Readable Cataloguing - MARC. If MARC started its career aged 18 it would be retiring next year aged 65, but it’s been redundant for years already.

Sometimes it feels as if the whole of librarianship itself is winding down to retirement. Whilst there are some amazing people doing innovative, urgently needed work, they always seem to be doing so against a background of disinterest, inertia and change aversion. MARC is an easy target, yet here we are, 20 years after Dublin Core, thirteen years after JSON, 8 years after the stabilisation of RDFa - still unwilling to step away from such a manifestly outdated and limiting metadata standard. Instead of embracing these exciting developments, 18 years have been wasted arguing about whether and how to make incremental, contradictory, and minimally valuable changes to MARC.

Waiting for Godot the Library of Congress

The best we seem to be able to do as an industry now is to wait for two American organisations - the Library of Congress and OCLC - to decide on our behalf what linked library data standards should look like. Never mind that one is a library for a specific set of legislators and the other is largely indistinguishable from a commercial software vendor. Whenever I discuss RDF or linked open data with colleagues the usual response is “Oh, you mean BIBFRAME”. Well yes, and no. Yes, BIBFRAME is an interesting project. And yes, the Bib Extend group (supported to a large degree by OCLC) preparing proposals for Schema.org is extremely valuable and necessary. But these are just two examples of how linked data and RDF can be used.

There is a long history of this sort of thing. Libraries across the English speaking world almost universally use Library of Congress Subject Headings to index our collections. This is such a standard that most librarians don’t ever stop to ponder how bizarre it is. Are librarians serving the needs of the United States legislature the best people to decide how to describe the subject of a book in a rural Australian library?

The incapacity of librarians to quickly move to take advantage of the enormous benefits of linked data displays some serious cultural and technical problems in the profession. We wait for someone else to make the rules, someone else to make the software, someone else to set the standards. Except they have to be library rules, library software and library standards. Heaven forbid we’d leverage knowledge and systems from a wider field. This passive and closed thinking causes all sorts of problems for libraries.

A box of hammers

Take, for example, the way libraries write tender specifications for library software. Invariably, requirements are listed in terms of the particular technology or protocol they must use, rather than in terms of their functionality. What protocol must they use? The one we already use, of course. Thus, publishers and e-book platforms supply metadata as MARC records to libraries (often for a fee), and software vendors ensure their products comply with SIP2, even though they are all too aware of how outdated, insecure and generally unfit for purpose it is. If instead we asked vendors to provide efficient and flexible metadata transfer abilities, and secure and rich circulation data services, they may well come to us with products that look quite different.

Consider the way WorldCat or Libraries Australia allow libraries to use a central shared repository of catalogue records to streamline copy cataloguing. OCLC is in fact ramping up their focus on this service, with their WorldShare library management platform enabling what amounts to two-click cataloguing by leveraging WorldCat. This is largely achieved through the magic of ‘the cloud’ - which is to say, the magic of sticking everything in the same multi-tenant data centre controlled by a corporation for a fee.

This is one way to do things, and not necessarily a te