Information Organization
LIS 5703 Fall 2009
For Dr. Michelle Kazmer
By Nathaniel V. Finley
Representation and Description Paper
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Abstract:
Today’s data is seeking ways to not only transmit information, but to transmit information in such a manner that is not lifeless, it is not sterile, but rather that the information that is transmitted in metadata can be a reflection somehow of the life in the work itself. This is the same motivation, I argue, that inspires Worldcat to offer a users’ comments and feedback section to its subscription service, and to allow users to write taglines for items in its service provided to the general public. Certainly there is still a need for the IP, but it is only with the help of the general public that a new style and art of metadata entry can be realized. _______________________________________________________________
I. Introduction
The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set was created in 1995 “in order to have an internationally agreed-upon set of metadata elements that could be completed by the creators of electronic documents (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, p. 213).” With its emphasis on international validity as well as user-creation vice specialist-creation Dublin Core is meant to be user friendly and flexible. Non-rigidity and accessibility ensure, as Greenberg et. al. (2002) argue, that through the use of Dublin Core “resource authors can create professional quality metadata.”
Dublin Core was never meant to be used by the information professional, who, as Greenberg et. al. argue, “are people who have had formal training and are proficient in the use of descriptive and content-value standards” and “generally produce high quality metadata (Greenberg et. al. 2002).”
“Resource authors,” on the other hand, “are individuals responsible for the creation of the intellectual content of a work (Greenberg et. al. 2002).” In this view, therefore, there are two types of catalogers: the professional, who regularly and fairly successfully catalogs information sources; and the resource author, who irregularly and perhaps seldomly catalogs information sources but could be engaged in cataloging at least his or her own information source. In this view, Dublin Core was designed as a simple alternative to information organization that allows the information creator to bypass the information specialist and participate in a do-it-yourself environment.
Not everybody agrees with this analysis, or at least not everybody understands Dublin Core as being primarily a do-it-yourself system. In a recent article by Anita Coleman (2005) the author argues that “providing resource descriptions for information
access is…a costly business and…libraries have relinquished new forms of materials to others. DC was envisioned as a simple way to get novices–people who are new to cataloging information resources for discovery–as a way to help solve this problem (p. 156).” In other words, Dublin Core was not envisioned as a do-it-yourself project at all, but rather as a way to get the general population to help librarians do their jobs. The purpose of Coleman’s article, in fact, is to teach people how to create a Dublin Core record that 1) is helpful in the goal of information discovery; 2) is complex enough to adequately describe new media resources as well as traditional media resources; 3) can be integrated into a library using MARC and AACR2R or other standards (Coleman, p. 155). For Coleman—radically at variance with Greenberg et. al.—Dublin Core is just one more tool for the systematization and coordination of information.
II. My Dublin Core Record
A. Explanatory remarks
What I chose to do was to use Anita Coleman’s directions and find out what results I get with my item. I chose a classic text for the auto mechanic do-it-yourselfer (appropriately enough). The version that I have is a 1995 25th anniversary edition with a number of features not included in earlier editions.
Two reasons I chose to follow Anita Coleman’s directions is that they are the easiest and most complete directions that I have found outside of the Dublin Core user manual (hereafter DCUM) which is located at http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/. While the DCUM is a complex directory of terms, purposes, appendixes and also directions—and is sometimes ambiguous in its directions—Coleman’s steps are relatively lucid and easy to follow (though not always). At times, however, there are inconsistencies between Coleman’s directions and the DCUM, in which cases I have opted for DCUM directions. As one of the hallmarks of the Dublin Core system is its flexibility and adaptability I thought that this approach was justified given that one of the goals of my project is test Coleman’s thesis against that of Greenberg et. al. Where I could find no resolution to a particular problem in either Coleman or DCUM I simply invented. My justification for this approach is that this is exactly what Dublin Core was created to allow for: inventiveness on the part of the user (within limits—I leave it to the reader to decide if I have overstepped these or not).
Following Coleman’s directions, here is the Dublin Core record that I created for my item, presented in a simple two column table:
B. The Record
ELEMENT NAME: ELEMENT VALUE
Title: How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive
Title.subtitle: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for
the Compleat Idiot
Creator.namePersonal: Muir, John
Subject : Auto Mechanics
Subject : Volkswagen
Subject : Manuals
Subject : Do-it-yourself
Subject : 1960’s countercultural history
Description.note: Quotation from item introduction by author
Description: I am a man, engineer, mechanic, lover-feeler who
has worked and felt with cars of all description for
many years. This book contains the product of these
years: clear and accurate Procedures to heal and keep
well your Volkswagen. I don’t expect you to become a
mechanic—I have done that! My understanding and
knowledge will be yours as you work. You supply the
labor, the book will supply the direction, so we work
as a team, you and I.
Publisher:
Contributor.namePersonal: Gregg, Tosh (co-author)
Contributor.namePersonal: Aschwanden, Peter (illustrator)
Date: 1995-06 (2nd printing of the 16th edition)
Date.firstedition: 1969
Type: Physical object
Type: Text
Type: Image
Format: Text
Format.other: Book, paperback
Format.other: 460 pp.
Format.other: 28 cm.
Identifier: ISBN 1-56261-190-9
Source:
Language: Eng
Relation.isversionOf: 1st Edition
Relation.firsteditionDate: 1969
Coverage: Volkswagen types I, II, III, IV and Fuel Injection
Rights: Restrictions Apply
Rights.type: Copyright
Rights.date: 1994
Rights.owner.namePersonal: Muir, Eve
Audience: General Education
C. Table Explanations:
1. The title automatically presented a problem. Coleman does not approach the issue of subtitles, nor does the DCUM. Am I to use a colon and put both the title and the subtitle in the title line? Coleman (2005) tells us to “Enter the title information as found in the resource. Use capitalization and punctuation as found in resource (p. 159),” which is fine if you have a copyright page or other LOC information. But what if you only have the cover? The only distinction that the cover and the cover page make between the title and the subtitle is a smaller font.
So I decided to use the option of repeating an element more than one time (Coleman, p. 157). I also used an inventive structure found in the textbook The Organization of Information (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, p. 217) which provides a copy of a Dublin Core record using the “.” to distinguish subgroupings under a larger element heading. I have employed this technique throughout.
2. The creator is the author. Coleman does not say anything about inverting the name to family name followed by personal name—in fact she says to reproduce the name exactly as it appears on the item. However the DCUM specifically directs the cataloger that “personal names should be listed surname or family name first, followed by forename or given name. When in doubt, give the name as it appears, and do not invert.” In this case there is no doubt, so I inverted. I also added the “.namePersonal” value which is found in Talyor and Joudrey (2009, p. 217).
3. “All of the DC elements are optional, repeatable, and
modifiable by qualifiers. All elements are optional, which means
that any of the DC elements may be omitted. All elements are repeatable; this means that if there is more than one person who created the resource, and you can use the Creator element as many
times as you need to record the names of multiple creators. Similarly, all other elements (Title, Subject, etc.) may be repeated as many times as needed (Coleman 2005, p. 157).” I followed Coleman’s directions on repetition here again, and as all subject fields were equally valued I did not use any sub-values for the elements. The inclusion of the subject “1960’s countercultural history” is a topic that I will discuss below in the comparison between my Dublin Core record and the OCLC MARC record for this item. I also included the subject “Do-it-yourself”.
4. I included the description note as per Taylor and Joudrey (2009, p. 217). The Table of Contents is lengthy and does not offer a view into the philosophy behind this book, which is part of the experiment of my project here as I hope to make clear below. On the other hand this quotation doesn’t give an indication of the level of mechanic expertise that is in the manual. The DCUM also recommends including this field “since the Description field is a potentially rich source of indexable terms (http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/elements.shtml)” but I don’t think that the description will provide many “indexible terms”. Nevertheless, the DCUM specifically tells the user that the description element “can be copied or automatically extracted from the item if there is no abstract or other structured description available (http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/elements.shtml),” and this is truly the most succinct statement of description of this book that I have found from the author himself.
5. Publisher: the DCUM specifically states “If the Creator and Publisher are the same, do not repeat the name in the Publisher area (http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/elements.shtml).” Coleman doesn’t mention this and it doesn’t make sense that I
would not include “John Muir Publications” as this element value, but the DCUM is the final authority for this project.
6. For contributors there are two, and Coleman specifically directs the user to use parentheses following the inverted name to indicate the role of each contributor (Coleman 2005, pg. 162).
7. Date entry follows directions from both Coleman and the DCUM. Although I didn’t find any authority that allowed me to do so, I thought it was important to specify in this section that my item is the 16th edition of the book (and 2nd printing) so I included the year of first publication as well.
8. Type: these are the three applicable DCMI type vocabularies.
9. Format: this is the most confusing of all of the element values. Apparently there is a strict set of values that are called MIME values but there is no authority that I could find for employing these terms. Coleman tells us to provide the physical dimensions of the book but then goes on to tell us that we are only allowed to use the value names which are provided as IMTs. The Dublin Core user manual was no better. So I followed her directions and used the term “other” for subcategories of elements other than text (see Coleman 2005, p. 165).
10. ISBN is provided on back cover.
11. Source: I was really confused about source, and nothing I could find led me to the conclusion that you (Dr. Kazmer) were giving us—that source is only used if the object has changed form. I left it blank only per your directive.
12. Language: RFC 3066 Code as per Coleman’s directions (2005, p. 167).
13. For the Relation Element I used Coleman’s directions, which were clear enough except when it came to how to list the relationship. I chose to use the same form that I had found in Taylor and Joudrey.
14. Coverage in my case was easy. The manual covers Volkswagen types I, II; III, IV, and Fuel Injection. It says so right on the cover.
15. The copyright page lists the rights of the book at time of publication.
III. The MARC Records:
A. Full MARC Record:
LC Control No.: 00267638
LCCN Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/00267638
Type of Material: Book (Print, Microform, Electronic, etc.)
Personal Name: Muir, John, 1918-
Main Title: How to keep your Volkswagen alive : a manual of step by step procedures for the compleat idiot / by John Muir & Tosh Gregg ; illustrated by Peter Aschwanden.
Edition Information: 16th ed., 25th anniversary ed.
Published/Created: Santa Fe, N.M. : J. Muir Publications ; Emeryville, Calif. : Distributed to the book trade by Publishers Group West, 1995.
Related Names: Gregg, Tosh.
Description: 460 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.
ISBN: 1562611909
Notes: At head of title: 1200, 1300, 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 & 2000.
Includes index.
Subjects: Volkswagen automobiles --Maintenance and repair --Handbooks, manuals, etc.
LC Classification: TL215.V6 M8 1995
Dewey Class No.: 629.28/722 21
B. Numeric MARC record:
LC Control No.: 00267638
LCCN Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/00267638
000 01169cam a2200265 a 450
001 12023767
005 20001207154304.0
008 000527s1995 nmua f 001 0 eng
906 __ |a 7 |b cbc |c origcop |d 2 |e ncip |f 20 |g y-gencatlg
925 0_ |a acquire |b 2 shelf copies |x policy default
955 __ |a to ASCD pb04 05-27-00; jg00 06-13-00; jg12 10-03-00; jg08 to Dewey 11-29-00; aa01 12-07-00
010 __ |a 00267638
020 __ |a 1562611909
040 __ |a DLC |c DLC |d DLC
050 00 |a TL215.V6 |b M8 1995
082 00 |a 629.28/722 |2 21
100 1_ |a Muir, John, |d 1918-
245 10 |a How to keep your Volkswagen alive : |b a manual of step by step procedures for the compleat idiot / |c by John Muir & Tosh Gregg ; illustrated by Peter Aschwanden.
250 __ |a 16th ed., 25th anniversary ed.
260 __ |a Santa Fe, N.M. : |b J. Muir Publications ; |a Emeryville, Calif. : |b Distributed to the book trade by Publishers Group West, |c 1995.
300 __ |a 460 p. : |b ill. ; |c 28 cm.
500 __ |a At head of title: 1200, 1300, 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 & 2000.
500 __ |a Includes index.
650 _0 |a Volkswagen automobiles |x Maintenance and repair |v Handbooks, manuals, etc.
700 1_ |a Gregg, Tosh.
IV. Comparison Evaluation
A. Introduction
Do-It-Yourself Cataloging
In “Author-generated Dublin Core Metadata for Web Resources: A Baseline Study in an Organization,” Greenberg et. al. present an argument for having an author-generated cataloging system. This is by no means a new argument, and has gained in popularity since the development of the internet. What the authors are saying, however, is very pertinent to what I came across when I was writing up this assignment.
In “Metadata”, Anne Clyde (2002) argues that there is a tangible difference between the agendas of librarians and artists:
"When a librarian creates a catalog record for a book, it is usually with the aim of assisting the library user to find relevant information. When a web site developer creates metadata, it is often with the aim of achieving high search engine rankings and bringing “traffic” to a web site (p. 45)."
While that might be partly true, we should not underestimate the desire of internet users to do information organization “themselves”. John Rikfin, in his book The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where all of Life is a Paid-For Experience (2000), makes the argument that far from being in the throws of late capitalism as earlier generations of Marxist scholars claimed, we are now finding that capitalism has actually transformed itself from a property-based market to an access-based market of which the chief characteristic is the need to “experience”.
The Age of Access…is governed by a whole new set of business assumptions that are very different from those used to manage a market era. In the new world, markets give way to networks, sellers and buyers are replaced by suppliers and users, and virtually everything is accessed. (p. 6)
In the Age of Access, Rifkin argues, owning material property is not as important as the ability to access somebody else’s property in order to have a unique experience and create a cultural product. For Rifkin it is important that “we are making a long-term shift from industrial production to cultural production…we are making the transition into what economists call an “experience” economy ( p. 7),” whereby experience means a commodified cultural encounter through the vehicle of (more persistently) somebody else’s property. Cars and motorcycles are no longer owned they are leased; condo units are sold as part of large pre-designed communities of access; and the internet has created a whole new dimension of experience for which access is the keyword. In the world of hypercapitalism, doing-it-yourself is part of the imperative.
John Muir, the author of my described item, is quoted as having once said “leaders are no longer necessary.” But John Muir was a drop-out, a man who left a family and a high performance position in the 1950s to become a yoga fanatic and a VW mechanic. And yet he left us with one of the world’s truly unique pieces of auto-mechanic descriptors: an entire book dedicated to recording his love for a car and a philosophy of life, and to giving people access to the experience of “doing-it-yourself.”
Do-it-Yourself and Authority Control
The greatest difference that I see between my record and the LOC MARC records is that there is to a degree a lack of humanity and a sterilization in the MARC record. This sterilization is most readily perceived in the difference between the information I provided and what the MARC records provides in the subject fields. I chose to describe my item in a way which is not found in the MARC record; namely through the descriptor “1960’s Countercultural History.” Needless to say, I am approaching this item as not only an automotive handbook but also as a primary historical document.
I base my argument for this approach on three pieces of evidence.
1. The foreward by Eve Muir (John’s wife) opens with a philosophical summation of life and love. This is in keeping with the contents of the book, which I will discuss below. It is a New Age philosophy, and one that I think is unique in the annals of auto-mechanics manuals and mechanical textbooks.
2. This book is a product of a countercultural participant. John Muir was a married man with three children who was an engineer for Lockheed (photos of Muir’s first family are included in the family album) when he decided to “drop out” of society and move to New Mexico. This book contains photos and philosophical remarks that are records of the 1960’s countercultural movement.
3. The text itself is widely regarded as one man’s discourse on life. You would be hard pressed to find an auto mechanics book that instructs the reader—for example, when buying a Volkswagen—to “get away from the car and the owner…to let your mind and feelings go over the car and the idea of the car. What has its Karma been?...find a quiet place, assume the good old Lotus and let the car be the thing (Muir 1995, pg. 22).” This is a countercultural approach to buying a car, and the manual itself can be read as a sort of hippy’s approach to auto mechanics.
Therefore I am arguing that this book is more than just an auto-mechanics manual. It is also a primary document of interest to historians or enthusiasts of the 1960’s counterculture.
The issue here is only partly one of authority control. I, an amateur (as of today) participant in the superstructure of information organization, have no access to the leading organizational record of this item. I have only very limited agency in determining how this record is maintained or what metadata is used to describe this item. But this is really only the tip of the iceberg, and it is true that the MARC system has been very successful at serving the needs of our culture’s information organization imperative.
The conflict which I described in the introduction to this project indicates more precisely what the problem is. On the surface, the conflict appears to be between a group of authoritarian librarians who will employ novice amateurs to perform some mundane cataloging. But this is only on the surface. Because what is truly going on is a revolution in how we think about and use metadata, and it is toward this discussion that I would like to now turn.
B. The Age of Access
The amateur and the information professional
Boydston and Leysen (2006) voice concerns about the relationship between the amateur and the professional information specialist in their article “Observations on the Catalogers’ Role in Descriptive Metadata Creation”:
"Some authors have also expressed concerns about cataloger’s participation
in metadata creation. The primary focus of this criticism is the
inflexibility of some catalogers. In order to participate in metadata creation, according to DeZelar-Tiedman and McCue, catalogers need to
be more flexible in their approach to standards. They need to extend
their knowledge of standards beyond MARC and the ‘catalog-centric
model’ (p. 12)."
These remarks do a very good job of introducing my argument: the amateur information specialist is finding it more and more difficult to navigate the world of professional information organization, and are looking for (and finding) many new ways of achieving similar ends through rather different means. This is a huge paradigm shift which reveals itself in every facet of librarianship, and is creating waves throughout scholarship and society at large. For the IP, the most alarming and yet, I think at the same time, exciting aspect of this shift is the narrowing divide between the IP and general public.
In this article, Boydston and Leysen make some very good arguments for why professional catalogers should become more involved with metadata description. However the authors fail to bridge the gap between the professional cataloger and the amateur, although they do voice speculative concerns for the future necessity of professional catalogers. “Perhaps in the future, library administrators will find it more cost effective to hire subject specialists or lower level staff to create some descriptive metadata (p. 13).” My argument is that it must not be one or the other; that in fact it is the potential of the combination of the professional and the amateur that makes today’s cataloging environment so exciting.
Particularly, I am arguing that it is only through the combined efforts of those with the experience of any given cultural artifact—be they subject specialists or novice/amateur information analysts—(in my case, my knowledge of the history of the 1960’s countercultural movements as well as my personal experiences with the book in question) as well as those with the empirical expertise in information organization, that the proper form of metadata self-expression will be able to emerge. I do argue that it will emerge, rather than be created (which is in the end a Heideggerian argument and this is not the place to pursue it more closely). However, it is worth noting that my position is in some conflict with the position which understands metadata as a tool, as we read argued in much of the current literature about metadata. A recent article by Richard Smiraglia will serve as an example.
In “Introducing Metadata” Smiraglia presents the traditional, pre-Era-of-Access-view of metadata and the task of the cataloger. “Casting the role of metadata under the aegis of resource description,” Smiraglia argues that “our RESOURCE DESCRIPTION NEEDS are grounded in the needs of our users to find, identify, select, and obtain some information thing (book, article, map, score, data set, etc.).” This leads Smiraglia to two conclusions concerning metadata. First, that metadata are tools for the proper functioning of catalogs, search engines, indexes, etc—all of those things which help users to find, identify, select, and obtain…etc. Second, that the primary test of the metadata tool is its functionability in regards to interoperability. Interoperability, Smiraglia argues, “a way to move seamlessly from one tool to another (Smiraglia 2005, p. 3).
We shall revisit some of Smiraglia’s ideas later in this paper, but for the
moment I would like to clearly state my position on Smiraglia’s definition of metadata as a tool whose primary worth lies in its ability to function interoperably. In other words, Smiraglia’s position holds that metadata is primarily a tool, and only secondarily a communication. My position is exactly the opposite. I maintain that metadata is primarily a communication, and as such only secondarily a tool.
The Post-Industrial Discursive Circuit
The move towards increasing complexity in society’s avenues of information access is becoming apparent in more and more walks of life. Alan Liu, in a recent article entitled “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse” (2004), argues that metadata is becoming a new form of discourse, approachable in similar ways as we once approached texts or works of art:
"An increasing number of businesses, publishers, booksellers, university libraries, and digital text archives now use databases and XML to manage the jostling, dynamic bundle of data objects we once called books, articles, reports, or songs. But now that XML is being integrated into standard enterprise and personal productivity software…ordinary authors and readers—especially those working in institutional settings—will be influenced as well. Authors and readers will join with their institutions to complete a new discursive circuit we might call, updating Friedrich Kittler’s media analysis, discourse network 2000 (p. 49).”
Liu goes on to call this form of discourse a “post-industrial discourse,” where
“what is at stake is indeed what I called an ideology of strict division between content and presentation—the very religion, as it were, of text encoding and databases (p. 56).”
Comparing my own Dublin Core record and the OCLC MARC record one sees this new metadata discourse at play. The two (three) records are conversing with one another. The younger, more vibrant Dublin Core record, using the open-ended transformative nature of the Dublin Core approach, is issuing a challenge to the older record, which wants to describe the item only as a maintenance and repair manual. I struggled with a way in which I could invoke, through the metadata, the excitement of particularly this, the 25th Anniversary edition-- which includes photos of the author as a man who gave his life to the pursuit of “dropping out” and being self-sufficient, and helping others to do the same. That a book of this nature would cause such a sensation as to achieve its 16th printing in 25 years seemed special to me, and untranslatable incommunicable in the metadata used to describe it by the MARC record.
Ann Baird Whiteside (2005) argues that even new forms of metadata inscription are not sufficiently meeting the needs of information seekers when it comes to cultural heritage artifacts such as art and architecture—which arguably, my item could be listed as. “Occasionally,” Whiteside writes, “AACR2 rules have been applied to works of art, but they fall far short of meeting the specific and idiosyncratic needs for describing works of art, architecture, cultural objects, and images (p. 16).” This is the conflict that is becoming more apparent as the post-industrial metadata discourse gains momentum. The old ways are simply too sterile, to restrictive, or not descriptive enough for the needs of today’s information consumers—or the needs of the “discursive circuit” itself.
That the needs of the discursive circuit are not being met is apparent, for example, in new IP literature such as a 2009 article by Mary S. Woodley where once again the failure of metadata interoperability functions is mourned and in which the author bemoans the fact that “unfortunately, there are still no magic programming scripts that can create seamless access to the right information in the right context so that it can be efficiently retrieved and understood (p. 1).” What I am arguing is that to a post-industrial mind this statement is outdated because for Woodley the problem is still a matter of information retrieval first and foremost. Woodley’s point is the same as that of Richard Smiraglia: metadata are tools which serve a function and the test for how well they serve that function is the test of interoperability.
It seems as if these commentators have to some degree missed out on a larger evolution in thought that is occurring outside of the IP profession. If what is at stake is the “an ideology of strict division between content and presentation” (as Liu argues), and one proof of this is that the grassroots information cataloging movement is made up of the authors of cultural artifacts themselves, then the question is no longer primarily how to use tools to “create seamless access to the right information in the right context so that it can be sufficiently retrieved and understood” (as Woodley argues) but rather how to experience metadata in such a manner as to allow it to make its contents known to us. The variation is subtle but marked: tools are for exploiting, but an experiential approach to metadata is a partnership.
Sheila S. Intner, in a recent article entitled “Struggling Toward Retrieval: Alternatives to Standard Operating Procedures Can Help Librarians and the Public,” makes the point very well:
"The advent of one-stop shopping in full-text databases, connecting a patron searching for bibliographic elements directly with documents,
demands we stop looking at resources as fodder for bibliographic databases and start looking at them as a set of holistic choices that patrons
select. Cataloging is no longer separate from the material it describes. It
is part of the material now and must advertise its contents to the greatest
extent possible, because librarians are no longer an integral part–albeit a
behind-the-scenes-part–of the retrieval process (pg. 79)."
In other words, cataloging and metadata description are no longer merely functional operations which utilize the tools of the IP trade. There is today a much more direct and as-of-yet ill defined correlation between information platform designers and the information that is made accessible—even in the way in which the information is made accessible. Perhaps, after all, there always was.
Even though Intner is sensitive to the need for a more holistic approach to cataloging, she still falls prey to approaching the needs of the user without due consideration for the needs of the data because she approaches the problem as if the solution lies completely in the hands of the information specialist. She argues that:
"The principal problem I see with the way librarians approach cataloging
is that we still start with the material and take from that material what
we think is needed by patrons. Common sense dictates that we need to
gather bibliographic information for identification purposes and that it
should be gathered from the materials being cataloged, and I would never
try to suggest we stop doing it. But we know this process does not completely fulfill our obligation to make materials available to patrons. We should progress to the point where we start with patrons and ask how to
make what they need accessible from the material (p. 77)."
The strict focus on the patron—as understandable as it is in a service- oriented profession—leads Intner to what I consider to be mistaken projections for avenues of problem resolution:
"To do this means beginning with studies that reveal how patrons search, the psychological effects of different access routes and delivery systems, and how various metadata systems are interpreted by patrons at different levels of expertise. Then, taking what can be learned from such studies, we can reinterpret cataloging objectives in patron-centered terms that might produce different results from those of our traditional cataloging systems (p. 77)."
This just seems like an awful lot of trouble to solve a problem whose resolution is not only already in play, but is threatening to overtake the very notion of the Information Professional, namely the activities of the grassroot amateur information specialist.
The Existentiality of Metadata
.
In 1958 a Romanian born Holocaust survivor-poet was presented with one of Germany’s highest literary prizes. In his acceptance speech of the Georg Büchner Prize in Literature, Paul Celan granted to literature an ontological position that equaled if not superseded that of humanity. “But,” Celan (1986) told his audience, “the poem speaks (“Aber das Gedicht Spricht.” For a discussion of existential elements in Celan’s poetry see Szondi, 2003). In a similar manner John Muir argued that a vehicle is not merely a lifeless piece of technology. In his introduction to “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive” Muir argued that “the type of life your car contains differs from yours by time scale, logic level and conceptual anomalies but it is “Life” nonetheless (p. 3).” In the age of access the discourse of metadata, as John Liu argues, is a discourse over the life of metadata. Not a metaphoric life, but an existential life of the same character as that which Paul Celan granted to poetry in 1958 and John Muir granted to the automobile in 1969, just as the metadata of my Dublin Core record is speaking to the metadata of the OCLC MARC record. Today, perhaps, as more and more of everyday life’s necessities depend upon the proper maintenance and communication of metadata, we are realizing that metadata itself has a certain type of existence, and far from allowing itself to remain sterile metadata, through the practice of grassroots novices and information professionals alike, it is forcing its way into a new voice, and a new form of self-description.
One way to approach this form of self-description is through the notion of metadata schemes. “The term scheme,” Jane Greenberg (2005) observes, “has historically been applied to classificatory and terminological systems used in library catalogs and other information databases, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification(DDC) system and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH); this practice continues with little debate–if any (p. 22).” In the language which Greenberg uses, schemes organize and reveal themselves to their users in a manner that is, to use Liu’s terms, that of “transcendental data.” So, for example, Greenberg argues, “These (data structures) are the higher-level structured schemes that may require or recommend the use of schemes containing acceptable data values (e.g., DDC or LCSH) (p. 22).” In Greenberg’s experience, the schemes themselves communicate (“require or recommend”) what is necessary for their proper operation, creating a partnership between the operator and the system. Greenberg employs Kant to bring the notion of the communicative metadata scheme into the realm of the human operator: “Kant reasons that a schema is a system based on experience and the gathering of empirical data. Kant’s model, emphasizing experience and empirical analysis, is applicable to developments underlying metadata schemes today (pg. 22).” In order to understand and properly employ metadata schemes (or other ‘schemas’), the human operator must use both experience and empiricism. This is in stark contrast to Woodley’s argument for the urgent need or empirical research to discern the needs of information users, and forms to my mind a much more complete picture of the existential relationship between the human information specialists (whether professional or amateur) and the inhuman but nevertheless communicative system with which they interact. If therefore, the goal of metadata is to communicate information, and not just merely to be a tool for information exploitation, than as Kant argues the onus for lucid operation of metadata schemes lies on both those with experience in the cultural sphere (either subject specialists or amateur information specialists with interests in specific subject fields) as well as those with the experiential and empirical knowledge of metadata operations. In other words, the amateur and the professional need to get together to create and allow to be revealed new metadata schemes that communicate effectively within the new metadata discourse network. The funny thing is, this already seems to be exactly what is happening and what was meant to be happening all along. That is, problem is not necessarily one of interoperability or even authority control. The problem is a sort lack of Hegelian self-consciousness on the part of information professionals.
For example, one solution to what I perceive to be the existential dilemma of metadata is offered by Norm Meideros (1999), who also speaks to the need for IP’s and amateurs to get together :
"The more adventurous application for Dublin Core metadata within the library community entails the creation of records to be contributed to a shared catalog. This Dublin Core-specific database would index all 15 elements, and make searching and/or limiting on these elements possible. This approach utilizes cooperative efforts, and results in a search engine that consists entirely of human-authorized metadata, whether manually input as such, converted from another standard, or harvested. Since the metadata creation is moved from the content provider to the librarian in this scenario, controlled vocabulary can be utilized, and database maintenance routinely performed. These metadata surrogates would form the basis for a de facto scholarly search engine (pg. 58)."
But what Meideros described in 1999 as “the more adventurous application for Dublin Core metadata within the library community” is actually what Taylor and Joudrey inform us was the purpose of the Dublin Core all along: “The Dublin Core…was created in order to have…(a) set of metadata elements that could be completed by the creators of electronic documents (2009, p. 213).” In other words, let the user create Dublin Core records! That’s why Dublin Core was created. Isn’t this the motivation for Coleman’s article: to help amateurs (“novices”) create records that could be truly useful in the creation of new catalogs? And then, just as Meideros envisaged in 1999, assimilate those records into a navigable search engine which will allow IP’s to create new metadata. Eureka! Like I said, I thought that was the point of Dublin Core to begin with.
C. Conclusion
What began as an attempt to understand what the discourse between two competing methods of interpreting Dublin Core metadata was all about—the one party perceiving a new movement of grassroots artist-based methods of self-cataloging, the other understanding the grassroots as being a function of the larger industry of information organization—is now transforming into an argument that the two can no longer exist without each other. In order to bring the cultural artifacts of the industrial (and particularly the late-industrial) era most lucidly into the post-industrial or—as Rifkin would have it—hypercapitalist world, librarians must rely upon grassroots and novice do-it-yourselfers to see what we cannot see, to be the experts in the minutiae of cultural production that individual catalogers are unable to access. Information Professionals must also find a way to broach the grassroots/establishment divide possibly by completing the process of incorporating Dublin Core records into the creation of MARC or other information organization systems. We might take exception to Anita Coleman’s assimilation of the users of Dublin Core, but her attempts to ease the way for novice do-it-yourselfers is, in the end, very much along the tradition of John Muir the philosopher of the Volkswagen, who urged his readers: “You supply the labor, the book will supply the direction, so we work as a team, you and I.”
Works Cited
Boydston, Jeanne M. K. and Joan M. Leysen. “Observations on the Catalogers’ Role in Descriptive Metadata Creation.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 43, vol 2 (2006) 4-17.
Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke Dritter Band. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1986.
Coleman, Anita S. “From Cataloging to Metadata: Dublin Core Records for the Library Catalog.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly vol.40 iss.3/4 (2005) 153 -181.
Clyde, Anne. “Metadata.” Teacher Librarian 30 no2 (2002): 45-7.
Greenberg, Jane. “Understanding Metadata and Metadata Schemes.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 40, Issue 3 & 4 (September 2005): 17-36.
Greenberg, Jane, Maria Cristina Pattuelli, Bijan Parsia and W. Davenport Robertson. “Author-generated Dublin Core Metadata for Web Resources: A Baseline Study in an Organization.” [Online] Available at http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/viewArticle/42/45 (Accessed October 29, 2009).
Intner, Sheila S. “Struggling Toward Retrieval: Alternatives to Standard Operating Procedures Can Help Librarians and the Public.” Cataloging &
ClassificationQuarterly 36, no. 3/4 (2003) 71-86.
Liu, Alan. “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 49-84.
Muir, John. How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step By Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. Santa Fe, NM: John Muir Publications, 1995.
Rikfin, John. The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where all of Life is a Paid for Experience. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2000.
Smiraglia, Richard P. “Introducing Metadata.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 40, no. 3/4 (2005) 1-15.
Szondi, Peter. “Reading Engführung.” Celan Studies. Stanford University Press, 2003. (pg 31)
Taylor, Arlene G. and Daniel N. Joudrey. The Organization of Information. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2009.
Whiteside, Ann Baird. “Cataloguing Cultural Objects: New Descriptive Cataloguing Guidelines for the Cultural Heritage Community.” Art Documentation 24 no 2 (Fall 2005) 16-18.
Woodley, Mary S. “Crosswalks, Metadata Harvesting, Federated Searching,
Metasearching: Using Metadata to Connect Users and Information.” [Online]
Available at http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/intrometadata/path.html. (Accessed October 29, 2009)
Thursday, October 29, 2009
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