PCC Participants’ Meeting Summary
ALA 2007 Mid-Winter Conference
Hotel W, Great Room 1
Seattle, Washington
January 21, 2007
4:00–6:00 p.m.
PCC Policy Committee Chair Mechael Charbonneau (Indiana University) opened
the meeting with thanks to all those involved in PCC activities for their
many contributions, especially the PCC Policy Committee members, PCC
standing committee chairs, members of various PCC committees and task groups,
and the many individuals involved in PCC training initiatives. Charbonneau
then presented an overview of PCC statistics, commenting that everyone's
hard work has resulted in strong growth in all areas of PCC activity.
Charbonneau summarized the November 2006 PCC Policy Committee meetings held
at the Library of Congress:
- The PCC governance document was being updated to include PoCo SACO representation
- Continuation of optional series authority control by PCC members was strongly endorsed
- A new task group will be appointed to consider simplifications in the area of series
authority record creation and maintenance
- The Policy Committee approved the new CONSER standard record
- Work continues on finalizing the PCC strategic plan's tactical action
items
Introduction of Guest Speaker
PCC Policy Committee Chair Emeritus Mark Watson (University of Oregon)
introduced the evening's guest speaker, Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President and
Chief Strategist, OCLC. Watson noted that Dempsey’s presentation would be
the first in a lecture series on professional development topics of
interest generated by the tactical objectives identified by the PCC Policy
Committee. Lorcan Dempsey is well known for writing and speaking on
leadership, and Watson acknowledged that
Mr. Dempsey’s weblog should be mandatory reading for information
professionals.
Keynote Address
Discovery, Disclosure, and Inventory Management: A New Landscape for
Catalogs and Cataloging
Lorcan Dempsey likened library catalogs and databases such as OCLC WorldCat
to a lake, with sediment collecting on the bottom while other sources of
information are more like a river containing constant flowing and
ever-changing data. Dempsey observed that the catalog is becoming more
river-like in today’s world. The key is to make cataloging data work
harder by removing it from the “lake” and manipulating it for other results.
Dempsey pointed to FictionFinder, a FRBR-inspired model for searching and
browsing bibliographic records tagged as fiction in OCLC WorldCat, as an
example of how data can be made to work harder. The FictionFinder prototype
creates a super record at the work level and then collects manifestations
into groups based on author and title information from bibliographic and
authority records. By re-purposing existing cataloging data, search results
in FictionFinder offer richer and more complete descriptions that are more
readily understood by library users. Mining information from the existing
database and processing the data in new ways gives entry into the full
range of WorldCat holdings, and therefore to the world of literature. A new
OCLC prototype in development, WorldCat Identities, is yet another example
of how processing existing information in WorldCat can be used to make data
work harder. This new OCLC product will build collective summaries of the
life and work of personal authors and corporate entities combining
information available from other sources such as authority records,
FictionFinder, RedLightGreen, and Wikipedia. By doing different things with
our databases we can provide users with a more engaging bibliographic
experience.
Using a grid with the top axis of "stewardship" and the side axis of
"uniqueness," Dempsey discussed how description of information objects has
been changing over time. Stewardship refers to the level of attention we
give things. Books and journals have typically represented an area of high
stewardship within libraries despite the fact that most of what is collected
has been published in multiple and widely available copies. Special
collections, because they are more unique, require the highest level of
attention in the area of stewardship. Research and learning materials
constitute a variety of community-based materials, such as e-prints and
learning objects, which exist in many places. Typically generated by staff
and students, this type of material is increasingly becoming digital but is
not receiving much curatorial attention at the moment.
The digital record is becoming more important in today's environment as
libraries struggle with storage and access issues surrounding digitized
resources. This is resulting in new behaviors and support for research and
learning models and the development of new services for teaching faculty.
Dempsey noted that electronic resources management systems (ERMS) and
knowledge bases will likely replace the current integrated library systems.
Increasingly libraries will focus on digital materials, archival practices,
and providing access to their hidden collections. In the future, "classic
cataloging" will likely be applied to a smaller part of a library's
collection with element sets being created that may be more or less detailed
in MARC, Dublin Core, and other metadata schema.M
The discovery experience for library users must be improved and it must be
more attractive. We need to provide disclosure by putting the discovery
experience where the users are. How do we get users aware of additional
resources in our catalogs? Is there some way we can reveal more to them
along the discovery way? Dempsey suggested four ways libraries can help
make this happen:
- Local catalogs must be improved as a discovery tool and we need to
develop a richer "skin" on top of our catalogs. Professionals should be
discussing the next generation of the catalog in this context, such as
Endeca, Primo from ExLibris, and WorldCat. It will be increasingly more
important to combine access to holdings information in local collections to
internet sources via one interface.
- Continue to develop more shared catalog discovery environments such as
those currently provided by OhioLink and WorldCat. By aggregating
information offered to users in these combined resources, collections will
be better able to meet the supply and demand needs of a larger audience.
- Create syndicated catalog discovery environments by projecting our
discovery experiences into other environments. This will enable individuals
to find data and services in a different stream, but bring them to the
library to obtain the resources. It is important that we expose our
information into other places, such as Google Book Search and Live Search
Books. Course management systems, RSS feeds, and the development of online
educational collaboration and learning settings, like the Sakai Project,
are other areas where we can insert the catalog discovery process.
- Leverage the discovery environment by bringing users into our local
library environment. For example, using a Firefox Extension/Greasemonkey
plug-in script, users of Amazon.co.uk can take advantage of a library
holdings lookup feature.
Dempsey predicted that the future will bring more acquisition of catalog
data from upstream and more automated creation of metadata from digital
materials. We should expect to see an emergence of more common metadata
creation environments across resource types. There will be an increase in
the creation of structured data coming from automated sources that can be
further processed programmatically resulting in less manual intervention
needed on the part of staff. He concluded his presentation by stating
that we need to make the data work harder in order to serve our users
better.
Questions and Answers following Keynote Address
Q: In the connection between Amazon and a library's catalog, can the system
determine if one item is a US publication and another one is from the UK?
A: Yes, the retrieval is based on ISBNs, so it can be distinguished.
Q: Publishers often use incorrect ISBNs--how does the system deal with that?
A: In that instance, we just fail. Data must support more automated
processes but it is not infallible.
Q: How does Amazon benefit from this collaboration?
A: It becomes more attractive and maybe users will spend more time there,
although they don't need to participate in your discovery process.
Q: Please talk about the relationship of PCC work with its rigorous standards
and how it fits with the future where the "lake" has currents from different
rivers and streams.
A: We are in danger of misinterpreting the relationship between
traditional and new environments and seeing them as competitors. The Web
environment desires data with more structure and is able to develop lists
of names and topics for consistent data indexing. However, Google and
Amazon are also interested in the traditional consistent data that libraries
are able to provide. However, we need to be certain that the relationships
in our data are both good and usable by machines. For example, Google Book
Search throws up a website for a book telling of entities with relationships
to the book. By contrast, there is a bit more constraint in the relational
structure we currently provide with our cataloging data.
Q: What is an example of traditional data that is not structured enough?
A: (Eric Childress, OCLC): 7xx access points are not clear in giving
relationships, for example, in the 7xx fields for Festschrifts--which person
is the honoree?
A: (Ed O'Neill, OCLC): Uniform Title Authority records are very
valuable to bring clusters of records together properly. For even better
control of the database, records need more editor, publisher, and
illustrator data.
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