orienteering for libraries: grounding our adventure: definitional alignment as our terra firma
TRANSCRIPT
Kathryn:
Hello, everyone. My name is Kathryn Harnish, principal at Leap Forward Library
Consulting, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to Grounding Our Adventure:
Definitional Alignment as Our Terra Firma, the second Webinar in our Orienteering for
Libraries & Librarians series.
Before we get rolling, I’d like to take care of a few housekeeping items:
• First, we’ve prepared and sent each registrant several documents to support
this session — a handout on what to do if you (or we) experience any technical
difficulties with our Webinar platform and a set of definitions that we’ll review
during today’s session. You may want to reference these during our
presentations.
• Second, we very much encourage the use of the “chat” function during the
session, as we think that discussion is really important to these topics. We will,
however, hold questions until the end…and for any that we don’t have a chance
to tackle, we’ll follow up on the Leap Forward blog (see the post
http://www.leapforwardlibraryconsulting .com/define-it-to-transform-it/). We also appreciate
feedback on our “Talk to Us” page — http://imteaminc.com/talk-to-us/ .
Finally, we’re recording today’s session and will make sure that you all receive a link to it,
as well as copies of our slides and speakers’ notes, complete with links to any cited
resources, by Friday of this week. In addition, all of our session materials are posted to
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http://imteaminc.com/resources-2/orienteering-resources/ for your reference.
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Kathryn:
Today’s Guides (http://imteaminc.com/about-us/our-people/)
Kathryn Harnish, principal at Leap Forward Library consulting, and an 18-
year veteran of the library software industry, having served in various
product management positions at ProQuest, OCLC, and Ex Libris. (http://www.leapforwardlibraryconsulting.com/about-me/)
Cathy Sackmann, lead analyst, and Nannette Naught, principal at IMT,
extensive experience with product and content development, architecture,
ontology, and modeling services for publishers, libraries, and their partners.(http://imteaminc.com/our-story/)
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Kathryn:
As the library industry looks toward the future, it’s critically important that we
know ourselves — that we understand who we are and why we’re here. I
talked about many of these “identity” issues in our last session — we’re
collectors, we’re navigators, we’re guardians, and so on.
But we need to go further to get to what’s essential, to think really critically
about how we define ourselves, our services, our value.
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Kathryn:
Are we collectors like our museum colleagues?
Are we service providers, offering a comprehensive set of knowledge
services against what we collect and beyond?
Or are we both?
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Kathryn:
Are we navigators, trusted guides traveling alongside our users to facilitate
pathways through information?
Or should we be enabling navigation in the way that that Google does?
Or both?
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Kathryn:
What does it mean to guard the intellectual record?
How are we rethinking our role as stewards of our collections in view of the trends
and activities described in OCLC’s Stewardship of the Evolving Scholarly Record:
From the Invisible Hand to Conscious Coordination? https://www.google.com/search?q=OCLC+
Stewardship+of+Evolving+Scholarly+Record&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
In view of a shift to increasingly electronic collections?
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Kathryn:
We need to get to this essence before we start building — building strategy,
building systems, building our future.
Because if we don’t understand, very clearly, who we are and what we do,
we won’t create the right solutions. In fact, I would argue that, as an industry,
we should have gotten to this essence before we started creating so-called
“next-generation” library management systems … as a result, we’ve rebuilt
rather than redefined or future proofed.
We’ve achieved parity-plus with our former systems, but have we achieved
anything that will not just preserve, but extend our relevance for our users?
Within our organizations?
Ask yourself:
• What is the ROI on the implementation of a next-gen system?
• How much are you really saving?
• How much more effectively are you delivering service to your users?
• How much more visible and viable are you?
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My sense is that there are very hard answers here.
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Kathryn:
Which brings us to the topic of today’s session:
Definitional alignment as that grounding force — that thing we need to do
to:
• Get to our essence before moving forward.
• Avoid repeating our past mistakes.
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Kathryn:
Stakeholders often have different understandings of terminology. As an example,
• My niece serves in the Navy, on the destroyer USS John Paul Jones. When
she thinks of a boat, she thinks of this.
• I live in northern Maine, not far from the Allagash Waterway. And when I think
of a boat, I think of this.
A common vocabulary ensures that everyone has the same understanding of the
words we’re using.
As Nannette noted in the last session, we need to increase our collaboration,
bringing in partners across the library, technical, and business aspects of our
organizations (and service providers) to achieve our goals of viability and visibility in
a Web-based world. Without shared understandings, we’ve been talking at cross-
purposes with these partners, like ships passing in the night. As a result, the
solutions we’ve created are unlikely to meet anyone’s needs — functional,
technical, or financial.
And this is evident in the answers to those previous questions about next-gen
systems . We’re NOT getting:
• Substantially better workflows.
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• The benefits of modern technology.
• A return on our institutions’ investments in these systems.
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Kathryn:
But before we even start talking about other stakeholders from outside of
Library, I would assert that we don’t have common vocabulary within
libraries, either writ large or, often, even within a single organization or single
team. As a result, we get twisted up, unable to come to consensus about
priorities, strategies, and how we deliver services.
I mentioned in our last session that my mom is also a librarian — she was
trained in the late 1960s and worked, until her retirement in 1998, as a
school librarian. While she and I share the same profession, we most
definitely do not share the same vocabulary … because we’ve worked at
different times, in different contexts, with different constituents. In short, our
business cases differed. And in many cases, as a result, our opinions differ,
as well.
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Kathryn:
Coming to agreement on definitions is a hard process … if you’re not butting
heads, you’re probably not doing it right!
And we need to butt heads, as we need to:
• Have our own story nailed down.
• Be clear in how we describe what we want, before we start engaging with
other stakeholders.
I will say, however, that it’s an unreasonable expectation that there will be universal
agreement — different business cases will give rise to different schemas, different
solutions, different systems. There’s no need for a law library and a medical library
to come to complete agreement … where there’s need for divergence, it’s OK. In
fact, it’s vital to our visibility and viability.
Too often, librarians believe that there’s only one way … but the reality is that there
are many valid ways that work optimally in different situations.
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Kathryn:
I recently left a product management position in which I was responsible for
conceptualizing a next-generation management system. For me, it was
important to do things differently, to improve our processes, and to respond
to customer needs in a way that no one else was. So I brought in partners
— IMT, in fact — that complemented my team’s library expertise with the
right technology focus. And unlike previous forays into this work, we, as a
group, spent a significant amount of time, right at the outset, on definitions.
We went through an exhaustive process of documenting all of the terms that
were flying around and then defining them in a consistent way.
We knew that without these definitions, we’d end up with inconsistent inputs
— requirements and specifications, the things that our technical counterparts
would act upon. And on the “outbound side”, once the coding was
completed, we wouldn’t be able to verify that we were getting what we asked
for in our testing.
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Kathryn:
Once we had those definitions, once we’d thought critically about the
meaning of each and how they fit into our stated goal of connecting
resources to people, we were able to begin categorizing things, finding
relationships, consolidating … and even discarding some of the terms. This,
then, enabled us to categorize, relate, consolidate, and discard functionality.
This process was intended to enable my team to develop the simplest, most
cost-effective solution … we didn’t want to invest unnecessary effort in
developing big, complicated systems that increased our costs as a provider
and your costs as a library. Instead, we wanted to help you answer those
ROI questions I posed earlier with positive answers — to ensure that we
were addressing the real business needs of the library. This is how you get
to return on investment.
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Kathryn:
With this clarity — which all starts with definitions — it became much easier
to reinvent, to transform, to think differently about what’s essential to
libraries.
And from there, we can build new strategies, new solutions with confidence
that we’ll meet user needs and expectations.
.
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Kathryn:
Similarly, much of the writing I’ve done on behalf of Leap Forward Library Consulting is
informed by the benefit of clear, consistent definitions and the assessment that’s
enabled by them. Let me take a moment to explore an example … I’ll explain how my
thinking about ILSes, our integrated library systems, has changed thanks to this
process.
Historically, we’ve thought about our library management systems as a series of
workflow-oriented applications that fit together to support the overall lifecycle of a
collection of resources — our library inventory. We purchase, we describe, we deliver
in an integrated, end-to-end process that creates and manages our physical inventory,
and traditional library system design largely parallels these processes.
But if we look critically at this, if we define our terms appropriately, a new picture
emerges. Description, for example, is a siloed, library-specific activity, often carried out
manually, in support of inventory management:
• It’s more about describing what we own than about providing context for
creative works in a complex web of knowledge;
• It’s about the business of serving our collection, not about the business of our
patrons using those collections. We describe so that we can order and
invoice the right resources; we describe to enable users, internal and external,
to locate the right resources; we describe to deliver the right resources to
these users —in our library systems, for our individual inventories.
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Kathryn:
Thinking about description differently changed my perspective on the ILS … and led me
to think about it as an IMS, or inventory management system, instead. We still need to
manage context through the activities of metadata aggregation, creation, and curation
(and note here that I intentionally switch from my use of the word “description”), but our
definitions enable us to separate inventory management from context management.
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Kathryn:
In fact, with IMT, we did define both of these terms, which appear on our
vocabulary list (http://imteaminc.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/11/Definitions_11_9_15.pdf). Before we go on, I’ll take just a
moment to pop these two definitions up so that you can better understand
the distinction I’m drawing between:
Inventory Management: Managing physical assets in the collection, and
Context Management: Managing relationships within and between
things.
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Kathryn:
To play things out a little further, we could:
• Take some of fundamental components of the IMS — the inventory
model, many of our acquisitions transactions, and most aspects of
distribution — and leverage what’s being done in other domains
because we now share definitions.
• Look to the expertise of organizations for which inventory
management is a core competence — like Amazon and Walmart —
and learn from best practices established in other domains, as
Nannette suggested was necessary in our last session.
• Simplify our business processes and rules, especially given that the
physical collections that comprise our inventories represent much less
of today’s spending and use. (And here, I would argue that it’s not just
“could”, but must … the effort we continue to make in print collection
management, both in libraries and in the ILS companies that support
them, is distracting us, preventing us from leaping forward to meet
organizational and user expectations in an Web-based world.)
• Better align how libraries work with the way that other supply chains
work, particularly in the publishing space, to streamline workflows,
reduce costs, and accelerate resource delivery. Talk about ROI from a
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system upgrade!
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Kathryn:
And all this stems from clear definitions — from taking a pile of words and
sorting them out, from defining them and understanding the connections
between them.
Admittedly, I jumped into the deep end with my example of defining inventory
and context management, but never fear … Nannette’s going to take a step
back and go through some more basic definitions, things that are the
building blocks that enable the kind of transformed thinking that I just went
through. So, over to you, Nannette.
Crossword from http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2007/12/06/crossword-puzzle-maker/
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Nannette:
Thanks, Kathryn. You are right we will take a step back and look at those
essence/essential/”isness” definitions, if you will.
But, first, let’s take a page from a cherished mentor’s playbook of mine ---
Barbara Tillett. Let’s:
• Inject a little fun.
• Suspend disbelief and DREAM for a moment of what we can be, of
what we want to be.
• Step through the door and envision the Library we want to live and
work in tomorrow, when all this transition, all of this transformation,
is done.
For as Barbara so eloquently suggested back then, we all need a break from
time to time, a break from all the hard work of “becoming.” A place to just be;
a place where we can connect our work with ourselves.
And, this space, this dream — This is the “isness” that informs our essential
definitions. It acts as a fence around them. Bounding them to both reality
and aspiration.
Unfortunately, though, those cherished FRBR glasses are well, a bit dated,
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and, honestly, slightly out of fashion . . .
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Nannette:
So let’s put on:
• Kathryn’s Library 2.0 glasses, Google glasses if you will.
• and maybe a slip into pair of social media jeans — yes, these were/are
a real thing, I found them in a piece entitled 10 wearable tech gadgets
librarians, and everyone else, can’t live without.
And with our focus thus removed from on that view immediately in front of
us, let’s use that enhanced reality of those Google glasses for just a
moment . . .
And ask ourselves, What do our systems look like now?
Image credits
Social Media Jeans. http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/10-wearable-tech-gadgets-librarians-and-
everyone-else-will-love/
Google glass background image. http://timnew.me/blog/2013/02/26/google-glass-isn-t-
really-an-enhanced-reality-device/
Become someone else campaign. http://ebookfriendly.com/ads-for-books-bookstores-
libraries/
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Nannette:
Wow, they are actually smaller! Much smaller . . . IMS, is back office:
• Just for inventory, print distribution, etc.
• IMS is ILS without the overhead of:
• All those unified print workflows stretched to their breaking points with
the eResource “shove ins.” For as we all can see pretty easily now with
our adjusted focus, those commonly accepted ILS workflows certainly
are not best practices. In fact their underlying premises (i.e., print,
RBDMS with flat file, string based data) dooms them to little more than
stuffing a cat in a jar: As we can see now, with our Google glasses, a
very bad idea that is likely to:
• Limit movement/functionality, and if not done just right with the
proper opening for air, it’s likely to limit life itself (aka viability)
• Make people very mad — patrons, funders, staff, and even those
uncomfortable detractors in our environments who are looking for
a reason to end Library and gain the funding for themselves.
Sound familiar to any managers out there? Anyone working on a
strategic plan?
• Cause large amounts of damage to ourself and others, when the
tortured cat, those eResources, are finally let out, or escapes
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their externally imposed containment.(Come on, you don’t
actually believe cats put themselves in jars do you?)
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Nannette:
Look at that, our Systems serve people NOT Collections!
They remove antiquated system constraints and allow the Service of Library
to come to the foreground — Personally I see it coming to the top layer, like
when I am doing a graphic, with the system fading to the back, as an unseen
or hidden layer almost, where it should be. And the service floating to the top
as the display layer.
Yes, thorough these glasses, I’m seeing Kathryn’s system that “allows
librarians to be librarians again” where the:
Library and Librarian serve People with:
• Their collections behind them, like in this picture.
• Their systems underneath them, like that hidden layer,
supporting their service. Rather than in front of them as they are
now, dominating and constricting their vision.
But what do these smaller, people serving systems look like if they don’t look
like an ILS or a database? What are we doing in them, if we are not
maintaining the system, our collection, and its metadata?
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Nannette:
Well, let’s contrast and compare.
They certainly aren’t Authority Control ---
Names that represent things, but aren’t really things, in a shadow like
word cloud (and if we’re honest, isn’t this exctly what Authority CONTROL in
the ILS era looks like? It’s a name hoping that it’s a thing.)
BUT when we put our Google glasses on, Authority Control
Becomes
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Nannette:
Identity AND Identity Management. Instead of dealing with just Names,
we are dealing with electronic representations of People — and other things,
but we’ll get there later.
People with names — and not just:
• One name, but many names and even versions of names (e.g.,
maiden and married), And all those names are interrelated.
• Names, but and all other attributes of a person that are pertinent to
the work of library.
Wow, with our Google glasses on and our social media jeans in place, the
electronic world of library, is beginning to look a lot more like the brick and
mortar world of Library, were we serve our customers everyday. Gone are
the artificial system constructs that:
• Interrupt our service of patrons in favor or service to the system’s
preferred method lookup.
• We have to teach people, or worse yet, program around to give our
users the ability to use our systems without us in intuitive displays.
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Nannette:
So let’s pause here a moment and pull out a couple important definitions
from this DREAM that we need to take with us into our essential, basic
considerations in a minute.
Identity
• It’s a condition of a thing, not a thing, but a condition of think, like a
current status or format of a resource.
• It’s not a label on a thing like a name. It’s inherently different than
what we have cataloged to date. And we may or may not be able to
get to it from what we’ve cataloged. And if we can, certainly not from
just one field. Ah yes, here’s the justification for that “clustering”
OCLC keeps talking about.
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Nannette:
Identity Management
• It’s a service, that:
• Consists of many activities and tasks.
• Applies to not just People, but all the other Things which
enhance meaning in libraries and library service (e.g.,
Resources, Subjects, Rights, etc.). Hmmm, feels a lot like things
we just might be getting to essentials we need to define as part
of our essence.
• Addresses both the system’s needs and the humans needs
together in an integrated way (as the second bullet discusses),
without all that added cost and time we have now by:
• Making the human try to figure out that crazy machine
readable stuff without aid.
• Making the computer try to parse and make sense of the
“almost” human readable (not to mention human, error
laden compiled we’re doing “in service of the system”)
string stuff like — Think Access Control points, OpenURLs.
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• Feeds that Context stuff Kathryn keeps talking about. Didn’t she say it had
something to do with Description? That is replaced Description?
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Nannette:
Let’s look at that in a bit more detail — with our Google glasses on, while wearing our
Social Media jeans.
Description, and it’s parent workflow Cataloging.
Description, the act of filling in a bunch of nonconnected fields, in a “card” template,
often by hand, that take pre-supplied data from any number of sources. Sources like
those below and re-enter it.:
• The resource itself (e.g., printed on the title page).
• Invoices and other materials supplied as part of resource purchase.
• External system outputs, like Excel files from a distrubutor.
• And the list goes on . . .
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Nannette:
Description, the act of re-entering, filling in these things, all this supplied data,
against or according to, a large number of detailed rules, and policies. Detailed rules
and policies that:
• Are designed to meet the specific requirements of your installed ILS, as you
have implemented it.
• Have to be consulted off-line or via a dizzying maze of interconnections that
require all systems to work just right at that that moment. And even when we
use these “automated tools,” we are still often required to consult an offline
reference or two to complete our work.
• Are organized against magic backbones you must go to school or be trained
to use. — Yeah I know I’m sounding like a bit of a heretic here, but honestly,
I am the technologist that spent 6 years studying the “next generation of
Cataloging — RDA" There’s a good number of reasons I’m not a cataloguer
and it’s not because I don’t like what cataloguers do. It’s not that I don’t love
metadata and all that geeky stuff. I do. It’s because I don’t like all of the
process and systems used to do it.
So when I put my Goggle glasses on, what does all of this Become?
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Nannette:
I becomes, I think,
Collection
Going shopping, if you will, assembling things others have put out
there NOT recreating them by copying those things the metadata was
put out there on or accompanying.
AND, once we assemble them, we get to enrich them.
Enrichment
Addition, correction, fleshing out, connection, etc. of the assembled
things in a way that aids in the services we want to provide ourselves
and our users. NOT doing rote things per detailed processes that the
system requires and/or the collective says we must have.
Yep, with our Google glasses on, it becomes really simple. With the focus
removed from service of our systems, and changed to serving our users,
reductions of the amount of required work becomes almost a well duh! Heck,
as Kathryn pointed out Amazon and Walmart are doing it now, and I
guarantee you they aren’t doing Cataloging! It’s too expensive and hard to
attract enough people to do!
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Nannette:
All of which, of course, allows us to do the vital work of Context
Management, once we put our Google glasses on — because after all, as
our users know, as we know when we aren’t blinded by our systems:
Context is everything!
It is the difference between, as this picture shows, a lovely romantic evening
and dumpster diving. Pizza’s, the thing’s, the same in either place, it just has
inherently different meaning to the human encountering based on where
they encounter it.
Image credits: http://adexchanger.com/comic-strip/adexchanger-context-matters/
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Nannette:
So let’s pause here again and pull out a couple important definitions from
this DREAM that we need to take with us into our essential, basic
considerations in a minute.
Context
• It’s a relationship between things, inside or outside our collection,
that impacts meaning in our customers’, our patrons’, interactions
with our collections.
• It’s the things that tell the user if the pizza is treasure or trash.
• It’s part of the answers given by the librarian at the reference desk
who all too frequently does the job of filling in what our systems miss
or obfuscate for our users.
Look at that we’re back to “letting librarians be librarians again” and things
and service. I think this dream is really starting to help us see our essential
isnesses.
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Nannette:
But before we jump to that, let’s pull out one more definition from this last
visionary experience.
Context Management
• It’s a service, that:
• Consists of many activities and tasks, like Identity Management.
• Applies to Things, again. Things which enhance meaning in
libraries and library service. Hmmm, the pattern of essence is
getting stronger.
• Addresses both the system’s needs and the humans needs
together in an integrated way, like Identity Management.
• Feeds Discovery, Lending, Collection — The services of Library!
This is both intuitively obvious for that brick and mortar side of
library and yet so different, so far removed from what we call
things like Discovery in our current systems, when we don’t have
our Goggle glasses on!
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Nannette:
I’m starting to see now, why Kathryn and her team became so enamored of
this definitions process? It has a way of “pulling” the librarian and the library
out of the “tech gobbly gook/pile of words mire” and making it abundantly
clear what we need to do through our platforms.
Hard work and head butting required? Definitely! But I think, well worth it.
Yes?
And we’ve just started here. There is more here than we can cover in this
hour webinar. Take a look at your definition lists and consider things like
Rights Management. And how it fits in with Context and Identity
Management.
Certainly, we’ll go into all this in a bit more detail in both the next webinar
and our writings. But hopefully, this gives you a little glimpse of the
possibilities. And starts the conversation!
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Nannette:
So let’s get down to the business of those essential definitions. Those things
that we need to first agree upon and then teach to our stakeholders, if we
are to, together, bridge the divide between the painful realities of our
systems of today AND the services of our dreams that we’ve been talking
about.
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Nannette:
What are those few
• Essential, Isness Definitions?
• Those Shared, Interconnected expressions of who we are and what
we do that guide us and our extended team members?
Having work on definitions with librarians of all stripes for 10+ years now —
and definitions with other subject matter experts about the essences of their
disciplines for over 20 yrs — I see a pretty simple set:
• Library
• Things
• Technology
And it’s so convenient too, that this set gives us a simple clear, visual
pneumonic —
Library is the Foundation
Technology is the Connector
Things are The Top Level, what folks see first.
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Very true to life, too. Which is a nice test on whether we got to the essentials!
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Nannette:
So let’s start with Library, that foundation, and let’s go back to those guiding
questions Kathryn asked. Are Libraries:
• Collectors --- Navigating alongside our users?
OR
• Service providers — Offering a comprehensive set of knowledge
services against what we collect and beyond? Navigating alongside
users, and Enabling navigation in the way that that Google does?
OR — And here is where I will add one that as an experienced outside
observer I don’t hear talked about much, but which seems vital
• Researchers & Educators — Studying our discipline (MLIS)?
Teaching it to others (K12 Edu)?
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Nannette:
I suggest, Library is all three. And I’ll give you a moment to read these
definitions, rather read them to you.
And as you are reading and questioning, remember:
• It is the Web-based, non-system trapped world that these definitions
need to live in.
• Value here, in this world, comes from variety that enables business
cases. It does not come from marching in lock step. It comes from
coordinated approaches that enable individual variations that allow
each library to service its community(s) to the best of its ability as
measured against its business case(s), as driven by its stated mission
and funders.
True, all of this is a bit different, in both approach and definition, than we
usually see. But think about it for a few minutes. Butt heads with yourself, if
you will. Is any of this untrue? Is there a good deal of fact in it —hard
essential truth?
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Nannette:
Let’s keep asking that hard questions of yourself and notice the
commonalities.
• Contracted. Libraries are contracted.
• Funded with a Purpose. The purpose is to collect, to protect, to
warehouse, to distribute — Resources and the scholarly record, or
any other record for that matter that the funders value, as
mentioned in our previous session. Records like the Cultural Record
of a nation.
• For People. Members of the funding community and/or their
designees.
Do these provide the appropriate level connectedness while allowing that
required level of variation?
Does it provide a good foundation from which to define the People of
Library?
Let’s check.
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Nannette:
Given that definition of Library, what is a Librarian? And I’ll give you again a minute to
read.
It this different that we think of it? Perhaps, MLIS isn’t mentioned. But then, butt heads
with that for a minute. Is MLIS actually an essential part of librarianship in the Library
today? Is it Helpful yes. Do we need some of them, yes. Is everyone one, No.
To me it’s kind of like Pharmacy. Where I have 1 Pharmacist per shift and that Pharmacist
has so many Pharmacy Techs underneath them. And together, they provide a wonderful
consultative service.
And this definition, it feels like it’s a very a nice match to those dreams. Identity and
Identity Management, as we talked about before.
It feels like it is more than just Names. It feels like a good thing. Especially when thinking
about that ROI, as it’s a foundation to make people, be that staff users, patrons, authors,
editors, those people we track on our systems. the same thing.
Wow! That’s:
• Different that the complication we have now in ILSes, even Next Gen ones.
• Pretty web-like come to think of it.
Hmm . . . An essence upon which to begin building new levels visibility and vitality in a
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web world? If I read the tea leaves right, some important people in Library (e.g.,
OCLC and LD4L) seem to think so too.
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Nannette:
So what about those others we need? Those others who impact our
business and/or our service creation and provision? What about the:
• Library Technologists. The Library technologists, the non-librarians I
talked about last week, that are essential to our future success?
• Those People We Serve: Patrons. Willing and able members of our
funders’ audience.
And let’s note that we still need, together to do a few more, to complete the
Library set, including:
• Library Funders.
• Library Business.
• Library Service.
If we are to have a complete foundation of library to share with our
stakeholders and the other members of our team. Again, I hope in throwing
these out starts the conversation.
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Nannette:
With the foundation, Library, in place then, acknowledging that we still have some
extensions, some completions to do. lLt’s take a few minutes of the time we have left
to look at top level, what folks see --- The Things.
The Things we are as Libraries, Librarians, and others on the Library team are, by
definition, contracted to:
• Collect,
• Protect,
• Warehouse,
• Distribute,
• Provide Access to, and
• Serve.
And yes, I combined People and Resources. And let’s acknowledge, talking about it
this way, feels at first, a bit silly, artificial, and Dr. Seuss-like. But let’s also
acknowledge that we do live in the age of the Internet of Things AND we are
assembled for the purpose of finding visibility and viability for Library in a web-based
(i.e., an Internet) world. So despite how silly and/or childlike we feel, we cannot ignore
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the Things. For if we do, we risk creating, yet another round of systems and services,
designed for a world that we no longer live in. Which, as we know, won’t bring us
either visibility or viability.
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Nannette:
So let’s look at the truth in this THING analogy for a moment:
• Like Thing 1 and Thing 2, even expanded to many, many things. All
the Things:
• We are contracted to do, all those activities, and
• All those things, those People and Resources we are
contracted to do them with and for,
Can be defined by same granules and in same way, at their basest level.
They do indeed, look very much alike on the outside.
Though as we know, they, like the people who wear a t-shirt are on the
inside, by meaning, very different.
Ah there’s that Context thing again! Not to mention a hint at the Technology
part.
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Nannette:
So let’s repeat the process we’ve been using today. Let’s take a look at a proposed
definition of Things.
Certainly, there is a lot more than we can go into here, in the short time we have left. I
just want to:
• Introduce this idea. This way of looking at it. And allow you to butt your head
against it for awhile
• Point out a few things for you to go away and think about. For example, look at all
the related words. Of those blue words:
• How many of these words do you use every day? How many do you use the
same as the other librarians you interact with? Are you hearing from
technologists that they don’t think you are all using them the same way? Or
that they don’t understand what you mean? Can you point these people to a
definition?
• How many of those problematic, those underlined blue worlds are
inadequately defined. How many are unintelligibly (meaning you have know
the “secret” language of Library to understand — I think there’s more than a
few in RDA alone). How many of them are irregularly, across the different
standards we use, defined? Or even worse, how many are undefined in our
standards and our data? And as that person who worked on RDA, I can you
that on release, in 2010, over 50% of the words we used in our data were
undefined upon release.
• The link means we’ve though this and feel some head butting needs to
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occur. Take a look at our draft definitions, we’re proposing a starting
point for conversation. Please come back to us with the conversation.
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Nannette:
And speaking of a starting point for conversation, let’s take just a minute to
consider the connector, Technology, in what we hope is plain English.
Let’s talk about three key technologies, everyone is bandying about today,
assuming everyone knows what they mean and understands what they are
saying:
• Linked Data
• Structured Data
• Federated Infrastructure
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Nannette:
Linked Data, what is it?
It’s just a format for distributing relationships between things, as structured
data (oops, there’s a definition we have to get to and we will, as the blue
underline indicates). Really, it’s just a vehicle for moving that Context we
keep talking about around.
What I like better, and the first time I’ve see it, is #2. OCLC’s connection of
the technology to the business case for it. It’s what we really care about, the
connection, not the specifics of the technology itself (didn’t we dream about
that being just a hidden, underneath layer support us?).
To this way of thinking, it’s a method of publishing structured data (yeah,
we’ll get there, as the blue line indicates) that can be easily understood by
computers, …. (see above).
Ah, OCLC’s wearing both their Google glasses and their social media jeans.
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Nannette:
Now what about that word, Structured Data?
Well, as a technologist, I can tell you, structured data is not really all that
hard. It’s just a standard machine-readable way to mark up content and
meta data. And yes, I did say content and meta data; both can be, both
should be structured data.
• A minimum, they should both be well formed. And what does well
formed mean? It means constructed according to basic, know syntax
rules. Can we say that about our MARC data? I don’t think so.
• At best, it means being
• Valid against a specific version of the format’s serialization (i.e., it’s
computer-code thing that allows you to validate statement syntax).
• Adherent to documented standards and defined models.
Right, the human and the machine, they both have to understand it, in
a way that connects to knowledge. That’s what the model is all about.
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Nannette:
So let’s end then, with Federated Infrastructure. Which, to my way of things,
is a great place to end, as it jumps/leads right into final webinar in this series,
use cases.
What is a federated infrastructure? It’s:
• An architecture that allows interoperability and sharing between semi-
autonomous de-centrally organized businesses, systems, and
applications. Hmmm, according to our earlier conversation, that’s
Libraries.
• Coordinated, controlled sharing and exchange of information. Hmm…
in library, it’s the thing that we need to accomplish all of those dreams.
And as OCLC points out, the thing that we need to steward all those
records.
• The national digital platform for libraries.
But it’s also something simple that comes from Publshing, from those
creators and owners of the resources with whom we must cooperate to
steward both those records and our collections. It’s that technical backbone
that we’re putting out there, as PraXis by IMT. And as I said, we’ll go into this
with more detail in use cases in the next session.
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So Kathryn, with that, back to you.
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Kathryn:
Thanks, Nannette. One thing that I know both of us want to re-enforce is the
important of dialog in this process. It’s tremendously important to moving
forward.
I know that we’ve just spent close to an hour, sort of “fire hosing.” We like to
joke that Nannette can be a little bit of a fire hose, sometimes. And I think we
probably both fire hosed you this afternoon. BUT we want to make sure that
we have dialog. That you take time to think about what we’re proposing here
and to engage with us, to engage with one another, to make these
definitions as robust and comprehensive as they need to be.
This really is a community effort, despite the fact that the voices that you’ve
heard today are mine and Nannette’s.
As we wrap up today, I’d like to invite you to the final session in the
Orienteering for Libraries and Librarians series, Taking a Practice Trip:
Three Problems, Three Solutions. In this session, we’ll be focusing on some
real-world use cases and introducing working software — PraXis by IMT —
that addresses the challenges in each. After two sessions of talking the talk,
we’ll walk the walk with demonstrations and discussion.
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Registration for the Tuesday, November 24 session is open on the IMT Web site,
under News and Events.
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Kathryn:
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Kathryn:
On behalf of Nannette, Cathy, and I, I’d like to thank you for taking time from
your schedule today to participate in this session. Again, the recording and
presentation materials will be available later this week via the Resources
menu on the IMT Web site, and we’d love to have comments and
conversation on the Leap Forward blog.
And so, until the 24th, I wish you visibility and viability for your library.
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