Catalogs, strings, and packages

One of the reasons for starting this blog was to get myself to write more. I've tried, and failed, several times to write a book of some kind and in doing so came up against a wall of insecurities--more like a frickin' labyrinth of walls--that I have let defeat me at every opportunity. My desk at home and on campus are littered with papers recording my attempts. So, I thought I might just put some of it out there into the ether....here is something I wrote just over a year ago in August 2015 that I rediscovered this morning:

What do we want to do with our library catalogs?  How separate do we want to make them from the ‘rest’ of the world, and how connected do we want to make them with the ‘rest’? Berners-Lee has this idea that is the Semantic Web, and pretty much anyone involved in the information and communication technology (ICT) world tends to follow his lead. He is a true visionary, I’ll give him that. It’s not going to get easier, our catalogs. They will become more complicated, more layered, more nuanced, and will not at all be like our beloved traditional no-it-isn’t-a-card-catalog-but-okay-really-it-is catalogs.

So, let’s ditch them, yes?  No?  There is still a bunch of useful information in them. We just need to convert it—transition it over to the ‘new way’. This means we transition our work, too. First, let go of the book. Second, let go of MARC. Third, learn to think in terms of information packages, not information strings. We’ve spend decades coding information strings—a piece of data here, a piece of data there—cobbled together into a ‘unit’ or ‘record’. We have to think of packets of information because that is how linked data works and linked data, for now, is the goal. The future? Perhaps. Let’s take it one frightening paradigm shift at a time.

What is a packet of information? 

How do we take our objectives and principles and translate them into packaged speech? We still want people to find and identify things, to select them, to obtain them, yes?  Of course, yes, we do. So, have the fundamentals really changed, or is it just the top layers?

How do stop building from the bottom up and build from the top down?  What does that even mean in terms of how we do our world?  Does it mean we don’t build a base, a system, to put records in? Do we just start making ‘packets’ and let them find each other, like amoeba in a petri dish?  Maybe, yes. I don’t really know for sure how it will work, but I want to make it work. I still want to be a librarian, a cataloger, and have a library catalog that represents the collection in the library. I am not deluded by the notion that everyone is ‘online’ and has infinite ‘access’ to what is on the Web and the Internet. I’m a realist (I hope).

How do we continue to help citizens be informed citizens—the bedrock of a democracy—and at the same time do cutting edge information organization? Let’s explore this. 

Faint and wispy words....

Little power, big power : bibliographic control and the ‘situation of the uncomplaining’

....or, bibliographic ignorance and the cost to resource discovery

Wilson (1968) asked us to image a Supreme Bibliographic Council given the task of evaluating bibliographical situations in order “to estimate the degree of bibliographical control needed” by individuals or groups based on both the complainants and non-complainants.  In doing so, the council would realize that the “situation of the uncomplaining was as bad as, or worse than, that of the complaining.” Nearly 50 years later, what sort of power does bibliographic control have when faced with the reality of what Wilson described as ‘lamentable bibliographic ignorance’?

What service does a library aim to give its users based on assessments of user information needs, including their bibliographic ignorances?  Bibliographic control itself seems to be making progress but that progress is ignored or abandoned for both financial simplicity and less complexity. At the same time, people demand easier and faster access to all information resources, in all their complexity. For example, instituting linked data using Resource Description Framework (RDF) so that we may one day have a “semantic web” requires more complex information organization practices then we have ever employed. Yet, that type of information work is underfunded or outsourced, or ignored completely, often because of complaints about information systems that are too cumbersome, too complex, too slow, etc., or the assumption that search engines are better and have access to everything. This even though most anyone using one would be hard-pressed to identify the depth and breadth, or even origin, of the resources retrieved (or not retrieved) by said engines, let alone their validity. Studies have even shown that some groups of people lack, or are losing, the ability to judge the relevance of information retrieved to their own information needs. This is not to say that all information gleamed via a search engine is useless but a recognition that different information needs often need a variety of different resources is lacking.

At the same time, as scholars, scientists and practitioners, how costly is our bibliographic ignorance to the growth of knowledge? From a scientific and scholarly standpoint we expect our libraries and institutional repositories to keep a record of research and published works so that we may know our scientific and scholarly histories, theories, etc. We need this record to understand that our present advances, in whatever direction they are headed, may proceed without devastating or costly mistakes. In other words, that we make forward progress by putting that knowledge to use. However, how do we put to use that which we may not have access to, or that which we are ignorant of even existing?

Wilson (1968) addressed the power of bibliographic control in his essay Two Kinds of Power, which holds an almost mythical status in library and information science—even though at times it reads as if addressing an entirely different world. It begs the question, what kind of power does bibliographic control have today? Is bibliographic control losing power? At the very least it seems the type of control it currently has is shifting towards an entirely different configuration. Wilson stated in 1977 that we needed a ‘reorientation toward the functional’ and while the global cataloging community has finally created functionality models (e.g., FRBR, FRAD) in order to ground its information systems in the logic of the entity-relationships database model, the systems themselves have not made the leap to reflect these changes due to, for one thing, a lack of communication between the organizers and the system developers. This speaks to a profound disconnect between what bibliographic control is intended to accomplish and what it actually has the power to accomplish. This is especially important in terms of evaluating and solving bibliographical situations and the information needs (and bibliographic ignorance) of its users, both complaining and non-complaining.

Wilson, P. (1968). Two kinds of power : An essay on bibliographical control. Berkeley, Los Angeles : University of California Press.

Wilson, P. (1977). Public knowledge, private ignorance: Toward a library and information policy. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press

Signals and messages

Want to talk about messages. Communication. Signal being sent, signal being received, the message delivered. That signal makes its way through some channel where there is probability of noise, or interference. All of this can be mathematically defined, as in Shannon's simple model of a communication system (Shannon and Weaver, 1963).

Beautiful to look at, easy on the eyes. The actual mathematical formula....

(I'm no mathematician, I confess, so while it looks cool I can't really read it, nor do I want to.)

Shannon himself said that his theory doesn't account for the meaning of the message. He wrote "These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem" (p. 32). But, I do want to talk about the meaning of messages because there are so many signals carrying messages that we receive in some way, shape, or form that I wonder we aren't tore apart from the non-stop barrage.

Messages from the brain to the body particularly interest me, inside messages, kind of muddy. My brain has lately begun to tell my body that it hurts. It sends out random signals to the toes on my left foot or my right shoulder, to the lower back, to my skin all over. No corresponding action having originated at the point of pain, though (i.e., I didn't smash my toe or my shoulder, scratch my skin). They tell me it is fibromyalgia, an auto-immune disorder, but the more I study it the more I don't understand what my brain is actually telling me. Is there some noise in the channel corrupting the actual message? What if instead of pain I am suppose to feel something else? Can we hijack the signal and re-write the message?

There are outside messages that are very clear--a handwritten note, a hungry yowl from a cat, someone talking to you--but I have no idea who or where the sender is. One morning I heard my name shouted, clear as day. Woke me from a dead sleep, even startled the cat laying next to me on the bed. He looked down the hall, ears perked up. I looked down the hall, eyes wide open. No one in the house but us.

Sometimes the message isn't heard or seen, just felt. Or, heard, seen, and felt through some other sense. I think sometimes those are what dreams are --some kind of weird messages. Dreaming has never been a problem for me. I remember dreams from childhood, clear as day. Sometimes I would have 'waking' dreams, often in the morning--lucid dreaming, think they call it? I would wake up, grab some coffee, sit and wait for the caffeine to take, and see stories, images, mostly nonsensical stuff that I assume was my brain clearing out the debris.

A while back I was in Tallahassee, at FSU, working on my doctorate. Not finished, but in that writing stage, crunching data, trying to make sense of it all. It is a strange phase of one's life, a time of a little craziness. (This was before I took the type of meds of I take now for depression, anxiety, insomnia so my brain was raw, on edge, prone to periods of intense sadness, happiness, hyper-vigilance, creativity.) I had banished the television and while I had Internet access I wasn't prone to surfing the web aimlessly so I wasn't online. I was in a self-imposed exile, in a way. I would sleep a little, write a little, sleep, write. Sometimes in a state of not quite asleep and not quite awake.  Things were blurry. I had one mission.... to write, write, write.

One morning I sat there zombie-tapping on my laptop, trying to finish a sentence started the night before and I suddenly felt a powerful urgency to get out of the house.  Had to get out. "Get out!" it said. I looked up and the roof was collapsing, right over my desk. I ran from my crappy little duplex, leaving everything behind. When I came back in I saw that there was all my stuff ruined, my laptop in pieces, and I could see the sky through the ceiling, as if something had blasted its way through. There was a fine, white dust covering everything, still floating in the air, choking me, making my eyes water. I remember thinking, where the hell did all the dust come from?

Yes, I was dreaming. The ceiling hadn't collapsed, my laptop was fine, and there was no white, powdery dust covering everything. It hadn't happened, but that powerful urge to run, someone telling me to get out...that had been real.

Later that morning I was sitting on the couch, reading, waiting for the mail because I had ordered something and desperately wanted it to arrive. It was about 11am in the morning and I was thinking of going back to sleep. I heard my neighbor's door open and then pounding on my door--loud and fast. When I opened the door he was standing there all excited and kind of scary---he was a big, bearded guy--and he was yelling "We're under attack!" Had no idea what he was talking about. A plane, he explained. A plane had hit the Twin towers in New York.

Spent most of the day at some friend's house, a married couple, who had a huge television--rear-projector, big boxy thing. I remember it because they gave it to me a few years later. The CNN logo was burned on the the screen in the lower-right corner. We had watch CNN all day, watched the chaos, the planes hitting the towers over and over again, the massive smoke lifting up to the sky, watched the people jumping or falling from the buildings, watched people running across the bridges, running from Manhattan. News reporters talking non-stop, reporting on the Pentagon hit, the plane down in Pennsylvania.  Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists.

That day seared in my brain, like the CNN logo on the tv screen. What I remember most clearly is the dust....the white powdery dust rolling through the streets, covering everyone, making them ghosts. It was the concrete from the ruined buildings, and, I assume, the ashes of those who had died in the fires. It was just like what I saw that morning, in that lucid vision-y dream thing.

As I read over this I realize it is so overly dramatic. But, it is a true account of my experience on that morning. Every time I think about Shannon's model I think about it. I think Shannon would say, you got a message, pure and simple. It was sent to no one in particular, you just happened to have your head in the right channel at the right time (high probability?) to receive it. What exactly is the meaning I am supposed to take away from it? Because, for all intents and purposes, it can be interpreted so many ways. There was nothing I could do to help any of those people, no message I could send to prevent any of it because from my calculations I heard it at the exact same time the first plane hit the tower. What was the point of it? 

I can only speculate that sometimes a whole bunch of people send the same message and it is amplified, jacked up, and sent out across some weird frequency. You can't help but receive it, can't help but get the message.