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.