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BIBFRAME Workshop at NOTSL Fall 2015 Meeting

09 Nov

The Northern Ohio Technical Services Librarians (NOTSL) Fall 2015 Meeting on October 30th, titled Don’t be Afraid of the Big, Bad BIBFRAME (or Linked Data), focused on the broad definitions and theory as well as the details of BIBFRAME testing that the Library of Congress (LC) is conducting. The workshop and meeting was held at the Cuyahoga County Public Library Parma-Snow branch and there were about 50 attendees with a good mix of public and academic librarians.

A quick note: BIBFRAME stands for bibliographic framework and is a proposed replacement of MARC that uses the principles of linked data to store cataloging information in smaller pieces, instead of one record, that opens up the possibilities of connecting it to other data sources, combining library data in interesting ways, and incorporating it within the wider Internet.

Paul Frank (Library of Congress) presented in the morning on the LC BIBFRAME Pilot. He is the coordinator of the testing, including training the LC catalogers testing it and working with the developers programming it. Currently, the 40 catalogers are finishing up the first pilot, with the possibility of a second next year. Once the initial pilot concludes, there will be analysis and a report with findings produced. LC built a BIBFRAME editor and continues to refine it so that the process is streamlined yet still as detailed and robust as catalogers need to capture the necessary information. LC has a dedicated website for the BIBFRAME project and encourages anyone who is conducting their own testing to register with them so that findings and ideas can be more easily shared among independent testers.

Paul Frank demonstrates the LC BIBFRAME editor

Paul Frank demonstrates the LC BIBFRAME editor

After the lunch break, Stephanie Church ran the NOTSL business meeting which included promoting their annual NOTSL scholarships for professional development (closes Monday November 9th, 2015).

Roman Panchyshyn (Kent State University) continued the workshop with his presentation BIBFRAME for Dummies: What can Catalogers do Now? It covered the basics of BIBFRAME and linked data, from definitions and theories to overviews of the different groups trying out the new standard. He also discussed various ways to learn about and prepare for BIBFRAME and provided many resources. Two resources include the University of California (UC) Davis website that details their IMLS grant funded testing and the LC website with BIBFRAME related tools which has the open source code for their editor.

Part of the enjoyment of the workshop was the multitude of questions that the librarians had for both speakers. I have been to many conference of all sizes and this group had an insatiable curiosity and asked hard-hitting questions, clearly driven by a need to understand how it works and why BIBFRAME would be useful, which makes sense since these would be the users of this potential cataloging standard. While there is much left to figure out and test, it is exciting to here about the developments and see the progress so far. If nothing else, perhaps learning about BIBFRAME and linked data will encourage and empower librarians, especially catalogers, to learn programming skills and use them with confidence since they continue to become more popular and useful within libraries.

Slides for the presentations are available and I highly recommend reviewing both of them, staring with Roman Panchyshyn’s for a solid background for those new to the topic.

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Posted by on November 9, 2015 in conference

 

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OCLC Developer House December 2014

25 Jan

During the first week of December, I participated in OCLC’s second Developer House with nine other academic librarians and library IT staff. We spent the week working with OCLC APIs, especially WorldCat Discovery API which is still in beta.

Our group of developers ranged in experience and technologies that complemented each other well for the various projects that we worked on. In addition, several OCLC staff spent the week with Dev House, offering support and knowledge whenever possible and many others were on call as needed. This provided us with the opportunity to dig into the projects and even create working demos with some functionality by the end of the week. Even with a team, it is a tough feat to pull off but fun none-the-less.

My team’s project searched the Discovery API information with third party information to generate relevant content that the library already owned. Our idea was to create a quick display of library material based on a particular topic, person, or place. After considering many third party sources, we selected DBpedia for its organized data and easy-of-use, then based the information on a date in history. This gave us a good amount of results and flexibility since dates are associated with many topics in a multitude of ways (birthdays, commemorations, releases, publications, etc.). Our group has a guest post on the OCLC Developer Network, if you’re interested to know more details and watch a short video demo of our project.

Trying to list off all of the things that I learned would make this post much too long, so let’s stick with the top three. First and foremost is SPARQL, an RDF query language that searches for and manipulates data and is customizable to allow for getting back desired information in a specific way. While learning and then mastering SPARQL queries well enough to use them took some time, figuring out what information was available and how we wanted the data was the main focus. Thankfully, OCLC has an SPARQL expert who helped us with this, which meant that we had the chance to create and hone several different queries to use in our application. Apache Jena is a good SPARQL tutorial and the SPARQL Explorer is great for trying out queries.

Second is GitHub, a website for sharing and collaborating on code. Before Dev House, I had signed up and looked at some of the tutorials to get started but it helped having a project with a time restriction to put GitHub to use. There are multiple ways to use GitHub for whichever you prefer: online on the website, through the client, or in a terminal. It reminds me of DropBox in that it keeps everyone’s code updated but it is more complex and offers much more functionality along with the ability to fork, or branch, a project.

Finally, there is an engaged community of library coders and it was exciting to spend a week with several of them. Even though we all are at different institutions, librarians still find to stay connected wether it be through OCLC Developer Network or Code4Lib Annual or Regional conferences, or other outlets. If you want to be involved more with coding and technology, just jump in. And there is bound to be another awesome OCLC DevHouse around the corner to apply for.

 
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Posted by on January 25, 2015 in Uncategorized

 

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ALA MW 2013 Successful Sunday

28 Jan

What a day! So much for taking it easy and not having so much on my list to do today. I ended conferencing for 12 hours, staying busy and engaged nearing the whole time. My plan was to be finished at 4 but things fall into place that you have to roll with sometimes!

This morning began with a change of pace. My mother-in-law @Lorna_Librarian works ILL at the College of Wooster so Steve (@sxflynn) and I went to meet Rapid ILL to find out information for her. They were at a hotel as their home base rather than being on the exhibit floor since they are so specialized, serving only academic librarians. The service and support that they is amazing. Their goal is to provide ILL within 24 hours, and their current average was 13 hours! Most of that is due to electronic resources that some are nearly instantly filled but even print versions usually have a quick turn around. Though they are a small organization that is inside of the Colorado State University library, this is their benefit because they work with their users everyday and are bettering the software and know it inside and out because it what they use. Originally, they created the program after a flood when they lost all of their bound widths and half of their monographs and since then it continues to grow and expand. Very cool!

Luckily, I made it back to the conference center in time for the LC New Bibliographic Framework Update. Roberta Schaffer introduced the session and speakers and said that the session was being recorded. It will be on up YouTube shortly and on the LC website after 6-8 weeks once they have closed captioned it. Beecher Wiggins gave an overview on what has happened since ALA Annual in Anaheim as far as committee work and moving forward. Reinhold Heuvelmann from the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek discussed their trial of Bibframe, touching on the difficulties, what they recommend for improvements, where they see this potentially going and its benefit, and how they are proceeding now to prepare for a linked data Bibframe future. Ted Fons, a Tech Evangelist at OCLC, then also gave his examples of what OCLC has done with linked data and Bibframe, and how a shift is taking place to a more agile, iterative system to get software out sooner and with continual revisions and releases. Part of the push to ensure that this is a long term standard is to use schema.org to utalize the web and linked data, gaining more clout in libraries and use of the resources that we already have by making them more findable in the internet. The purpose is the expose library data. At this point, I left for my lunch plans, knowing that the rest I can catch recorded. The three remaining speakers were Eric Miller, Sally McCallum, and Kevin Ford. However, with leaving early, I missed the official unveiling of http://www.bibframe.org but I caught it on Twitter. This is when Twitter and hashtags truly rock!

After lunch, I hit the exhibit floor and ran into friends and people who know my co-workers. That is part of the beauty of attending a conference, you never know who you will see and catch up with. Or who you will meet! And now, I am recognizing people from past conferences and they are becoming conference friends. Plus, it’s always fun to meet those librarians who work with Safari MARC records that I create. They love meeting me and putting a face to the who is behind the product and making it run. One guy came up and said hi at another session later, already making a point to build our connection–awesome!

Next was the all important RDA Update Forum that had huge attendance, over 200. This one wasn’t recorded and if I had planned ahead I would have brought my laptop to record audio since it was very detailed. That is one issue with sessions, you never know if it will be practical or theoretical, and even then if it’s actionable information or just informative; this was practical and actionable, and I wish I’d had my laptop. Sure I could have used the iPad but it would have been as good from the back of the room–this is my assumption since I’ve not tested iPad Mini recording against a laptop’s. Again, Beecher Wiggins gave the RDA update since last Annual. The final RDA update rewording/rewrite is wrapping up after a few chapters were reviewed and okayed. He also mentioned the http://www.bibframe.org launch. LC have 150 training resource available online for use, just give credit to them. All their staff training will wrap up around March. Next, Troy Linker from ALA Publishing talked specifically about RDA revisions and publishing a new version. RDA Toolkit’s latest improvements was a main portion, pointing out in particular RDA MARC mappings, auto sync table of contents, global and local workflows, videos and tutorials (part of the free section on the toolkit), their blog with first Tue of the month announcing change and second Tue implementing it, and a new print edition out around mid 2013, among other things. Also, there is an Essential RDA in the works, similar to Concise AACR2, that’s meant to be a practical guide and live outside of the toolkit. John Attig from the JSC gave his updates. He walked through the revision process that they did in November at their meeting. CC:DA and JSC websites discuss the changes for RDA and Fast Track keeps a history of all of those changes. Phillip Schruer, a PCC chair, covered PCC and RDA, talking about RDA BIBCO Standard Record, different task groups that have progressed to reviewing recommendations and comments on their reports to create a final version and guidelines. Three in particular focused on hybrid records, access points for expressions, and relationship designators and will be out in a few months. Undifferentiated names are a new focus now but they are still working on it. He also mentioned RDA PCC decision tables. Finally, Cynthia Whitacre from OCLC gave a brief summary of the new RDA policy and how records will be treated in OCLC. They plan to be very open and informative about when they make global changes, doing it piece by piece rather than whole records. In the Q&A, new to me, she mentioned OCLC working on a new bib notification that is very customizable and based on your holdings–no name at this time. I need to find the slides because of all the information convey, especially the very detailed field and subfields changes that are difficult to type everything out. There was a lot of great, useful information provided; a lot to take in!

Surprisingly, RDA ended early. I guess they expected a hour of questions but not many people asked. So with time to spare, I headed over to the Collection Management and Electronic Resources IG. Since it is newish and their leadership fell through, it ended up being an open discussion about ERMs. Very fascinating, not having dealt with them. Apparently there isn’t one perfect software to do everything so based on your institutions needs, and funding, there are multiple things necessary to management the data and other documents for electronic resources. Part of the initial challenge is gather the info but a major hurdle can be all of the data entry. There was a lot of interest in the group and they are look for a chair and vice chair so let me know if you are interested because I have their contact info!

Not having had enough fun for the day, I hit up on last session to satiate my curiosity–the Digital Humanities Discussion Group. This had huge turn out for what the organizers originally planned. This began only at Annual Anaheim last summer and now they are trying to make it an IG due to the interest and growing area and need for it. The session was, similar to my previous, an open discussion about several topics: data and alt-metrics, retraining, digital humanities space. Many people talked about their work and projects, or the challenges faced with beginning, as well as how to proceed as professional librarians. Do we need to change the perception of us as specialists, experts, and end points to being experimenters and explorers along side faculty members? Does buy-in need to come from tenured faculty, newly hired, newly tenured, grad students, or those already using tech, OA, and DH who might be more receptive and interested? Though provoking stuff! Can’t wait to see what these librarians put together for Annual in Chicago! They have a blog and a Twitter @DHandLib–they live tweeted so you can follow the gist of the meeting.

By now, at 5:30, my day was definitely going to end. Plans were to eat chowder, walk to the Space Needle and take in the Chihuly Garden and Glass. However, as things present themselves…

While eating said chowder, we noticed a Thompson Reuters Customer Reception going on next door. And librarians were still going in! So we headed over, Steve being a customer himself, and met some great people, had drinks, food, and collected our first tile. Apparently this is a big thing, and some have attended for 20 years so they have quite a collection! Who knew!?

By 9 p.m., we were back to our place. So much for my plan to not do as much. The thing is, once I get to conferences, I always want to do and see what I can. Being curious also keeps me seeking out topics of interest, or speakers that I want to hear. And ALA sure provides a great selection for no matter what type of library you work for or what your role is. If you are willing to do it, there is always something new or more to learn, and people to meet who are just excited (sometimes if not more)! Making connections is always fun. Especially when you run into again at later ALAs. That’s one of the benefits of returning.

Tomorrow I promise myself not to do as much. Maybe.

Seattle 2013 TR tile:

Seattle 2013 Thompson Reuters tile

 
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Posted by on January 28, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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ALA MidWinter 2013: Solidarity Saturday

27 Jan

Sitting in Seattle right now, it is still hard to believe that ALA MidWinter is upon us–even having spent the day conferencing all around the city. Though enjoying seafood and 50 degrees, despite some drizzle, is enjoyable!

This is my first MidWinter but it is just as crazy and bustling as Annual, it seems. As co-vice chair for the Cataloging Norms Interest Group, I helped with our panel this morning and it had 60-some people attend. And that’s for MidWinter. It amazes me that thousands of librarians turn out for this mid-year event, though it shouldn’t because it seems to be gaining in size and clout each year.

Today, I attended four sessions, though two were closely related. That is a lot in one day for a conference. Cataloging Norms IG started off my day with two distinct presentations that dovetailed each other nicely. The first speaker, Harold Thiele, gave an in-depth look into the history and beginnings of cataloging, starting with Mesopotamia and Sumer up through RDA. He discussed how title main entry slow progressed and evolved to the form that we know in AACR2 and how with RDA the approach is more with its lack of main entry as we know it. Maura Valentino discussed the 21st century, focusing on metadata beyond that of description and how it affects workflows and process. Though very different, the two talks paired well together and truly gave a complete picture of how far cataloging and metadata have come.

The Catalog Management Interest Group focused on managing catalog workflows, content, metadata, and prepping for RDA field displays. This ended being a more practical session that I first anticipated. Sherab Chen spoke about his new role as an e-resource manager, focusing on personnel tips and his lessons learned so far. He balanced his talk well between a no-nonsence, realistic approach and having an optimistic, can-do attitude despite all of the work and problems that such a job entails. Next, Jessica Hayden covered demand driven acquisitions within an consortial environment. Not having worked in such a setting, I am fascinated by all of the collaboration and discussions that must go on in order for a consortium to function well, and yet there are myriads of benefits to such a arrangement. Also, the distinction of what is done at the consortial level versus local can create either more roadblocks or paved ways, depending on the situation. Sarah Beth Weeks, however, gave my favorite presentation due to her topic of using Google Refine to clean up data in the catalog. For a cataloger, the chance to provide more access and an easier search for the patron to find what they are looking for is the main goal that we all strive to achieve. At their college, rather than amend specific MARC fields to make them all uniform, they added the most common form of a term as a 9xx field for better access. Finally, Roman Panchyshyn closed off the session with his testing of RDA catalog display and how to best make it work for the patron. The 3xx, no surprise, were the oddest and trickiest to work with of the new fields. Since the 264 has a 2nd indicator to help define it, those were easier to display, as were the 502 field labels after a wording tweak. Next month, he will send of his recommendations, basically what he presented at the session, to Innovative in order to get their ILS to display RDA records and fields how they want them, and ensure that they are included in indexing for search results.

After a great lunch break–ALA plans out 1.5 hours over the lunch hour, thank goodness, for no sessions–a back-to-back linked data two part session began. The first hour was informative. Some of it I had heard in Anaheim at Annual but it was a good refresher and parts of it were new information, or said a different way. Eric Miller, president of Zepheria, discussed linked data, tying git in a little bit to Bibframe. Mainly he covered the underlying structure of linked data and why it is an important task to take on as a library community. If all of our libraries were linked data, search engines would include our books and items in the top results pages, allowing users more access especially if they begin their research in the web. Next, Richard Wallis from OCLC talked about all the different projects that they are a part of concerning linked data–mainly VIAF, FAST, Dewey Classification, and now WorldCat linked data. They hope to create a large, more prominent presence on the internet with library data, and are setting an example for member libraries. It is true that if all of the libraries work together, we could make a huge splash in online metadata and set president for all who are part of the web; we have the specialized knowledge and wonderful data, so we just need to make it accessible openly on the web through links that bring users back to the library websites and catalogs.

During the second part of the linked data session, two librarians showed the small-scale projects that they completed using linked data. Both approached the idea differently and created two unrelated yet amazing projects. Violeta Ilik linked her universities math department in Viewshare, allowing for new connections and analysis to be done on the faculty itself, including gender ratios and research areas. One of the coolest part of her data ended being the PhD. location of all the faculty, which displayed on a map. Jeremy Myntti used Viewshare for an entirely different purpose with a whole other type of data. His institution has an online collection of animal sounds recorded in several states. To get even more out of the data, he loaded certain information into Viewshare and was able to display not only a map of locations for the sound recordings but to show pie charts that broke down the kingdoms and genus. The link to the recordings for each animal was included so that a person could click and follow the link to the website with the player on it. Both Violeta and Jeremy said the from start to finish, their projects took no more than 1 hour to create the linked data. Though these were fairly small scale, the implications and ease of linked data are amazing to consider.

What a day! I love attending sessions that sound interesting and I always yearn to learn more while at a conference. That’s why I am here! However, there gets to be an overload point if you pack too much in, especially if you aren’t used to it. Thankfully MidWinter is slightly shorter in the sense that there aren’t as many sessions, so I can conference a bit harder today and tomorrow knowing that Monday will be fairly sparse and Tuesday I fly out before the crack of dawn.

So far it’s been a great conference. Let’s hope tomorrow can live up to today’s standards! We will see that that huge RDA afternoon session brings…

 
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Posted by on January 27, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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ALA Anaheim: Super Saturday

24 Jun

Very busy day today! Lots of wonderful sessions which makes it hard to decide what to attend. In the end, the three sessions I chose today taught me a lot and were enjoyable.

Session 1) LITA’s Linked Data and Next Generation Catalogs covered a broad base of what Linked Data is, why libraries should lead the charge, and how to do so. Different libraries and vendors on the panel talked about the topic generally while also delving into specifics of projects and current use of Linked Data. Unfortunately, attending the all-day Linked Data workshop yesterday at the pre-conference meant that some of the speakers also presented at this event as well and while they weren’t the same presentations, there was overlap. But being new to Linked Data, it was good to have things reiterated and spoken about more broadly. A few others from yesterday came as well but doing one or the other would have been sufficient, especially since this session lasted 4 hours and covered lots of ground.

Lesson learned: Instead of trying to hit all the same topics, vary your sessions to learn more and expand your horizons–plus you have the chance to meet so many more people of all different types.

Session 2) Transforming Technical Services: Growing IT Skill Sets Within Technical Services Departments provided a practical realistic look at how to increase tech savvy among TS staff. Several libraries each gave their take on what it takes to increase, encourage, and support professional development in application development, software training, and bringing more tech into library work to ensure projects are done by librarians who understand the system, users, and needs rather than hand it off to already busy IT people. Oddly enough, all the speakers rounded back on the same or similar tips and concerns but each offered their own way of how they handled their situation and what their solutions and realizations were. So useful. And not just for TS–this applies to libraries in general as well as general business. In a nutshell, talk the the staff to find out what they use and need but remember that they don’t know what they don’t know at time, encourage and support relevant learning that will make their work easier and more effective, start with small and meaningful projects that are achievable and leave a lasting impact to increase buy-in, and work within the knowledge and abilities of the staff to drawn on the best of what they can offer pairing it with the technology to increase their effectiveness.

Lesson learned: Though libraries are becoming more techie and librarians with tech savvy skills are needed and necessary these days, as one speaker said “Remember, we are not growing programmers”.

Session 3) Traveling the Spectrum: From Interstellar Adventures to Epic Fantasy, the influence of Science Fiction and Fantasy on the World Today (i.e. the George R.R. Martin talk!) was my guilty pleasure session of the day and a great way to relax and enjoy a fun author-talk. Besides George R.R. Martin, Blake Charlton also spoke and, for some reason, Lois McMaster Bujold wasn’t billed but was on the panel as well. Each talked about themselves, their paths to reading and writing books, and how Sci-Fi and Fantasy shaped them and the world. Though I’ve not read a word by any of these authors (I LOVE the HBO Game of Thones show), they are now three of my favorite authors and I vow to read their works as soon as my year of reading my bookshelf is up, which isn’t going so well this month, lol. Each was so humble and had tough lives that lead them to not only books that engaged and inspired them to read and eventually to write. Authors that talk realistically about writing and what it took to get their win me over instantly because, like most things, book writing is not magic and neither is getting published. Hard work and persistence win out. Once I finish Camp this June, I might be crazy enough to write another 50,000 words in August for it again and this time return to my roots of Fantasy and Sci-Fi as well; it’s been a decade since I began my Fantasy novel that never really got off the ground but after this talk today, I’m ready to commit a month to returning to those worlds and characters and actually writing the novel now.

Lesson learned: Listening to them all made me realize that fantastical literature/fiction is escapist for a reason; most Fantasy and Sci-Fi authors and readers lead hard lives, in one aspect or another, and the release and travels and adventures that those genres provide enrich everyone’s life who writes or reads them. And as with most genres, there is quality and fluff so there is something for all tastes and preferences and if you haven’t read any, find out about them (use Reader’s Advisory at your library) and crack open some books and see what they are all about!

Now, time to briefly look over my schedule tomorrow to set a game plan for more sessions! Are you ready for yours?

 
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Posted by on June 24, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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ALA Anaheim: Pre-conference and kick-off!

23 Jun

Even though #ALA12 officially began with the Opening General Session at 4 this afternoon, I arrived late last night in order to attend a pre-conference session about Linked Data. Being an all-day session, it was jam-packed with great presenters, attenders, and information. The Twitter hash tag was #ala2012_ldpre and many of us tweeted during it, so definitely check it out if you’re interested in seeing how the day progressed.

The format helped keep the momentum going for the entire day: a key note, lightning talks, small group discussions, and reporting back to the whole group. Though the session focused on Linked Data, a whole range of aspects and depths were discussed. From theory to how to get started, global implications to SPARQL queries.

The presenters represented vendors, libraries, and even LC. Each honed in on a different part of the Linked Data topic and yet the talks fit together well because it built a larger tapestry of the topic and issues surrounding it. The fun part was hearing and seeing examples of how LD could advance libraries but also the web more generally. Yet there are many problems and concerns that get in the way, mainly time and money. However, as the keynote speaker Eric Miller pointed out, catalogers and libraries are particularly well poised to lead the way to make use of LD and have been doing so for 40 years with MARC already: think controlled subject headings and names. All controlled fields and the accompanying authority files are Linked Data.

My brain still buzzes with all the new information and ideas and hope for the future. Cataloging is changing quite rapidly with FRBR and RDA, and now Linked Data. Yet it isn’t changing, really. The theory and the purpose are the same but now technologies are advancing to allow us to create things that were never possible before. For some it’s a scary unknown but it could bring libraries back into the conversation more if we helped create and guide standards that would organize and maintain data on the web as well as in libraries.

Several people at this session today called for action. Not just holding meetings and being aware of what’s going on with Linked Data but actually creating and doing something to test and set up projects to find out what best works and begin stepping into the future today. How apt a statement with Disneyland across from my hotel. 🙂 But, as was reiterated as the day’s session wound down, there is no magic involved–it’s all hard work by smart and dedicated people working together to build off each other to make some. So let’s create Linked Data and help build better libraries and a better world with excellent data! Who’s with me?

 
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Posted by on June 23, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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