Metadata is catnip to digital scholars / Jennifer schaffner
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Presented at RDA & Rare Materials Seminar, 6 November 2015 Edinburgh, hosted by the Cataloguing & Indexing Group in Scotland and organised with support from members of RBMS, EURIG, RBSCG, CIG, IFLA and JSC for Development of RDA
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Metadata is catnip to digital scholars / Jennifer schaffner
- 1. Metadata is Catnip to Digital Scholars Jennifer Schaffner RDA & Rare Materials Seminar Edinburgh Friday 6th November 2015 Metadata is Catnip to Digital Scholars
- 2. Metadata is Catnip to Digital Scholars Jennifer Schaffner RDA & Rare Materials Seminar Edinburgh Friday 6th November 2015 Metadata is Catnip to Digital Scholars
- 3. “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 36 November 2015 documents.cerl.org/publications/cerl_papers_ii.pdf
- 4. to scholars, “metadata” can… • describe digital or physical objects • be any level of granularity • be automatically captured (preferable) • be manually produced (of necessity) “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 46 November 2015
- 5. “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 56 November 2015
- 6. What Middletown Read: metadata structure, interface… 6 November 2015 “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 6 www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr/
- 7. “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 76 November 2015 www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/portal.html
- 8. “a research project” “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 86 November 2015 www.ustc.ac.uk
- 9. 6 November 2015 “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 9 www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/orlando
- 10. 6 November 2015 “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 10 orlando.cambridge.org
- 11. Early Novels Database (END) 6 November 2015 “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 11
- 12. “conceived out of sheer frustration” “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 126 November 2015 ebba.english.ucsb.edu and ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
- 13. “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 136 November 2015
- 14. Republic of Letters 6 November 2015 republicofletters.stanford.edu
- 15. “expanding the Republic of Letters – India” Mitch Fraas "Historical" texts and their circulation c. 1750-1800 15 mappingbooks.blogspot.com/2013/07/expanding- republic-of-letters-india-and.html
- 16. Tamboti 166 November 2015 multilingual data architecture kjc-sv016.kjc.uni-heidelberg.de:8080/exist/apps/tamboti/
- 17. booktraces.org “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 176 November 2015
- 18. 6 November 2015 “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 18
- 19. observations so far… • scholars and academics doing their research… – use catalogues and bibliographies – create catalogues and bibliographies – transcribe printed and handwritten catalogues and circulation records – wish that they could do more (contribute, update, correct) • scholars need and desire paratext… – copy-specific metadata (bibliographic provenance) – relationships (archival context) • one person’s bibliographic metadata is another person’s research dataset • specific and circumscribed academic projects tend to grow larger • frustrated scholars must reinvent the wheel 19
- 20. for librarians… “metadata for all” Scholarly Libraries Archives Museums “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 206 November 2015 DCRM ? ? ? ?
- 21. • when to support? • when to collaborate? • and when to lead? 216 November 2015
- 22. CUL Incunabula Project before and after 22 inc.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk
- 23. Chronica Hungarorum Ratdolt: Augsburg, 1488 • 1590 • 1488 1488 • 1664 • 1542 • 1591 1640 • 1585 • 1560 Chronica Hungarorum Augsburg: 1488 “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 236 November 2015 Cambridge University Libraries
- 24. 1488 1488 1542 1560 1585 1590 1591 1664 1640 “…our digital ambitions must be equally sensitive to current research trends…” - Ed Potten, CUL
- 25. 6 November 2015 “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 25
- 26. “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 266 November 2015 www.linkedincunables.net
- 27. to librarians, demos can… • prove the research value of metadata: – tools for scholars, academics, and researchers – tools for paedogogy – increase access and use of rare books – unanticipated uses – new discoveries • show monetary value of metadata – ($$ ££ €€) “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 276 November 2015
- 28. library director logic…? • library increasingly disintermediated from academics • need programmatic support from central administration – £££ €€€ $$$ • demonstrate value of the library • what is distinctive about this library • valorise public purpose of rare and unique materials the intersection of special collections and academics is… “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 286 November 2015
- 29. metadata that academics make and use • names (entities, authorities) • timelines (dates) • maps and geotags (place names, provenance) • annotations (provenance) • lash up with manuscripts and archives (finding aids) • lash up with digital, digitised and TEI (digital libraries) • biographies, prosopography (biographical dictionaries) • complete the oeuvre (catalogue raisonné) • relationships with contemporaries, correspondence, translations (provenance, “context”) • who’s reading what (institutional records of library collections and library lending) • links to academic articles (secondary sources) • integrate “transcribed” catalogues, lists, ledgers, bibliographies (converting hidden, handwritten and print-only metadata, adding discoveries) • multilingual sources and metadata, or at least “non-western” metadata for “non-western” sources (ahem…) • holdings (yay) and circulation records (argh) • (insert more flavours of metadata here) • (insert unanticipated future research interests here) “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 296 November 2015
- 30. thank you! Jennifer Schaffner @genschaffner jennifer.schaffner@gmail.com please do not hesitate to pass along more academic research projects that use pools of library and archives metadata as “primary sources” “Metadata is Catnip” RDA and Rare Materials Seminar 306 November 2015 thanks to OCLC Research, Jim Michalko, Ricky Erway, and the library directors and rare book librarians whom I have consulted for guidance
Editor's Notes
- Thank you for accepting my proposal. I am honored and thrilled to be presenting at this seminar. This title, “metadata is catnip,” is a phrase that a librarian quipped when Ricky Erway and I were investigating relationships of libraries with digital humanities Introduction: My research project is to investigate ways in which metadata describing rare, unique, and distinctive collections can be used as the raw material of new forms of scholarship. The special collections community has imagined that catalogues were academic research tools. These days, some academics desire the metadata itself, not so much the union catalogues, OPACS, finding aid platforms, and digital library interfaces we have built on their behalf. Disclaimer #1: I have pursued this research about academic projects that use library metadata both at OCLC Research, and now as an enthusiastic independent professional. This is a work in progress… The prelimininary synthesis and the conclusions are my own. [At OCLC Research, our internal name for this project was “really mobilising unique materials.”]
- Revised title and scope: Digital scholarship and digital humanities (or humanities computing) are (“just”) scholarship, and vice versa. Distinctions between digital scholarship and scholarship are quickly becoming unnecessary, and perhaps less useful. My thesis (so far) will be: that it is the right time to open the door for “progressive bibliography” and “scholarly metadata” (this is not news). A union catalogue is the hub, extensive research and scholarship creates the spokes It is the responsibility of librarians to peel cataloguing apart from bibliography Libraries and librarians must do the cataloguing Not so much descriptive bibliography, which will be specific to individual intellectual inquiry and academic research To begin, I return to first principles (and Cutter): Who is the “audience”? For whom do we create resource descriptions? What do our “users” desire and need? Scholars and academics are just one of several “publics” (and they are a very thin slice, few in numbers…) Disclaimer #2: I am not a metadata librarian, although I am a huge fan and long-time user of metadata for special collections. I have recently been a kind of “meta-librarian,” and now I am becoming “post-librarian” (credit to Liz Chapman for this term)
- This is not a new research question: CERL knew that setting up an international retrospective bibliographical database (HPB) is one thing, while persuading scholars to use it quite another. in 1999 (!), CERL convened a meeting, “to encourage contact between those who create the database and its potential users.” Need to: develop a feed back mechanism between researchers and the database develop a feed back mechanism between researchers and the libraries copy-specific information convert earlier catalogues and inventories (- María-Luisa López Vidriero, p. 37 and 34) Need to: …include as many collections as possible, beyond libraries, especially those of museums and archives known to have considerable collections of printed works …encourage cultural heritage custodians/professionals to catalogue their collections …strike a balance between rapid progress and detailed and precise cataloguing …support accuracy (in distinguishing editions and Issues) using modern technology (rather than cataloguing), e.g. scanning title pages or typographical ornaments …provide information on as many extant copies as possible (- Pierre Delsaerdt, p.64) Conclusion in 1999 (-Lotte Helinga p. ix): foresee “further application and refinement of the data” Helinga reiterates Hugh Amory’s caveat: “bibliographies may be invoked to answer questions they were never designed to answer…” proposal: “changes in format and cataloguing practice that would make bibliographical records better suited” to academic research http://documents.cerl.org/publications/cerl_papers_ii.pdf
- What does the word metadata mean to academics? (What do academics think library metadata can do for them?) DH discourse seems at times to be predominately about creating, reusing, and sharing metadata. Academics say they would like to craft the metadata into something that has meaning for intellectual inquiry. Scholarship values consistent metadata, and needs to trust the provenance of the information. [“automatically captured”? That’s us.]
- Example of a discovery (of manuscripts); and also an example of academics building a custom database and hand-crafted search engine on top of transcription of “dusty ledgers” of public library’s circulation records from 1890s This is not a FRBR user task… to create a raw dataset from born-analog library metadata, build a quasi-ILS for searching, including searching patron entities and transactions (in Access?) Ledgers discovered by a faculty member, project built by 2 academics (English, History), later add 1 librarian Scholars publish many articles and an award-winning academic book in social history (also an example of scholars releasing their “research data” for reuse by others, which is very common) “The project began when Frank Felsenstein, Reed D. Voran Honors Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Ball State University, came across a collection of dusty ledgers that had been uncovered when the present Muncie Public Library… was refurbished …These volumes… list all of its patrons, books, and circulation transactions for a period that begins on November 5, 1891 and ends on December 3, 1902... Felsenstein enlisted the Center for Middletown Studies and Ball State University Libraries in constructing a searchable digital version of these handwritten records, which are now freely available to the public.” http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr/ Book came out in 2015 – won a prize… Library Journal Oct 29, 2015: “In an email to Library Journal, NEH communications outreach specialist Mackenzie Shutler said the organization selected this project for its 50th Anniversary website because it exemplifies “how archives can stimulate new research” and “brings humanities into the public square.” “ http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/10/digital-content/national-endowment-for-the-humanities-honors-what-middletown-read/
- Data content “standard”? Data structure “standard”? Developed own list of fields (29 “book data” “fields,” including binding type, discard date, “of whom procured,” late in the game added the MARC record as a separate field…) Great example of library director deciding to “support” with researchers, when they approach him The academics didn’t think to enlist help of catalogers until very late in the project… Now cataloguers have added links out to MARC records (with pre-coordinated subject headings… etc.)
- Example of academic research project that runs a bona fide library system on top of their own transcribed and aggregated metadata from several institutions (“academies”) Not a FRBR task… to harvest records from “catalogues,” add “record bling” to MARC, and lash up with scholar-built “authority database,” adapting an ILS to purpose Academic project from Dr. Williams library: centered on provenance integrates “authorities” created (and linked) by scholars built out from a from specific research focus – topic, subject, “aboutness” Their “Virtual Library System” is running on adapted Koha (open source), like an OPAC on data “…compiled from a range of sources, including historic catalogues, shelf lists, loan registers, and surviving books from the academy libraries” “Each record in the system describes a single edition of a given work and consists of three parts: bibliographic data harvested from modern library catalogues; information about the copies held in different academy libraries; and, where available, evidence of borrowing.” “The Database and Encyclopedia” is basically name authorities with extensive scholarly articles and references, and guide to archival resources: “When complete it will contain: historical accounts of individual academies, biographical articles about leading tutors, and biographical data for thousands of students educated at the academies over two centuries. It also provides the most comprehensive guide to archival sources for the study of dissenting academies ever created.” The Koha records are versions of MARC and ISBD, but most enhanced with extensive scholarship (“scholarly metadata”) in the 5xx, 500 notes and 561, adapting 5xxs to include the “holdings” of each library in each academy Example of when to collaborate: Two scholars, one scholar is the head of Dr. Williams Library, create a “major digital resource for the study of the dissenting academies in the British Isles from 1660 to 1860” http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/portal.html
- Example of a circumscribed intellectual project - a digital bibliography for specific research inquiry of a historian of print culture, Andrew Pettegree - that grew wildly (like Jack and the Beanstalk) Perhaps also an example of scholarship doing work that might seem to librarians as “reinventing the wheel”? “The Universal Short Title Catalogue began with much more modest intentions. The original research project was a survey of French religious books, intended as a contribution to the study of the Reformation. But it proved impossible to make sense of French Protestantism without also creating a bibliography of Catholic books; then it seemed important to survey all French vernacular imprints, to establish how religious books fitted into the economy of print. It was only when this first project was nearing completion in 2007 that we conceived the more ambitious goal of extending our work on France to all of Europe.” a static Access database running on a scholar’s laptop, and “backed-up” on a stick/drive (pause to reflect on digital preservation…) includes catalogue records from separate national and linguistic silo-ed library ‘catalogues” (BnF, ESTC, ISTC, etc.) think of as a hand-crafted metadata aggregation, embellished with scholarly metadata? only released as “published” (not a living breathing catalogue), resembles a static research dataset important scholarship has been published based on “catalogue” (including Pettegree’s books) [Jen: what is the relationship of the USTC to the HPB? Why didn’t Pettegree do his work by collaborating and contributing to the HPB?] http://www.ustc.ac.uk/
- Example of digital scholarship and prosopography, to “aggregate” bibliographic metadata and “collate” with scholarly articles The data is entirely text, an enormous text aggregation Is this aggregating scholarship itself? is aggregated scholarship “metadata”? 3 distinguished English professors set out to “research and write a much-needed literary history and to deliver it electronically” Interdisciplinary (and international) from the start, in 1995, of literary scholars, digital humanists, and computing scientists Metadata structure includes early development and use of TEI, XML, and schemas, tagsets, and DTDs “new biographical and critical accounts of the lives and works of its subjects, together with contextual materials relevant to critical and historical readings” www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/orlando (image credit: expansive and hierarchical metadata structure; “starburst represents the chief tags in the Production section of the Writing schema”)
- For FRBR task FIND, metadata is “people, chronologies, tags, freetext and links” etc. Orlando embodies creative leadership - especially John Simpson - in linked data experiments (recently put VIAF through paces…) Orland is the fairy godmother and the ur-mother/grandmother of literary academic research inquiry that creates and research that can be informed by “scholarly metadata” started as an “e-publication” (online reference work “published” in electronic form, carefully marked up) now the size equivalent of ~80 books begun as a reference guide to the history of women writers, now a living breathing growing dataset Online version from CUP, behind a paywall: http://orlando.cambridge.org/
- Example of scholar who is well aware of library metadata (“black-box metadata”), correcting the library metadata, outside the library (no feedback mechanism yet) “…peek behind the curtain into the world of interactive cataloging and the art of discretionary taxonomy building” Wants to contribute Creating scholarly metadata (and database) IS the project Blending scholarly metadata with bibliographic metadata Social metadata, bibliographic metadata and scholarly metadata, with tools and student projects layered on the dataset Operations on metadata: search, play, visualise, download (open data) Academic project is skillfully creating folksonomies (consistent metadata, thesaurus, vocabularies) with data open for reuse visualisations, and pedagogy… “Slow Metadata” is MARC with embellished MARC-like additions earlynovels.org
- Example of an academic building metadata (and software tools) for their research, to serve a scholarly intellectual need: “…allow one to study ballads as a distinctive phenomenon…” FRBR tasks? Cannot “find” or “get,“ so built a research data set of items, metadata, digital images, home-grown vocabularies, etc. “English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) was conceived in 2003 out of sheer frustration” (the “archive” is also called a “digital library”) EBBA Director, Patricia Fumerton, was launching new research and teaching on street literature, and found access blocked. “Originals were highly guarded at libraries on either side of the pond; microfilm copies were difficult to locate and read; most printed editions offering only selections and, even then, only transcriptions with no duplication of the ballads’ original formatting and few illustrations; and, in the rare cases of facsimile editions, the opposite problem—no easily readable transcriptions.” “Early English Books Online (EEBO) has to date failed to come to the rescue” since: many extant ballads have yet to be mounted in its database, nor can those that are online be easily searched by collection or finer cataloguing details that allow one to study ballads as a distinctive phenomenon.” ‘Cataloguing”? TEI-compliant (and MARC-XML) Each has own unique ID (looking ahead to linked open data_ Keywords and “headings” Cross-reference ESTC ID (if there is one) Includes a digital image, transcription, and the “standard tune” or melody Include both collections and items Bodleian joins EBBA, which generates an amusing series of blog posts reporting on meetings about metadata structures and values… Librarians to the rescue: Bodleian uses metadata to match and augment the UCSB project: visual materials and bibliographic metadata, ICONCLASS for image search, transcribe handwritten first-line index Source: http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/history and http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/catalogue-headings Bodleian: http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
- Example of e-science project aggregating cultural heritage metadata (“cultural information”) to create a “digital library,” by assembling a critical mass for research created by and for academics metadata for digitized and digital information (documents, encyclopedias, digital libraries, biographies, gov docs) tools for scholarly to create their own “virtual collections” tools for scholars to link up entities, establish relationships and context, contribute back to the pool of metadat some libraries and archives were invited and declined scholars did it all themselves with an impressive amount of funding all about linked open data, consistent metadata, etc… “HuNI is a new research and discovery platform developed by and for humanities and creative arts scholars” [Jen: is this “distant reading” of metadata?] “part of the Australian e-Research program. HuNI combines information from 30 of Australia’s most significant cultural datasets. 2 million authoritative records relating to the people, organisations, objects and events that make up Australia's rich cultural heritage. HuNI also enables researchers to work with and share this large-scale aggregation of cultural information. HuNI has been developed as a partnership between 13 public institutions, led by Deakin University.”
- his is not a FRBR “user task” – research inquiry and visualisations on an entire raw set of bibliographic data This is an example of a research project that created metadata for mapping, especially to map relationships between entities: In the project “Mapping the Republic of Letters,” a map of Voltaire’s oeuvre was constructed with metadata from the Bibiothèque nationale de France. (My personal favorite is use of this bibliographic metadata to map fictional locations of false imprints.) The RIN included this project in its 2011 study with researchers in the humanities – tellingly titled Reinventing Research? – in which one participant observed that digital scholarship was responding to an earlier information technology revolution: development of postal systems. [I have inquired about the data content standards – they had asked about authorities in about 2010, and OCLC Research referred them to VIAF as linked data] http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/ Reinventing Research? at http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/Humanities_Case_Studies_for_screen_2_0.pdf
- ‘I was immediately struck by the absences encoded into this sweeping view of the Enlightenment…” Partly in response to the western bias in that project, at the 2013 SHARP conference Mitch Fraas (“scholar-librarian” at the University of Pennsylvania,”DHer”) presented elegant maps of the flow of texts between Europe and India in the 18th Century. Example of assembling metadata for mapping provenance, in order to ameliorate western bias in the data, and at the same time an example of remediating gaps in metadata by compiling and augmenting a bibliographic dataset from myriad printed and digital metadata. Sources for this case study include: provenance information in a retrospective bibliography records from a previous grant that are now in the UK Data Archive catalogue records* secondary sources “255 records extracted from 28 major catalogs of Persian and other oriental manuscripts including those of the British Library, India Office Library, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, the Bibiothèque national, the Salar Jang Library, Harvard, Yale, Michigan, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Phillipps collection, the Danish Royal Library, the Khuda Bakhsh Library, and others. This work is ongoing.” [also an example of cross-over domains of scholar-librarians] http://mappingbooks.blogspot.com/2013/07/expanding-republic-of-letters-india-and.html
- Example of another crying need: multilingual data modeling and data architecture - interface & records - that actually works (not BIBFRAME) From a scholar of early (very early) Chinese rare books, Duncan Paterson, at the University of Heidelberg: “annotate records with metadata on language, script, and transcription” Tamboti’s main functions: You can search for existing metadata records You can create new metadata records and edit existing ones. You can annotate metadata entries in a manner that facilitates cross-cultural and cross-lingual research. You can add comments and do classifications. “…growing database consists of records on the distribution and transformation of Euro-American knowledge in late imperial China, gathering bibliographical as well as biographical and terminological data. The collection was started in 1996 in Göttingen…” MODS, VRA and TEI on XML http://kjc-sv016.kjc.uni-heidelberg.de:8080/exist/apps/tamboti/
- Example of a social “hub” of copy-specific information… annotation Started by a scholar (who was surprised by discoveries in the stacks, unintended consequence of an assignment to his undergraduate class) All about provenance, “Marks in Books” Open to contributions by students, librarians, academics, and the public booktraces.org
- There several other “social metadata” hubs out there about provenance Snap a photo, drop in basic description (“ownership”) Transcribe, translate, and tag the hell out of it… Endpapers Archive (https://endpapersarchive.wordpress.com/) Book Inscriptions Project (http://bookinscriptionsproject.tumblr.com/_ (argh) scholars reinventing their scholarly wheels, out of necessity why? social metadata and provenance? is this scholarly?
- Metadata as the precursor to the scholarly enterprise? Academics need and desire: "Provenance" metadata in the sense that rare book people use the word "provenance," as copy-specific information, or the chain of custody. “Contextual” metadata, in the sense that archivists use the term “context,” as relationships and authorities Boutique research projects, necessary to satisfy intellectual curiousity Some researchers use distant reading of metadata (metadata as “text”?) Karen Coyle and Dianne Hillman (emphasis mine) in a piece rather critical of RDA: “Sandler, and others looking at the future of library collections, see the focus on the published products of scholarship, where libraries have traditionally put most of their effort, making way for a new focus on primary collections of research materials. These collections, often unique and organized with emphases on geographic relevance, programmatic needs, and faculty interests and strengths, are not the product of the scholarly enterprise, but instead the precursor. More effort to acquire and manage these materials will require different cataloging approaches than used now on the published products collected redundantly by libraries, as well as a more flexible infrastructure. There are certainly other, equally compelling visions of what the future will look like for libraries, but what stays the same is the need for reusable data from others (as materials are combined "virtually" for delivery to users), as well as for more sustainable and efficient ways to describe these materials. The level of interoperability required for this new environment of data sharing cannot be accomplished with the current proposals for revision of the library cataloging rules.” Coyle, Karen and Diane Hillmann. Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging rules for the 20th century. D-Lib Magazine, Jan./Feb. 2007, v. 13, no. ½ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/coyle/01coyle.html
- Move now to a quick dash through a few examples of librarians responding to scholarship based on library metadata Why metadata, from a librarian’s point of view? for users of search engines, OR for use within a local systems, OR for sharing with metadata aggregators …or for digital scholarship [speculate that scholars contribute - and would like to contribute - “aboutness,” context, authorities, names, and prosopography…] “Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums” by Mary W. Elings and Günter Waibel. First Monday, volume 12, number 3 (March 2007), URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_3/elings/index.html
- Linking cultural heritage metadata with intellectual inquiry enables new discoveries and analysis, new research methods, and meaning. “Radical changes in scholarship have been top of mind. It has been argued that the digital revolution is reconnecting the two parallel institutional worlds that had emerged by the end of the 19 c: scholarship and professional memory institutions (cultural heritage).” [-Anne Burdick et. al. 2012, page 33 http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262018470_Open_Access_Edition.pdf].) Jeffrey Schnapp, long-time DH hot-shot, has argued that DH really got going when libraries started digitizing special collections. The tricky bit: when to support when to collaborate and when to lead
- Example of librarian offering experimental demonstration of reusing (expensive) library metadata for digital research methods: Curator: Ed Potten - Head of Rare Books, Cambridge University Library “Over the past decade there has been a significant shift in research practice around early printed books - the transition from textual study, to the study of the book as a material object. The direction of current academic research has been a direct driver…” “The catalogue records created in this project include detailed information about the binding, illumination and decoration, provenance, and imperfections of the copies, 4650 incunables at Cambridge 1954 printed catalogue no longer fit to purpose five-year Mellon-funded project to catalogue our collection of fifteenth-century books which begun in 2009 (£300,000, $500,000) make detailed records for its collection of incunabula available and searchable online for the first time (Newton, COPAC, WorldCat?) plan to take the results of that project and exploit them as fully and usefully as we can, how to make the books as visible and hard working in the digital realm as they now are in the physical. Resource description IS collaboration with scholars: hire a PhD who specializes in the field to do the cataloguing (it’s easy to teach MARC) “creating and developing a wide pool of academic and research interest and expertise around the collections through a suite of physical and digital initiatives which have drawn new audiences to interact with the books. This pool of users has proved enormously useful in gauging and tweaking the activities of the project to ensure that we have focussed our attentions on delivering data which has the maximum academic impact.” http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/incunabulaproject.html (no longer available?) inc.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk
- Ed: “Each catalogue record produced over the past five years contains a history of the lifecycle of a single book from publication to the present day.” “…features like a book’s binding, its annotations, illumination and provenance elucidate something about its contemporary or later reception, its use, trade, movement or transmission.”
- When to lead? [note: Ed says this mapping-over-time exercise, using google maps, is a simplistic demonstration] Provenance provenance provenance: example of mapping, focus on use of metadata about annotations and ownership “By 1542 the CUL copy had made its way to Heidelberg, where it was in the hands of Stefan Rodtacker, a teacher of art and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, who annotated the book heavily with his notes and comments. By 1560, however, the book had travelled far, appearing in the possession of Joannes Balloch, a pastor in Eastern Latvia, who noted on a flyleaf that a quarto edition of the text had recently been printed in Riga. It was presumably in Riga that the book was then acquired by Sir Jerome Horsey, traveller and diplomat – we know Horsey visited Riga in 1585, giving us a tentative date and location for the acquisition. Horsey travelled very widely, spending much of the latter quarter of the sixteenth century in Russia, culminating in 1590 with a brief stint as England's ambassador in Yaroslavl. Following his expulsion from Russia in 1591 Horsey returned with the book to England, settling in Buckinghamshire, where both remained until his death in 1640. The volume then made its way to Cambridge, acquired although we don’t know where or precisely when, by Richard Holdsworth, Master of Emmanuel College. Holdsworth’s books were bequeathed to Cambridge University in 1664, where they remain today.”
- Annotated Books Online is an example of “when to lead”: a library-initiated project, with deep attention to provenance and “marks in books” Purpose: to enrich the early modern annotations with transcriptions and translations Libraries (led by U Amsterdam,) build a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) “for scholars and students interested in historical reading practices” Funded by national Dutch e-science initiative “social” - like booktraces - but built largely by librarians 60 books… invitation to add text/annotations as you wish, and to contribute to compilation of a list of handwritten and printed “catalogues” that include provenance/copy-specific information about annotations (catalogues” that will need to be “converted” to digital metadata) http://www.annotatedbooksonline.com/
- Example of a linked open data experiment/demonstration, by library school students, using bibliographic metadata as linked data, to make a “new scholarly tool” geospatial referencing developed using catalog information from the New York Public Library's Rare Book Division “patterns in the expansion of printing throughout the Western world… …provide serendipitous discovery of new information through hidden relationships. It is our hope that this tool will facilitate new research and increased access to these rare materials.” “The data was harvested, converted to linked data format, and combined with additional sources, then visualized…” http://www.linkedincunables.net Similar demo of a timeline slider from Greg Prickman, Head of SC at U Iowa, is the Atlas of Early Printing: explicitly for teaching purposes uses bib records, ISTC and geo databases with google maps… http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/
- Research value matters to academics, who desire and need heaps, piles, bags, and pools of metadata What can we librarians do? To[p priority is to catalog as much as possible, as fast as possible, AND – we can collaborate/help academics, when they dive deep into metadata structures and vocabularies The price of metadata matters to library directors and institutional leaders – like university principles and research institute directors.
- (cataloguing can be hard to explain to university administration… making a case for investment in cataloguing) …with the (obvious) trends…
- (first question in the seminar was brilliant: “What can we librarians STOP doing?”) So far, my synthesis of “kinds” of metadata that scholars use, reuse, and reinvent when libraries do not provide what they need: The usual: names (especially non-bibliographic entities), dates, places, holdings What’s not so easy: archives, digitized images and texts, biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias, scholarly secondary sources Required, not optional: multilingual metadata modeling and multilingual metadata structures This is also what the cultural heritage community has been striving to do for the past 15+ years: linking and lashing up non-bibliographic metadata (relationships, other sources, context) My conclusion is mostly the same as Hugh Amory’s from 15 years ago: union catalogues need to be catalogues (track surviving copies); bibliography is the domain of scholars and experts; (people who take the “deep dive,” into what Rachel Buurma of the END calls “slow metadata”) there is a crying need to “funnel,” “feed back,” or attach the academic research discoveries and secondary sources to the catalog records of librarians I believe that RDA for unique and distinctive materials is an opportunity to create metadata structures and standards that can be repurposed, reused, “progress” For unanticipated creative uses Cultural heritage metadata in an ideal world? The data structure needs to be extensible The data content needs to be consistent Scholars will work with librarians, to support projects that recon paper and handwritten catalogues and inventories, and remediate uncatalogued backlogs Librarians will work with scholars to create, add to, and correct the data content In my voice: this project is incomplete, preliminary. Is such a synthesis useful?
- Concluding thoughts? We must do better balancing needs for a comprehensive union catalogue with desires for detailed information about provenance and context. We need to make our data as easy as possible for scholars to access and use. (Not just “come- and-get-it””...) Librarians are reasserting the value of the collections - and the value of the metadata describing collections - that are directly related to the work of the academy, and to the research of digital scholars themselves.