Orienteering for Libraries: Session 1: Surveying the Terrain

Kathryn:
Welcome.
We’re recording today’s session and have posted it at
www.imteaminc.com in the News & Events section. Also, if you click
on the session on October 27th, the recording will automatically
launch. The slides themselves with notes are also posted at
www.imteaminc.com.
Technical difficulties. Please message Cathy Sackmann for
assistance.
We encourage folks to share their thoughts and engage in a dialog
about the discussion topics. Rather than answering questions here in
the presentation, we’ll take some time after the session to review the
chat transcript and respond to questions and comments offline.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015 Surveying The Terrain
©2015 by Information Management Team, Inc.® and Leap Forward Library Consulting™ Page 1

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/)

Kathryn:
The last ALA Midwinter, in Chicago, was a defining moment for me,
professionally.
Let me explain. I’ve spent much of my career, more than 15 years, as
a product manager, working with vendors and librarians to build
software products that help libraries do their business. And I confess
that, during much of this time, I’ve thought about this work from a very
process-oriented standpoint — from the perspective of purchase
orders, fines and fees, and MARC record merge profiles, to name a
few.
But as the daughter of a librarian (and a librarian myself), I knew that
libraries were about more than those things that I’d focused on. And
at ALA Midwinter, I put it out there.

Kathryn:
Libraries are valued for the access we facilitate and the authority we
bring; we have a unique position of trust in our communities. We’re
valued for our service-oriented engagement with people, for the
connections we help to draw for them, for enabling powerful and
personalized discovery. We are about knowledge, growth, and
freedom.
And as I suggested that we are about more than processes, I watched
a sea of librarian faces nod and smile in agreement. I think I may
have even heard a “Preach!” from somewhere in the room.
Yes, I was pretty impassioned … because these are the reasons I
became a librarian, why my mom became a librarian. Because we
believe that access to information, in the special way enabled by
libraries and librarians, makes the world a better place.

Kathryn:
Librarians provide highly-valued services by being great at a number
of things.
First, we are collectors. We aggregate and curate information
resources on behalf of our user communities.

Kathryn:
We are navigators.
We find routes to information and knowledge that others may not know
exist.

Kathryn:
We are context builders.
We help put information in its appropriate setting — or settings, as is
often the case.

Kathryn:
We are investigators.
We dig, and dig, and dig (and dig some more, as my father can attest)
to find answers to questions, to solve mysteries, to shine light.

Kathryn:
We are guardians.
We stand watch, often alone, over the intellectual record, ensuring
freedom of access to others.

Kathryn:
We are helpers.
We believe in connecting people to the information that creates
knowledge.

Kathryn:
But, and this is sometimes hard for me to admit, there are things at
which we, as a profession, don’t excel.

Kathryn:
As a veteran of several ILS providers, having worked on lots of library
software, I can say with some authority — our management systems
leave a lot to be desired. Much of which I’ve been discussing on my
blog this summer. (http://www.leapforwardlibraryconsulting.com/the-more-for-libraries-
context-management/)
Core ILS functionality is essentially unchanged since the early days
of these systems. Sure, we’ve moved from text-based interfaces to
graphical user experiences. And we’ve added some bells and
whistles that make work a little bit easier. But fundamentally, very little
has changed in the nature of support these systems offer libraries.
On top of that, very little of library technology has changed. Sure, we
have bigger, faster machines and more powerful search technology,
and we’ve transitioned from mainframes to client/server technology,
and now, to the proverbial cloud.
But the larger technology landscape has changed, and changed
significantly. Which is a big part of why library systems are wanting -

we’re falling further out of step with technology with each passing day.

Kathryn:
I know this one will be controversial, but we’re not universal metadata
experts. We are experts in MARC, but as a community, we’ve been
slow to adapt and extend that experience in alignment with other
industries, especially in a Web-based world.

Kathryn:
And finally, we’re not resource experts. We still bring a print-centric
mindset to our resources — we think about resources from a macro,
metadata and inventory, perspective, as boxes with labels on the
outside. But resources are complex — there’s a lot of “micro”
goodness inside of those boxes that we never see.

Kathryn:
Nannette and I have a remarkable ability to turn up just the right
reading for the other…at just the right time. Perfect serendipity. And
last week, she did it again, pointing me to an LJ Peer to Peer column
written by Dorothea Salo in February.
(http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/02/opinion/peer-to-peer-review/marc-linked-data-and-
human-computer-asymmetry-peer-to-peer-review/)
In the piece, Dorothea describes some of her thinking as she prepped
to teach a linked data and XML class to library school students, and
many of her comments jived with the thinking that I’ve been doing with
IMT in the past months.
In particular, she notes, “Just about everyone has discovered and
rediscovered that designing data based solely on how it should look
for human beings, without considering how computers may need to
manipulate it, leads inexorably to ruinously messy, inconsistent data
and tremendous retooling costs—exactly the challenges libraries now
face.”

Kathryn:
And exactly what you’d expect to happen when expertise in structured
data and technology are behind the curve.
Dorothea also draws parallels between the publishing industry, which
had to figure out its own path through what she calls “human-
computer asymmetry” during the early days of the eResource
revolution, and the library domain. Key to publishing’s ultimate
success was how the industry transformed its thinking so that they
could see texts in ways other than human-friendly displays. I would
argue that we need a similar transformation in our thinking, to seeing
the Web as our technology platform, our knowledgebase, our system
with its associated shifts in how we view our metadata and resources
in an increasingly “e” world.
I know this is something Nannette and I have discussed a number of
times, and which she will go into in greater detail later in the
presentation.

Kathryn:
We need that transformation because can’t keep marching along the
path we’ve been on — my sense, from many discussions with librarian
colleagues, is that we all know it doesn’t lead us where we need to go.

Kathryn:
And at the same time, we can’t afford to stay hunkered down, waiting
for rescue. In the absence of such transformation, we hold ourselves
back, constrain our ability to deliver service in a Web-based world, and
cost ourselves visibility and viability . . . We’ll be snowed over . . . and
forgotten.

Kathryn:
And similarly, we can’t continue hand-wringing and arguing about
which path is the right one. It’s time to get moving … to make choices
and to start hiking.

Kathryn:
Which is why I’m on this path, founding Leap Forward Library
Consulting and partnering with Information Management Team — I
wanted to get off the dead-end track, to get out of the survival hut, to
quit the squabbling, to begin charting a course to sustainable visibility
and viability with libraries. I want to help bridge between the things
that we, as libraries and librarians, do well — and, as I said, there are
many, many things at which we excel, for which people truly depend
upon us — with new technologies and broader perspectives.
And Nannette, as principal at IMT, is ideally positioned to delve deeper
into some of these challenges. Nannette’s work as an innovator in
publishing technology gives her a unique perspective on what’s
happening in the library space, which she’ll share in her landscape
analysis. So without further ado…Nannette.

Nannette:
And charting a new course, requires more than just a compass and a
map. It takes leadership.
As Maxwell’s Law of Leadership #4 points out --- Anyone car steer a
ship — or for that matter a horse (Yes, Kathryn, there is a horse metaphor
for that, mounted orienteering) — BUT it takes a leader (or leaders for
that matter) to chart a course (the courses our institutions need to
succeed).
And I’ll be bold here and state something not mentioned in Kathryn’s
slides so far, but a clear conclusion for our Landscape survey — and
likely for anyone who attended the recent round of Library
Conferences like ALA Annual and ILFA. Library seems to be in a
leadership vacuum at the moment. Most in the profession are ready to
go, but like these riders, they’re waiting for their leaders to read maps
(tea leaves?) and tell them where to go
And therein lies one more set of "WE ARE" and "WE’RE NOT" slides,
that I as a non-Librarian, as an experienced Resource life cycle
technologist and an avid Library/ Librarian supporter/enabler see as

key at the moment.

Nannette:
By and large, library, or at least library technology, as it has been of
late is about Management. Focused on maintaining systems and
processes, Focused on moving books around — eResource
Management, Print Management, Repository Management, Access
management …… and the list goes on.
Joining Kathryn for work on conceptualizing a new Next Generation
system around this time last year, I was floored by how many things
had the word “Management” associated with them. Most of the
functionality was labeled “Management of.”
And I kept pushing to find out the purpose of this Management, the
why they were doing it. Often the answers were “Because” —
“Because we do.” — “Because we always have” ….
Very few answers were related to how this “Management of” enabled
the Library to provide better services to their Patrons, to their Funders
— to their Customers. Most were just “Because it’s what we dos.”

Nannette:
And this,
• As an experienced eResource developer, seemed odd to me. I
could remember back to working with Reference librarians, our
target demographic, in the early 2000s to create new Boolean
Search and Browse functionality for academic eResources.
I knew Librarians to be demanding, service-oriented
professionals, who
o Knew what they wanted and why they wanted it — down to
complete, detailed descriptions of the Patrons who came up
to the desk and the questions they asked.
o Knew how to relate their needs to their service provision
— and even how to extrapolate their needs, to what aids and
added functionality their Patrons (of various audiences/from
various communities) would need to complete the work on
their own, without a trip to the reference desk.
And this was in 2000 to 2002! So it seemed odd, that in 2014,
“Management of” in the ILS wasn’t leaps and bounds beyond the

eResources available not long after my sophomore in high school was
born.

Nannette:
And this,
• As a library patron myself, I perceived the Library as a
Knowledge service — those things Kathryn mentioned earlier.
Not Supply Chain & Systems Management, but Knowledge &
Resource Management. For as I the eResource developer
working for Publishers knew, those smaller things were the realm
of distributors, IT professionals, and the like.
And again, I was puzzled, it seemed odd, counterintuitive even.
Sure I get it, Management is needed to enable service provision, but
ask yourself,
• How much of the management Libraries and Librarians do is
about enabling?
And
• How much is “just what we do in Library?
At least to me, an admitted non-Librarian, this “Business
Management” approach to Library seems, well to be honest, a bit too
small. Too small for the important, community enabling work I know

my Library friends and coworkers to be doing. Too small to answer Kathryn’s 4
“Are”s.

Nannette:
Leaders know management is just a starting point, — The base to
which all these others things noted here are added to it get to
leadership
But WE/Librarians have, possess, many leadership qualities. Which is
good!
Because, WE/Librarians need to be Leaders at this moment in time —
This moment of Library redefinition. Or even more practically, just the
moment now, over the next few months, when WE/Librarians must get
• Off the path we’ve been on since 1970, before the lifespan of
those systems we’re actively managing is reached.
• Out of our “hunker down” bunkers, before our savior arrives and
when he arrives, also steals our funding.
• Off the consensus debate train, before others in the resource life
cycle quit listening and just leave us in their dust.

Nannette:
But, WE/Librarians possess many leadership qualities:
• WE/Librarians are Collectors — Maxwell’s Irrefutable Law of
Leadership #21: The Law of Legacy — A leader’s lasting value is
measured by succession.
• WE/Librarians are Helpers, you are those service professionals
I as developer and patron perceived you to be. Maxwell’s
Irrefutable Law of Leadership Law #10: The Law of Connection
— Leaders touch a hand before they ask for a heart.
• WE/Librarians are still Navigators, just like those target
demographic research librarians in 2000 who helped us
Publishign folks define inResource Search and Browse.
Maxwell’s Irrefutable Law of Leadership #5: The Law of Addition
– Leaders add value by serving others.
• WE/Librarians are Guardians, those trusted guardians folks like
the NYTimes refer to. Maxwell’s Irrefutable Law of Leadership
#6: The Law of Solid Ground — Trust is the foundation of
leadership.

Nannette:
And You/Librarians and Libraries can become leaders.
We just need to exploit these characteristics.
And minimize those 3 Aren’ts Kathryn mentioned earlier — Software
expert, universal Metadata expert, Resource expert.
By
Completing our Library teams with folks who AREs in those 3
areas, but are AREN’Ts in the 4 Library AREs

Nannette:
By
Adding a good leadership development tool, and here I’ll be using
Maxwell — A top choice of executives and presidents with many
scenarios, and quotes, not to mention full skills assessment and
development tools.
(http://www.amazon.com/The-Irrefutable-Laws-Leadership-Anniversary/dp/149151311X)
Tackling key trusted service areas our current landscape survey
indicates need to be tackled,
If we are to maintain the all important trusted value propositions
Kathryn and a recent NY Times article referred to:
“But today, the principal danger facing libraries comes not from threats
like these but from ill-considered changes that may cause libraries to
lose their defining triple role: as preservers of the memory of our society,
as providers of the accounts of our experience and the tools to navigate
them — and
as symbols of our identity.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/24/opinion/
reinventing-t he-library.html?_r=0)
With a bit of forethought and some attention to detail. Two things that,
according to Maxwell, seperate that ship leader I mentioned earlier,

from the ship managing steer-er. Two things that anyone can tell you ARE
definite Library and Librarian strengths!

Nannette:
Together, WE/Librarians and their trusted outside experts can
lead the much needed Library Transformation ALA is talking about.
(http://www.ala.org/transforminglibraries/)
Together, WE/Librarians and their trusted outside experts can lead,
where WE/Librarians can’t Manage.
Together We we can lead it, to a win!
So let’s start by using that current landscape survey Kathryn and I
keep mentioning to identify some key issues we need to tackle in our
anchor trusted service: Collection

Nannette:
So taking
• The recent NY Times piece
(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/24/opinion/reinventing-the-library.html
• Libraries Transform from ALA (http://www.ala.org/transforminglibraries/ )
• The recent Pew Libraries at a Crossroads piece
(http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/09/15/libraries-at-the-crossroads/
Note: There are others, these are just a good sampling we chose to pull for here,
that we thought summarized what we’ve seen in our landscape survey, quite
well.
Libraries Collect
• Memory — Accounts of our experience.
• Resources — Knowledge containers.
• Identity — Community(s) identity(s), Creator(s) identity(s),
Contributor(s) identity(s), Title(s) Identity(s), and Other identity(s)
related to these things.
And The
• Tools to navigate the things they collect

• People who use their collected things and tools
Notice, Systems is not mentioned here as a collectable object.

Nannette:
As such, Librarians — and the Libraries who employ them, all the
libraries who employ them (Academic, School, Public, Corporate,
Special, etc.) — Are Stewards of the evolving Cultural, Commerce,
Educational, & Scholarly Record --- and probably a few more record
types I’ve forgotten.
There’s that service focus again, that bigger than just “Management
of” again. And you, Librarians and Libraries are already good — great
and trusted even at — the stewardship part of a print-centric world.
But, the current world is no longer print-centric, as we all know — As
any landscape survey or just casual observer knows, more non-print
resources are being collected, more non-print are being used. Larger
and larger portions of libraries’ print collections are being moved to
shared print, off site, and to other “harder” for Patrons to immediately
access areas — To dare we say it archives.
And as we said earlier, We/Librarians and their team completing
outside experts are leaders of Library transformation. We must be
more than just steer-ers of the ship. We our institution’s, our
discipline’s assembled teams of Librarians and those other needed

experts must be good leaders “Who control the direction, rather than being
controlled by it”, as former GE chairman Jack Welch notes.

Nannette:
And, Jim Collins in Good to Great, 2001 notes We, the assembled
teams — as Great Leaders — must
• Maintain faith that we will prevail in the end. And I would take this
one step, from my experience leading innovative, some would
say disruptive, projects over the past 20 years and say, We must
not just Maintain, but Inspire and Instill Faith in our team, in those
we report to, and in those we serve. But this is a digression into
another law.
• Confront the MOST brutal facts of our current reality.
So let’s take a moment to look at those BRUTAL facts, of this
stewardship,
• The Fences we have to scoot under.
• The Rocks which threaten to bruise or scrape our knees.
• The Darkness that threatens to overtake us in our quest.

Nannette:
Today, we’ll focus on Scholarly Record stewardship, as there is a
good piece on it from OCLC Research that thoughtfully summarizes
many of these points. And begins to suggest some new thought
patterns for moving forward. Points and suggestions that are, I think,
applicable to any number of the other records We/Librarians and their
assembled teams of outside experts steward.
(http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2015/ oclcresearch-esr-stewardship-2015.html)
Or course we don’t have time to today to go into the whole 50 page
report in detail. We’ll just hit the highlights here. And, as with the other
works cited through this webinar, we’ll include links to the full piece
when we post the slides later this week, so you can review and
consider them in more detail.
So hitting the highlights, or to my way of thinking some key points:

Nannette:
Brutal Fact #1
Strategies designed to support the stewardship of print materials
no longer suite the “weightless” (I read electronic) scholarly record
now coalescing in digital spaces.
“Ut oh” — Looks like we really need those software and resource
experts to round out our teams.

Nannette:
Brutal Fact #2
The importance of context is growing!
The scholarly record is evolving to incorporate a deep contextual
layer.
There is a growing need for context-aware decision support
Cool, Librarians are good at Context!
But, Librarians will certainly need to work collaboratively with those
other, added experts to work our internal, personal sense of context
into our currently
• Flat MARC metadata.
• Those Resources we still think of as closed boxes.

Nannette:
Brutal Fact #3
The size and diversity of the network and players we must interact and
work with to be good stewards is growing exponentially!
Hmmm . . . so Library’s current silo’d models, past ideas of strings as
identifiers, closed ontologies, and flat, outside the resource box
metadata ---- won’t work any more. Bet you’re starting to get a bit sick
of my points like this, and I don’t mean to be a hammer, oh yes, wait, I
do, These are the things we see again and again in any number of
contexts
But the coordination point here is new and this is key, not to mention
huge and hard to do. Good stewardship moving beyond print,
requires us to not just: 1) Change Our Technologies, and 2) Add a
few outside experts
Good stewardship requires us to change our models of collaboration.
To extend them beyond the boundaries of the Library and the
institution(s) or audience(s) we serve. It sounds like we need to extend
collaboration to the others who serve these users as well ---- Really?
That’s brutal, and dare we say it, not quite as easy as the technology

part.

Nannette:
So where do we go from here? Well, let’s do a short Leadership
analysis, based on these brutal facts, we’re leaders after all!
1. GREAT! We are good with context, as we said earlier and in our
brutal fact assessment.
2. But — and it’s a big, brutal but — We are NOT software experts,
and this reality in a web world, requires significant software, and
it sounds like also hardware expertise.
Not too bad, though perhaps slightly painful at times, we’ve
already said we can add these types of experts to our teams.
The hard part of course is empowering those experts when
Library and their expertise‘s conflict or cross. Which is of course
where our 2nd webinar will focus. (http://imteaminc.com/calendar/?mc_id=2)

Nannette:
3. And this one is a little bit harder to swallow, at least for the
Library data geeks amongst us — We are NOT universal
metadata experts.
In fact, most of our expertise is limited to:
• Bibliographic, Authority, and overarching Subject
metadata.
• Metadata trapped in strings,
• Metadata, that we are just beginning to Assess and
Liberate from these encumbrances with projects like:
o OCLC’s clustering activities
Library Linked Data in the Cloud, Chapter 4: Entity
Identification through Text Mining, section 3.3
Clustering (http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2015/
oclcresearch-library-linked-data-in-the-cloud.html) and
(http://downloads.alcts.ala.org/mw_ac/ac15_linked_data_smith-
yoshimura_godby.pdf)

o LC’s BIBFRAME project (http://www.loc.gov/bibframe/) and
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIBFRAME)

Nannette:
Though if we’re brutally honest, as leaders need to be, some of those efforts
appear — at least from the outside — to be bogged down by at best
indecision. At worst, a dated model of collaboration.
There’s that new collaboration model idea again. That old thought that:
ALL must do the same thing, at the same time, and
ALL must come along, and
ALL that we kept in MARC, must live on side by side with the new —
Drug along because We must NOT like the pioneers drop pianos, corsets,
and heirlooms behind us when they get too heavy and/or constraining to
move forward.
But here too there is good news, some evidence that folks are realizing this
idea of collaboration to be a dated trapping issue. For example, Dianne
Hillman’s recent blog post (http://managemetadata.com/blog/ October 12, 2015
Separating Ideology, Politics, and Utility)

Nannette:
“But times have changed, and we don’t all need to use the same schema to
be interoperable (just like we don’t all need to speak English or Esperanto
to communicate). But what we do need to think about is what the needs of
our organization are at all stages of the workflow: from creating, publishing,
consuming, through integrating our metadata to make it useful in the
various efforts in which we engage. “
And she goes on to say,
“As consumers, libraries and other cultural institutions are also better
served by choices. Depending on the services they’re trying to support, they
can choose what flavor of data meets their needs best, instead of being
offered only what the provider assumes they want . . . . So, it’s not about
choosing the ‘right’ metadata format, it’s about having a fuller and more
expansive notion about sharing data and learning some new skills.”

Nannette:
You might ask, did that landscape survey of yours offer us any
suggestions about how to move beyond a leadership analysis into
action?
Yes, yes it did and we’ve already touched on several of them already:
• Maxwell’s Irrefutable Law of Leadership #10. Librarians are
good, great at that. Remember those:
o Reference Librarians I was telling you about earlier, who
knew themselves, their patrons, and what was needed to
connect the two?
o Community enabling Library friends and coworkers, I
mentioned earlier, who were doing something in person so
much bigger, than their systems were doing?
They were and are winding Libraries’ own path through the
human-computer asymmetry Dorothea is talking about!

Nannette:
And this is a path forward, a next step —
Taking that knowledge, that essential context expertise
and
Connecting it with the software, metadata, hardware, and
resource expertise you’ve added, or will be adding, to your
winning teams.
To collaboratively develop the Resources and Tools needed to
navigate them in service and stewardship of your patrons and funders.
But, and again, this might be a big but, we need a new collaborative
model — have I said it 7 times yet, so that it sinks into your brain? A
new collaborative model is needed!
Toward that end, let’s go back to two of the references we’ve already
cited for suggestions:

Nannette:
First, Maxwell’s Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, Law #10: The Law of
Connection — a Library and Librarian strength!
And let’s restate it in the words of legendary NFL Coach Bill Walsh:
“’Nothing is more effective than sincere, accurate praise, and nothing is
more lame than a cookie-cutter compliment.’ Authentic leaders connect.“
So let’s connect!

Nannette:
Dorothea’s piece suggests some easy ways to do that, which brings
us to our Second re-citation, the February LJ Peer to Peer column,
that outlines three areas where we can learn from those Experts who
ARE good at what WE AREN’T. (http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/02/opinion/peer-
to-peer-review/marc-linked-data-and-human-computer-asymmetry-peer-to-peer-review/)
Places where we can build connection by simply acknowledging —
rather than “arguing with” to borrow Dianne Hillman’s turn of phrase —
they have already found the right way.
“Atomicity, also known as granularity . . . Computers can build up from
granular pieces of data, but they’re surprisingly bad at breaking compound,
complex, or ambiguous statements into their component parts.”
“Consistency. This means saying the same thing the same way every
single time it’s said. . .MARC data particularly is absolutely notorious for
inconsistency.”
“Reliable, unchanging identifiers. You think you’re bad with names?
Computers are worse.”

Nannette:
And, as the leaders we are, let’s considering going one step further.
Let’s be authentic and not just “talk the talk,” let’s “walk our talk”!
Let’s acknowledge that
“those principles won’t guarantee a perfect data structure because there’s
no such thing, but these [Publisher] principles do lead to flexible data
structures with escape hatches.”
Thus, let’s commit to:
• Adjusting our library standards, our policies and procedures, our
systems now, to NOT just endorse, BUT to use and operate on
these principles.
• Making our voices heard in our RFPs to system vendors, our
responses to standards bodies, our talking with IT and catalogers
at our institutions. Making sure they understand that these three
things are not just “nice to haves”, but givens that must be
accommodated now.
• Magnifying voices like NLM with it’s BIBFRAME Lite who are
working towards these ends and providing examples for all of us
to follow and lessons for us to learn from.
(https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/mj15/mj15_bibframe.html) and

http://alaac15.ala.org/node/29177 Session Materials ALABIbFrame-fallagren.pptx)

Nannette:
Might we even consider . . . Pulling a Steve Jobs?

Nannette:
Might we upon resumption — Yes, I said it resumption — of leadership
in a field we defined (i.e., the field of Resource Collection and User
Service),
• Call our Bill Gates, our archenemy and say:
• Microsoft and Apple —Two brands fighting for the hearts of end
users, in competitive, but very different ways —
Of was that, Library & Publishers? Libraries & Service Providers?
Libraries & IT? Libraries & Google?
• Should work more closely together,
• But we have this issue to resolve, this intellectual-property —
This Identifier, This shared users, This shared resources, This
Permissions, This Price dispute.
• Let’s resolve it.

Nannette:
Our landscape survey and it’s accompanying detailed analysis,
suggest we should.

Nannette:
Because — You remember those reasons for "management of”
instead of leadership and connection noted earlier —
Many of those assumptions or underlying things noted in recent
pieces, by:
• Leading OCLC researchers [both the Evolving Record and
Library Linked Data in the Cloud, mentioned earlier in this
presentation].
• LD4L (https://www.ld4l.org/ and http://downloads.alcts.ala.org/mw_ac/ac15_linked_
data_folsom_greenhorn_ontologist.pdf ), LD4P
(https://wiki.harvard.edu/confluence/ display/LibraryStaffDoc/LD4P+at+Harvard),
LC, NLM, IFLA and other leading Library luminaries.
• Scholarly Publishers like those behind The Scholarly Kitchen
(http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/)
• Leading publishing executives like those leading PQ and now
ExLibris, OCLC, Ebsco, and others.

Nannette:
All center on a couple, unstated, but clear facts, as we learned in our
landscape analysis and they are:
The Resource Libraries, Publishers, and all in the Resource life cycle
share
• Has a LIFE CYCLE that is no longer linear (as it was in the 19th
and 20th Centuries) — Creation is ongoing, never done, and
happening at all levels by many individuals — Authors, editors,
users, translators, commentators, publishers, distributors,
libraries, etc. simultaneously.
• Is ITSELF no longer a single set of contiguous closed entities (as
it was in the 19th and 20th Centuries) — Consumption changes
across, and even within, individuals based on their current
data→information→knowledge→wisdom need.
• FORMAT is no longer controlled by life cycle authorities —
author, editor, publisher, distributor, loaner — (as in the 19th and
20th Centuries) — Delivery method and preferred lense(s) for
viewing are individual decisions, made by the user at the point of

acquisition from a life cycle authority

Nannette:
The User Libraries, Publishers, and all in the Resource life cycle
share:
• Demand CHOICEs — Choices in content, application(s),
service(s), service options, device(s), and price.
• Expect TIMELINESS— At Web Scale, In Real Time, regardless
of what our systems are capable of.
• Require CONNECTION — Across resource and service
providers, across resources and/or parts of resources, across
locations, and through time.

Nannette:
The technology is here and it is flexible and extensible enough.
The question is are we? Can we change our thinking enough to:
• Realize that our current databases are simply flat file databases
pushed forward into relational database technology that can’t
completely or easily be made into the objects needed for the
Context-Aware Decision Support
or
Context-Driven Discovery
Our shared users demand. Corsets that we are going to have to
give up and leave behind like those pioneers.
• Completely change some of our thinking, to allow those added
experts to contribute fully (e.g., the NoSQL folks, the non-LIbrary
metadata experts), as equal partners on our teams?
To me at least, that is what Reports and changes like those going on
at the Library of Congress are demanding that we do . . . if
We/Librarians, Librarians, and their assembled teams are to remain
relevant and stay funded.

Nannette:
The question is are we? Can we change our thinking enough to:
• Actively work with those added experts to define — in terms and
definitions technologist, librarian, business person (aka funder),
and patron alike understand — Key context-based Library tools,
like our subject ontologies and identity management tools, in
technically correct, user appropriate ways.
To me at least, this is how we avoid repeating past mistakes of going it
alone, without added expertise and:
• Inadvertently, dumbing down Dewey into a thesaurus only in its
electronic form, by choosing to implement it in an incorrect
technology (SKOS). Thereby, making a key tool less in electronic
form than it is, and have been in print since its inception. (Library
Linked Data in the Cloud, Chapter 2: Modeling Library Authority Files, section 2.2.6
The Dewey Decimal Classification (http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2015/
oclcresearch-library-linked-data-in-the-cloud.html)
• Closemindedly, releasing a standard in 2010 that didn’t
absolutely require those unchanging (persistent), reliable
(consistent) identifiers for all things and parts of things. Yes,
despite some significant comment at the time, the new standard
set of Library metadata collection rules, forgot — at that late date
— to require the basest currency of the web in all its data,
numerical, nonstring identifiers. After all, you can’t do linked data,
or an index, a link list, a browse tree, a search and retrieval
system for Resources without them.

And on that note, I’ll pass it back to you, Kathryn.

Kathryn:
So let’s pause here, as our hour together comes to an end.
Admittedly, we’ve covered a lot of territory, some of it that may have
been challenging terrain to cross.
As I listened to Nannette speak, it became clear to me that there are
several things that we need to do in response to what’s happening in
the landscape in which we live and work as librarians.
First, we need to take our strengths and the leadership qualities
associated with them and maximize them by developing them further.
We need to focus on what’s central to libraries and librarianship. We
bring tremendous value to our communities, and it’s our special skills
— collecting, navigating, context-building, investigating, protecting,
and helping — that will increase our relevance moving forward.

Kathryn:
Second, we need to recognize our weaknesses and leverage outside
expertise to fill in the gaps that hold us back, that keep us silo'd, that
prevent us from reaching our potential. Again, we need partners when
it comes to software development, metadata, and resource creation
and management. If we do not, our relevance is bound to decrease.
And finally, we need to guide this team forward — to provide the
passion, the vision, the direction…the leadership … necessary to
reimagine libraries for today and tomorrow.

Orienteering for Libraries: Session 1: Surveying the Terrain

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