1, 2, 3,…
Jangle has been around for a little while, but I just came across a video of Ross Singers’ “Lightening Talk” on it at the recent Code4Lib conference, and was struck by a comparison with Ex Libris’ Primo product. The latter, of course, is a big, slick, vendor-supplied and -supported, complete “discovery and delivery” total system that purports to be a “one-stop solution” for library users. It isn’t quite that, naturally, and it is expensive — but assuming it comes anywhere near, it’s nonetheless both intriguing and impressive.
Jangle, on the other hand, is a typical open-source bootstrap operation — though with a Talis connection — with threads literal and figurative dangling from code. Unlike Primo, it doesn’t have a general repository for locally held or collected metadata — it’s really just an interface or “layer”, fitting between a library’s various repositories (including the OPAC) and “users”, whether human or machine (i.e., other systems, like LMSs, campus portals, etc.). But as such, it looks like it may be able to offer a similar sort of “one-stop” functionality, albeit with help from additional systems, and with some (maybe a lot of!) tweaking.
What it really offers, though, is the possibility of a different approach to library systems altogether. Primo, while at least (and finally) getting away from the idea that the OPAC constitutes a library’s primary discovery platform or “sun”, continues the era of big, costly, one-size-fits-all, integrated systems that have held libraries in chains for decades, and are now holding them back. Having invested so much in them, we can’t easily move away from them, and so are driven to continue to use them in situations and under circumstances that are no longer appropriate — the old “when all you’ve got is a hammer” syndrome. The alternative is to move toward less “finished”, and certainly less integrated, more “loosely coupled” systems (and even portions or components of systems), that are nevertheless much more flexible, adaptable, and re-usable for that very reason. For that alternative, Jangle is a good illustration.
Interesting that Microsoft announced its abandonment of its own “Large Scale Digitization Initiative” (LSDI) just as I’m writing this (though I guess only interesting to me). Their effort never had the kind of attention and cachet that Google’s had, though they did, apparently, manage to digitize 3/4 of a million books and some 80 million articles; they also developed one of the more intriguing user interfaces for their search and browse functions — so it’s sad to see them go.
Nevertheless, the Google juggernaut seems to be rolling on as before, and libraries are still struggling to catch up with the technical, organizational, social, and cultural implications. A recent White Paper (via Lorcan Dempsey again) by Oya Rieger, issued by CLIR, entitled “Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization“, goes some way toward getting a handle on these. I haven’t read the whole thing (it’s long), but I found the conclusions particularly interesting in the emphasis they give to two important ways in which these sorts of LSDIs are driving change in current library organization and culture: the need for much closer, more systematic collaboration among institutions to take advantage of the network, and the need for a more “agile”, risk-taking organization in general. Here’s an especially telling paragraph near the end:
One virtue of LSDIs is that the contributing libraries are gaining experience in interacting and negotiating with commercial information organizations, which function very differently than do academic institutions. As John Voloudakis has noted, today’s need for faster responsiveness has introduced the “adaptive organization” strategic planning model for IT.116 This model is characterized by an institutional focus on sensing and responding to the evolving environment as quickly as possible. In today’s fluid IT environment, traditional strategic planning and consensus models are unlikely to support the decision-making processes of research libraries. There will be increasing pressure for quick responses to opportunities and changes. It will also be essential that libraries develop scalable and flexible infrastructures that facilitate rapid execution. Equally important is learning to take calculated risks. The summary of discussions at Digital Preservation in State Government: Best Practices Exchange 2006 notes that there are no “best practices” for digital preservation.117 Instead, there are merely “good-enough” solutions. Holding out for an ideal solution is often not feasible; moreover, implementing less-than-perfect solutions can enable institutions to be flexible, modular, and nimble so that they can continue to refine their strategies as new options become available.
A number of posts have come to my attention lately all dealing, one way or another, with the notion of “Service Oriented Architecture” or SOA. Here, for example, is one that talks about a “Nice, lightweight SOA implementation” (May 18/08 ) as an illustration of some of the benefits of this approach; which in turn refers to Richard Ackerman’s presentation on SOA at the 2006 Access Conference (Dec 20/06) — Ackerman’s further reflections:
The main focus for library technology seems to be around the catalogue and adding layers on top of it, not breaking it apart into services. There still seems to be limited concrete action in working on library SOA to integrate with the various frameworks that are out there.
…
I basically continue to be concerned about a lot of diverging wheel-reinvention activities, rather than seeing a lot of unifying activities starting to deliver good models and services.
And then found this on Paul Walker’s blog, “SOA and reusable knowledge” (Feb 26/08), which, as the title hints, downplays the idea of re-usable code, in favour of the interesting idea of re-usable knowledge (of the business or organization), and speaks of:
… the knowledge to be gained from adopting an SOA approach, with the intention that this can help organisations plan and prioritise their development efforts. While ‘re-use’ is a stated potential benefit of the e-Framework, it refers more to the re-use of understanding, documentation & design.
The “e-Framework” he refers to above is the “e-framework for Education and Research“, initiated from Australia and the UK. Walker’s inspiration appears to be this Feb 25/08 article in Infoworld, which, after noting the usual confusion and disappointment so commonly associated with buzzwords (and “SOA” is one), concludes:
Early adopters have discovered a harder-to-measure but more practical benefit to SOA: increased agility, Finley said. “Agility” in this context means being able to deploy new projects faster based on having adopted SOA as the fundamental approach to IT, in turn letting the business reap benefits from its IT initiatives faster.
Finley noted that the projects don’t happen faster because of code reuse. Instead, it is the changed mind-set that SOA brings to development and management of technology as a whole that provides the real benefit, Finley said.
What’s particularly interesting about this, to me, is the notion that “SOA” might well define an approach that goes beyond technical developments altogether, but is extendable to organizational structure and culture as well — perhaps involving, for example, breaking down the organization into service components, and then making such components available to parties, groups, or other components external to the organization….
So, no sooner do I cite a Karen Coyle paper relegating RDA to the 20th century, then I run across a Karen Coyle post that updates it significantly: “Astonishing Announcement: RDA goes 2.0“. This stems from a meeting at the British Library Apr 30-May 1/07, in which it was agreed to attempt to merge RDA and Dublin Core approaches to machine-readable descriptive elements, throwing in FRBR/FRAD and RDF for good measure. Which is maybe a little obscure, especially at this point, but Karen includes a helpful interview with one of the meeting participants:
KC: What does it mean that there will be a “formal RDA Element vocabulary?”
D: It will look something like the Dublin Core registered terms. They will be both human readable (as displayed in a browser) and machine readable (in a format like RDF). Try clicking on this link [was broken, but I believe this is what was meant], and you can see on the right the different machine-readable formats.
KC: What happens now to the “tome” that has been developed through the RDA process?
D: The “instructions” as we see them in the RDA documentation, will not be affected. The element vocabulary, the formal vocabulary, will be separated out, and the documentation will point to the formal vocabulary terms. Many users of the documentation will not see the formal element vocabulary and may not know that it exists. The vocabulary, however, will be behind the online tools that are being created. This will make it easier to create a system that allows people to click on a term and get a definition or to see the related hierarchy.
She summarizes her impressions this way: “Imagine a library that is seamlessly integrated with the semantic web…. we seem to be on our way.”
Well, my ignorance of this up til now certainly illustrates the point that I’m not a cataloguer, as in my disclaimer in the previous post. But I’m still concerned — the problem of trying to apply a top-down authority approach (“control”) to highly variable, highly mutable, often evanescent digital data isn’t really addressed by this, nor are the criticisms of attempting to cram print and digital together in a single compendious set of protocols, nor the worry that the very effort to implement such a set will only add to the institutional inertia carrying libraries further down a blind alley.
Still, I can certainly agree that even the attempt to make the massive RDA protocols programmatically accessible is a Good Thing.
By the way, re: responses to that Final Report of the WoGroFuBiCo, here’s the British Library’s. (A key point: they agree with the Joint Response of the Library of Congress et al. — and disagree, therefore, with the Final Report — that work on RDA should continue.)
It’s been a little while now since the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control issued its Final Report (PDF) (Jan 10/08), but a couple of weeks ago the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Agricultural Library issued their “Joint Statement” (PDF) (May 1/08 ) in response. This statement was in fact in advance of a “full response” from the LC itself, and was apparently prompted by the need to quell some anxiety/confusion that has arisen around one part of one section of one recommendation — 4.2.2: “Temporarily suspend work on RDA [Resource Description and Access]“, a result of ongoing uncertainty around the implementation of FRBR among possibly other things. In Deanna Marcum’s (the receiver of the Final Report) own words, one of the reasons for this “counterintuitive” early response was “because so many librarians are asking about the national libraries’ plans to implement the proposed code [i.e., RDA]“, and the joint response clearly indicated that these institutions jointly turned down the recommendation to suspend work, however temporarily.
Now, IANAC, but I thought this rather hurried rejection of that admittedly controversial recommendation was a matter of some concern, for reasons like the following:
- It’s not just FRBR that’s still unclear — it’s the whole strategy of attempting once again to impose an international, top-down “control” on data that can be described as “bibliographic” only in the most tenuous sense; the uncertainties surrounding FRBR and its implementation is but the tip of that iceberg.
- The retooling of various versions of the ILS in order to implement RDA looks to be a slow and costly process for vendors and libraries alike — and this, among other sources of significant investment, will further the problem of institutional inertia that has impeded libraries’ ability to respond with agility to environmental change; we’ll end up, once again, with just a more expensive version of the catalogue as the hammer that tries to turn every problem into a nail.
- Bizarrely, I find myself close to agreeing with Michael Gorman, though in a sense that’s quite different from his usual blinkered view of things — he thinks that a simple(r) revision of AACR2 would have sufficed to handle library information resources; I think that’s likely true if you precede the phrase “information resources” with the word “traditional”. That is, if we separated out the items of the library’s physical collection we’d find that our usual approaches to managing them continue to work fine (more or less) — and then we could concentrate on much more flexible, “loosely-coupled” approaches to managing all the other resources/services that the nodal library must mediate.
- .
Roy Tennant is referring here to the WoGroFuBiCo Final Report above, but I think the words pertain to the entire RDA effort:
So here’s the thing: you may or may not have noticed it, but we just went from a world where we were the gatekeepers to information to one in which we are hanging on for dear life. We can either wise up or get out of the game. I prefer to wise up.
PS (Update): For a close and extensive critique of RDA — from the standpoint of someone grounded in present realities, however volatile, as opposed to mired in the past — it’s hard to do better than Karen Coyle’s paper in D-Lib (Jan-Feb 2007), “Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century” (emphasis added).
A while back, the Economist published one of its special sections, this one on mobile computing — intro entitled “Nomads at last”. This is a prominent theme, as we’ve seen, in the new wave of network-induced changes that some are referring to as “Web 3.0″, but what makes this section particularly interesting is that its focus is upon the social rather than technical aspects of this change:
SHERRY TURKLE, the psychologist at MIT who studies the nexus between people and gadgets, believes that the tools of mobility are leading to “the emergence of a new type of person”.
Which may not involve an actual speciation event, of course — though that might be something to contemplate — but it does seem to involve some significant implications for the ways in which we think of space or spaces, from urban geographical, to travel, to local, to personal. That includes the structures we erect to define internal spaces — what The Economist calls the “new oases” — and that includes libraries. In that connection, it’s interesting to compare the description of the structure used to represent this impact — MIT’s “Stata Centre” (sic) — with UBC’s new Irving K. Barber Centre:
Stata, says William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT who worked with Mr Gehry on the centre’s design, was conceived as a new kind of “hybrid space”.
This is best seen in the building’s “student street”, an interior passage that twists and meanders through the complex and is open to the public 24 hours a day. It is dotted with nooks and crannies. Cafés and lounges are interspersed with work desks and whiteboards, and there is free Wi-Fi everywhere. Students, teachers and visitors are cramming for exams, flirting, napping, instant-messaging, researching, reading and discussing. No part of the student street is physically specialised for any of these activities. Instead, every bit of it can instantaneously become the venue for a seminar, a snack or romance.
The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century.
Via Lorcan Dempsey
– was the title of a book by Michael Lewis that came out in 2000. It was essentially about one Jim Clark, who had founded Silicon Graphics and then Netscape, as he tries for a Trifecta by starting up a health care website called “Healtheon”. Shortly after the book came out, of course, the (first?) Internet bubble burst. Today, none of the three companies he founded are around, at least as independent entities. There’s certainly an irony, and maybe a lesson, there as we contemplate the “new new thing” buzz swirling about Web 3.0.
But, that said, there remains the nagging sense, from disparate signs and portents, that something significantly new may really be emerging, again. A link made in passing in the previous post probably deserves a little more focus, since it collects a wide range of views on this intriguing possibility — this is a post by Jonas Bolinder, on his blog devoted to “Web 3.0″, entitled “Web 3.0 – The Semantic, Implicit, Mobile, or Distributed Web?“. Despite have a blog focused on the label, Bolinder is no mere “Web 3.0″ cheerleader — as one of his posts notes, it looks as though the term may have peaked as a buzzword in October/07, and a post today asks if it’s “Time to Throw Web 3.0 in the Deadpool?“. Still, as the previous summary indicated, there seem to be a number of more or less distinct but related phenomena that are aspects of this change, one of which being the interesting notion of an “implicit web”, of “recommendation and personalization” (see also this Guardian article by Jemima Kiss). It’s all very impressionistic at this stage, admittedly, but one impression that seems to be coming clearer is the dissolution of what were once thought of as stable structures like “web sites” and even “web pages” — information and data are becoming looser, and highly mutable, often created and consumed on the fly, transported in machine readable streams and units, filtered and reconstituted in varying ways only at the point of need, and only for the duration of need. The information is in the “cloud”, and the cloud is everywhere.
– hype or spin?
There’s another possibility, of course, which is that it’s on to something, as the ending of the previous post hinted. I think many people, however, have quite understandably grown wary and skeptical of the use of these sorts of bland, meaningless labels as simply a means of generating mostly a lot of froth and buzz. For an unfortunate example of that, we only need to look at another article in that first issue of Nodalities (PDF), “The Value of Web 3.0″, by Mills Davis. As in this (p. 4):
Information-centric patterns of computing have reached the limit of what they can provide to cope with problems of scale, complexity, security, mobility, rich media interaction, and autonomic behavior.
Web 3.0 will solve these problems and lay a foundation for the coming ubiquitous Web of connected intelligences. The Web 3.0 solution, simply put, is to give the internet a knowledge space.
Wow. “Connected intelligences”, no less. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were a real effort to add substance, or specificity, to that notion of “knowledge”, but instead he just falls back on the by now too-familiar and banal repetition of the coming wonders of “semantic” machines:
Current systems including the internet are designed to operate with predefined parameters. Change spells trouble. Mobility is a problem. Semantic ecosystems, however, will be futureproof, able to grow dynamically, evolve, adapt, self-organize, and self-protect.
Riiight. Whatever, dude.
On the other hand….
I received an interesting email from a colleague today that pointed to another article on the label, “Web 3.0 Through the Ages“, by Josh Catone, on the ReadWriteWeb blog, and this one’s a distinct improvement:
It already feels like we’ve been talking about Web 3.0 for ages, even though we don’t know yet know exactly what Web 2.0 is. What are the various ways that Web 3.0 has been defined over the past three years, and why is it helpful to talk about what the next web will look like?
His summary of a number of more or less different definitions or meanings the label has acquired in the last little while is particularly interesting as possibly indicating some converging developments:
Blogger Jonas Bolinder has painstakingly assembled a list of some of the most talked about definitions of Web 3.0 over the past three years. He’s broken them down into 4 basic definition groups: the Semantic Web (which is what might enable the “decentralized me”), the proliferation of APIs and web services (aren’t we already living that?), the rise of the mobile web, smart devices, and web applications (maybe the just launched Live Mesh has something to do with Web 3.0?), and the “implicit web.”
It’s starting to sound a bit like the story of the blind men and the elephant — there may well be a common emerging reality underlying these distinct phenomena and focuses, and the label may be the least important aspect of it.
UPDATE: Best comment to above RRW post: “Web 3.0 is yesterday’s news. Everybody I know has already moved on to Web 4.0″
– was the name I’d wanted for this blog, until I found that it was already taken by a blog and magazine put out by Talis, and so switched (back) to “Nodal”. Not that anyone would be likely to be confused, of course, since this blog is all but invisible, but just that it seemed better not to look as though I’m appropriating a much more prominent title on similar themes. Still can’t let go of that “nodal”, though.
That other blog and magazine are certainly worth checking out. Talis is an interesting ILS vendor in the UK that seems to have staked a good part of its corporate future on developments involving the “Semantic Web”. As its blog subtitle perhaps indicates, though, that somewhat nebulous or abstract notion may be evolving toward more concrete applications — such as the notion of “Linked Data”. Here’s just a hint of that development, from an article by Tom Heath (PDF) in the first issue of “Nodalities”:
Grouped under this theme [of publishing as opposed to consuming Linked Data] are a number of papers that highlight how existing data sets held within social media and photo sharing sites, library catalogues, enterprise and administrative databases, institutional repositories and even plain HTML documents can be exposed on the Web according to Linked Data principles.
On the “consumption” side of Linked Data, we have this:
The Linked Data browsers that will be presented take a range of forms, from add-in widgets for Web pages, to location-enabled applications for mobile phones, to desktop browsers that can also publish back to the Web of Data.
Hmm. Web widgets, the mobile web, the semantic web — is something happening here?
