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™

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:

ALLmust do the same thing, at the same time, and

ALLmust come along, and

ALL that we kept in MARC, must live on side by side with the new —

Drug along becauseWe 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

Leadership & Management