I'm a relative newcomer to the parallel universe that is an academic library. While my role is to provide technical support to a digitisation service I also need an understanding of how libraries and librarians work in order the solutions I suggest to have a chance of being practical. VALA and libcamp seemed like a good opportunity to do some exploring.
Delivered a showcase presentation with my boss, attended the digitisation and museum streams, with a short detour to ask a question at the Library Hack presentation. Hmmmm... some awesome stuff going on... but it's the things that aren't happening that still leave me mystified. Asking questions after a presentation is one thing, but there's nothing like a good discussion to toss ideas around. Needed more contacts... note to self ... "Sign up for Twitter" before libcamp.
Turned up for libcamp and while the registration queue was relatively quiet, the energy in the lecture theatre was electric. It was a bit daunting as a newbie so the only thing to do was throw myself in at the deep end and participate as much as possible. Did I find the answers to the great mysteries of the library? Not really, but I thought it might be useful to share a perspective of a couple of them 'from the sidelines'.
More librarians should be programmers/developers: A similar theme came up in the keynote address at the recent PARADISEC conference at the University of Melbourne.It's pretty obvious that the best people to know how software should work are the people who use it, but the proportion of people with the skills, expertise and inclination to do both is likely to be relatively small. A slightly different spin on this theme may be that librarians (or humanities researchers) need to engage more with programmers and developers so that they have a better idea of what the requirements of the applications are. The administrator of the catalogue is more like a high priest, the holder of special knowledge known to few others with special access to communicate with the vendor gods. Imaging what the catalogue would be like if every software engineer working on it was required to catalogue 10,000 assorted items before releasing a new version ;-)
Ditching the catalogue: As someone who is trying to use a library catalogue as a data source I can assure you that there are certainly many problems and challenges with the catalogue. In my search for answers I found a lot of contradictions... studies looking for metadata schemas to employ that chose MARC21 because of the granularity it provided while other studies show that only a small percentage of the schema is actually in use. I've only ever caught a glimpse of a backend screen of our catalogue. Given the complexity of MARC21 I'd expect it has some kick-arse features for efficiently adding data... but given the spreadsheets of book lists we receive I rather suspect that this is not the case.
To over-simplify things, I'd suggest that the systems and data frameworks required to 'replace' catalogues would be very similar to those required to make creating and managing catalogue records more efficient. Perhaps we may even see a re-invention of the catalogue at a later time?
I won't rant about embedded metadata because I've waffled on far too long as it is. I really enjoyed libcamp. Every conference should have an unconference! :-)
Ben
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