Managing statements

From Records To Statements

Taking the Leap

ALA Dallas, 1/20/122

What’s different about

statement data?

Library data compliance has been defined by consensus since MARC was a pup

But outside the MARC silo we need different strategies

To accomplish this we need to look at value, costs and investments very differently

Flickr photo by Robert Jagendorf


What Are Statements?

• A MARC record can be viewed as an aggregation of statements• All the attribute = value pairs relate to the same

resource

• In a linked data world, statements are dis-aggregated and each carries the relationship to a resource as the ‘subject’ of each triple

• Though it seems more complicated to deal with statements in isolation, it is really simpler (the complications are that we know little about it)


Future Metadata Strategies

• Statement level rather than record level management

• Records as units of transport rather than units of management

• Emphasis on evaluation coming in and provenance going out

• Shift in human effort from creating standard cataloging to careful human intervention in machine-based processes

• Extensive use of data created outside libraries

• Intelligent re-use of our legacy data


http://dcpapers.dublincore.org/ojs/pubs/article/view/770/766

Managing Statements




[Possible] New Roles for Librarians

• Aggregators of relevant metadata content• Developing methods to expose & redistribute

without a central node

• Modeling and documenting best practices in metadata creation, improvement and exposure• Application profiles important in this effort

• Developers of vocabularies using bibliographic relationships

• Innovators in using social networks to enhance bibliographic description


Re-Thinking MetadataManagement



Harvest/Ingest Plan

• Choosing data sources• There are known sources out there, some of

them are of good quality, others are usable, with improvement

• Tools are needed to help pull data, validate it, cache it, and set it up for evaluation• Most of these tasks can/should be set up with

automated processes, with alerts to human minders when something goes wrong



Metadata Evaluation

• Evaluation needs to scale well beyond random sampling

• Statistical and data mining tools need to be brought into the process, to provide both ‘overview’ and specifics of whole data sets

• Improvement specifications, techniques, quality criteria and tools need to be iterative, granular, and shareable



Testing, Monitoring & Re-evaluation

• Data will change, and processes must be able to detect that, based on data profiles• Human intervention should be limited

• Tools need to be built so that non-programmers can run them• Reading logs, monitoring error reports, checking

results, writing specs, can/should be done by data specialists (a.k.a. catalogers w/training)

• Looking for opportunities for programmers and catalogers to learn together is essential



Re-distribution Plan

• If we improve data, we need to expose how we did it (and what we did), for the use of downstream consumers• New metadata provenance efforts designed to do

this at the statement level

• This strategy can only exist successfully where open licenses allow innovation and wide re-use

• Ideally, distribution AND redistribution should be accomplished with Application Profiles


Will This Shift Cost Too Much?

• It’s the human effort that costs us• Cost of traditional cataloging is far too high, for

increasingly dubious value

• Our current investments have reached the end of their usefulness• All the possible efficiencies for traditional cataloging have

already been accomplished

• Waiting for leadership from the big players costs us valuable time with no guarantees of results

• We need to figure out how to invest in more distributed innovation and focused collaboration


ROI in the LOD World

• Free metadata is essential in a ‘culture economy’• We need eyeballs, attention, connection for our

content!

• Thinking about ROI based on recovering the cost of creating metadata is a dead end

• To drive people to your content, you need to put your data out there• But once it’s there, it’s out of your control, and we

need to get comfortable with that

Thank you! Questions?

Contact info: [email protected]

Metadata Matters: http://managemetadata.com/blog

ALA Dallas, 1/20/12 18

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://managemetadata.com/blog



Technology

Managing statements