An Emergent Theory of Digital Library Metadata: Enrich then Filter

An Emergent Theory of Digital Library Metadata

Enrich then Filter

Getaneh Alemu

Brett Stevens

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Authors biography

Re-thinking library metadata

1. Introduction

The construction of metadata

Metadata categories

The continued relevance of metadata

2. Existing standards-based metadata approaches and principles

The principle of sufficiency and necessity

The principle of user convenience

The principle of representation

The principle of standardisation

Integration and interoperability

Guiding assumptions for the principle of standardisation

Controlled vocabularies

A priori metadata

Limitations of contemporary standards-based metadata approaches

The future of metadata standards

Summary

3. The Web 2.0 paradigm and the emergence of socially-constructed metadata approaches

Web 2.0 concepts

Platform for two-way collaboration

Users as co-creators

The wisdom of crowds

Variable participation

Openness

Post-hoc quality control

Web 2.0 technologies and implications for libraries

The case of Wikipedia versus encyclopaedia Britannica

Limitations of the Web 2.0 paradigm

The social construction of metadata

4. The emergence of socially-constructed metadata in a mixed metadata approach

The positioning of post-hoc metadata creation

The potential benefit of involving users

Current platforms proactive metadata co-creation

Users as proactive metadata co-creators

Metadata diversity

Metadata scalability and variable metadata participation

Metadata aggregation

Network effect and wisdom of crowds

Self-healing system

Affixing provenance to metadata

Collective metadata intelligence

Motivation for socially-constructed metadata approaches

Challenges to implementing socially-constructed metadata approaches

Metadata quality control

Towards a mixed metadata approach

5. The principle of metadata enriching

Metadata diversity

Metadata granularity

Platform for metadata enriching

6. The principle of metadata linking

Enriching via linking

Current status of linking in libraries

Resource usage patterns, zeitgeist and emergent metadata

Facet-based navigations

Metadata enriching with links

Challenges to adopt linking technologies in libraries

Re-conceptualising library metadata as granular metadata statements

Unique metadata identifiers

Integrating socially-constructed metadata

Facilitate serendipitous discovery of information resources

Summary

7. The principle of metadata openness

Improving institutional transparency and accountability

Metadata sharing and return on investment

Improved user experiences

Degrees of metadata openness and metadata licensing

Summary

8. The principle of metadata filtering

Emerging user preferences and convenience

Searching, manual filtering and triangulation

Contextualised and personalised post-hoc metadata filtering

Personalisation and privacy

Recommendation services

Summary

9. The theory of metadata enriching and filtering

Integrating the four principles

The theory of metadata enriching and filtering

Separation of metadata content (enriching) and interface (filtering)

Separation of about-ness from medium

Enriching and filtering as a non-deterministic process

From user-centred to user-driven metadata enriching and filtering

Enriching as a continuous process

Metadata diversity better conforming to users’ needs

Seamless linking

‘Useful’ rather than ‘perfect’ metadata

Post-hoc user-driven filtering

Summary

Glossary

Abbreviations

References

Index

Copyright

Chandos Publishing is an imprint of Elsevier

225 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA 02451, USA

Langford Lane, Kidlington, OX5 1GB, UK

Copyright © 2015 G. Alemu and B. Stevens. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Details on how to seek permission, further information about the Publisher’s permissions policies and our arrangements with organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center and the Copyright Licensing Agency, can be found at our website: www.elsevier.com/permissions.

This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than as may be noted herein).

Notices

Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

ISBN: 978-0-08-100385-5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939551

For information on all Chandos Publishing visit our website at http://store.elsevier.com/

Authors biography

Dr Getaneh Alemu is an information professional and researcher who is currently working as a Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Southampton Solent University, United Kingdom. He has worked and studied in higher education for more than 15 years in Ethiopia, Belgium, Norway, Estonia and the United Kingdom. He worked as a lecturer and Head University Librarian in Mekelle University, Ethiopia. He also worked as a research assistant on a digital preservation project at the University of Portsmouth. Getaneh’s research focus includes Metadata, Digital Libraries, Open Access, Linked Data and Web 2.0 technologies.

Dr Brett Stevens is a Principal Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Programmes for the School of Creative Technologies, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom. After joining Portsmouth in 2001, teaching multimedia production, virtual reality and research methods at Masters level, Brett has since become Faculty Research Degrees Coordinator for the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries. His research focuses on user interaction, with a focus on Augmented and Virtual Reality, Computer Games and Computer Animation. He is a Member of the British Computing Society and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Re-thinking library metadata

The discipline of library and information science has developed to play a pivotal role in providing conceptual and technical solutions to library standards agencies, libraries and library system developers. However, the availability of complete, timely, accurate and quality information sources, along with the emergence of new technologies, has changed users’ expectations. This, in turn has prompted existing metadata principles, approaches, systems and tools to be called into question. This is partly due to library standards that are underpinned by theories and principles that were developed in the context of physical libraries and print resources. These do not always reflect the heterogeneity and diversity of users as well as the ever increasing size and variety of digital collections. Hence it is imperative that future metadata approaches are underpinned by relevant conceptual principles.

This book is informed by 4 years of in-depth interviews with metadata practitioners, researchers and academics from across continents. It presents and discusses four emerging metadata principles, namely metadata Enriching, Linking, Openness and Filtering. The integration of these principles resulted in the emergence of a new theory of digital library metadata: The Theory of Metadata Enriching and Filtering. Within the context of current challenges, the theory stipulates that metadata should be enriched by melding standards-based (a priori) and socially-constructed (post-hoc) metadata, and that this cannot be optimally utilised unless the resulting metadata is contextually and semantically linked to both internal and external information sources. Moreover, in order to exploit the full benefits of such linking, metadata must be made openly accessible, where it can be shared, reused, mixed and matched, thus reducing metadata duplication. Ultimately, metadata that has been enriched (by linking to other openly accessible metadata) should be filtered for each user, via a flexible, contextual, personalised and reconfigurable interface.

The theory provides a holistic framework demonstrating the interdependence between expert-curated and socially-constructed metadata, wherein the former helps to structure the latter, whilst the latter provides diversity to the former. This theory also suggests a conceptual shift from the current metadata principle of sufficiency and necessity, which has resulted in metadata simplicity, to the new principle of metadata enriching, where information objects are described using a multiplicity of users’ perspectives (interpretations). Central to this is the consideration of users as pro-active metadata creators, rather than mere consumers. Librarians adopt the role of creators of a priori metadata and experts at providing structure, granularity and interoperability to the post-hoc, user-created, metadata. The theory elegantly delineates metadata functions into two: enriching (metadata content) and filtering (interface). By providing underlying principles, this should enable standards-agencies, librarians and systems developers to better address the changing needs of users as well as to adapt to recent technological advances.

The emergent theory of digital library metadata, although buttressed by two seemingly simple concepts, is nonetheless a first rigorous attempt in library and information science (LIS) research to integrate the concepts of enriching, linking, openness and filtering into principles and subsequently into a holistic digital library metadata theory. By making the case for mixed metadata (standards-based and socially-constructed metadata), the theory brings into focus the importance of re-conceptualising current metadata principles. Hence suggesting a shift from an objectivistic ontology and deterministic metadata approaches that chiefly focus on metadata simplicity to a social constructivist, interpretive ontology and non-deterministic continuous and evolving process of metadata enriching.

Keywords: Libraries, metadata, metadata enriching, metadata linking, linked data, metadata openness, metadata filtering, cataloguing, MARC, RDA, a priori metadata, post-hoc metadata, digital libraries, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Semantic Web, RDF, OPAC, socially-constructed metadata, standards-based metadata.

1

Introduction

The organisation of library collections has had an enduring history. The description of books through cataloguing has played a significant role in identifying, locating and finding the required item on library shelves. However, the volume and diversity of digital information resources now available, with ubiquitous access to the web, has bought new challenges to libraries along with a potential solution, in the form of metadata. Metadata provides the descriptive, structural and administrative information necessary to effectively access and utilise digital information objects. However, current library metadata standards are based upon the conceptual underpinnings that were developed for print book collections and the library card catalogue. Understanding the history, typology, limitations and relevance of existing metadata approaches is important when considering the provision of adequate description for the growing volume and diversity of information objects.

Keywords

Cataloguing; metadata; metadata standards; information organisation; digital libraries; library and information science

The main function of library catalogues was originally limited to conducting an inventory of the library’s holdings. However, widespread usage of the printing press as well as the progressive industrialisation of institutions, both of which contributed to the growth of library collections, forced libraries to change (Wright, 2007). They then not only produced listings of their collections for their own use but also provided the same to their patrons so that the latter could also determine what book(s), on a given subject and by which particular author(s) were available on the shelves.

However, the current volume of intellectual works (information objects) available is unprecedented. Including ancient civilisations, for example Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Indian, Mayan and Aztec (see Wright, 2007), contemporary human endeavour and the relative democratisation of information creation, empowered by the World Wide Web, has resulted in an ever increasing need for information management. This increase in size and diversity of information resulted in a phenomenon often referred to as information overload but also known as info glut, data smog or information tsunami (Blair, 2010; Morville, 2005; Toffler, 1970, 1980; Weinberger, 2007, 2012; Wright, 2007).

To alleviate these and related challenges, the discipline of library and information science has developed to play a pivotal role in providing conceptual and technical solutions (Svenonius, 2000). The discipline brings the multi-faceted functions pertaining to the identification, selection, storage, retrieval, evaluation and utilisation of information under the field of information organisation (Blair, 2010; IFLA, 2009; Lagoze, 2010; Svenonius, 2000). However, current practice is rooted in a long history of incremental developments and it is important to see the current theory development in this context.

One of the pioneers of modern cataloguing was Sir Anthony Panizzi who is credited with publishing the 91 ‘Rules for the Compilation of the Catalogue’ in 1841, whilst he was at the British Museum’s library. Panizzi’s goal was to devise a system that could definitely solve the problem of how to give access to the right book, including its various editions, if any, as well as others on a related topic to the right user, at the right time. Panizzi ‘felt the old catalogue was too limited, linear and one-dimensional, proposing instead a new, intricate set of rules for identifying additional meta information such as editions, publishers, dates and places of publication’ (Wright, 2007). Panizzi’s work focused on devising multiple access or entry points (such as author, title and subject) for identifying, distinguishing, relating and accessing works and their granular forms of editions, translations and formats. By and large, Panizzi is considered a pioneer of the card catalogue and his contributions to library cataloguing ‘would go down as a landmark in the history of library science’ (Wright, 2007).

Following Panizzi’s ideas, in the United States, the simultaneous efforts of Charles Cutter, who published ‘Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalogue’, and Melville Dewey, for his landmark development of the Dewey Decimal Classification scheme in 1876, are given particular prominence (Denton, 2007; Weinberger, 2007; Wright, 2007). However, whilst Cutter focused on cataloguing, Dewey put emphasis on classifying knowledge into 10 major divisions, each of which was subsequently subdivided into 10 parts and so on. Both Cutter and Dewey strived to improve the discoverability of books on library shelves and in making the efforts of library patrons easier by collocating similar books together (Coyle, 2010; Wright, 2007). The Dewey Decimal Classification scheme has subsequently become extremely successful, having been widely adopted throughout the world (Weinberger, 2007; Wright, 2007). However, it is also important to note that an alternative, Library of Congress Classification scheme, developed by Herbert Putnam in 1897, is also used by several libraries across the world including the Library of Congress itself (Denton, 2007; Wright, 2007).

Moving on to Europe, Paul Otlet, after having reviewed the efforts of Melville Dewey’s DDC and Panizzi’s cataloguing scheme, came to the conclusion that the catalogues and classification systems led the patron ‘as far as the individual book’ but not to the relationship of its contents to that of others. He devised a system called the ‘réseau’ – a tool for creating semantic links between documents and keeping track of the annotations made by readers. These eventually formed new trails of documents, all of them semantically interconnected (Wright, 2007). Day (2001) and Wright (2007) agree that, as a pioneer of documentation and information science, Otlet deserves credit as a precursor of the web for his vision of semantic links and associations between documents in 1934, well