It’s time for my second post about the ArLiS conference in Minneapolis, and today I will be writing about my first full day at the conference, Friday. As I am looking at my notes from the day, there was one very good session, and the rest were a “mixed bag,” as I like to say.
My first session on Friday was the opening plenary, which ostensibly was about copyright, and how bridges can be built between educational users and copyright holders. Really, the presentation was more about orphan works and the experience Jule Sigall had with trying to deal politically with those works. Frankly, I felt it was a bit off topic from the program, and seemed to be of less interest to the librarians than to the visual resources professionals. I can see how, broadly, his presentation applied to librarians, and I think that copyright is an important topic (and minefield) for our profession. I just felt a bit misled by the title, I suppose.
Following the opening plenary was the session Beyond the silos of the LAMS, and was about the integration and convergence of libraries, archives, and museums (thus the acronym). This is a topic that really interests me, going back to my earliest days of library school. As a matter of fact, you’ll more than likely see a post here about that very topic in the near future. One of the first ideas presented in this session was that the unique collections of the library, archive, and museum are hidden by separate systems – meaning their metadata are not integrated. Oftentimes, the library has a catalog, the archives have finding aids, and the museum has a collection database – three very different systems with different needs and requirements. One of the first steps to integrating all these resources for our patrons is using some kind of discovery system – which precludes at least some of the information about the objects in the collection being shared in a way that can be read by the discover tool. As a matter of fact, one of the panelists stated that they use Summon, but that it does not accept EAD records, which is essential to the concept of moving between the “silos.” Of course, the panelists also pointed out the recent OCLC report, upon which the session was based. They also highlighted the need for an overall metadata strategy – which is key to being able to integrate all the metadata into a unified search tool. A thought that occurred to me in this session is that libraries and archives within museums are uniquely positioned, as the curatorial staff are experts in their subject fields, and so can advise the library and archives on pertinent additions, bibliographies, and key themes that support the museum’s collection. I think overall the concept I came away with from this session was that users don’t care if you are a library, an archive, and a museum, and so we (institutions) need to “get over ourselves” and facilitate the sharing of our resources with people that want them.
My next session was one that was great (if you trust the three pages of notes I made) – it was all about one of my interests as a cataloger, the semantic web. I know I’ve talked a great deal about this topic on the blog previously, but only in the abstract. The session at ArLiS was led by people who are in the midst of the creation of the semantic web – so it was exciting for me to hear from these presenters. I could go into great depth about this, but suffice it to say that the semantic web is still in its infant stages. Much standardization needs to be done in order for libraries to even begin to look at how this new schema can be implemented. There are too many methods, and there is no clear leader or exemplar for the implementation of the semantic web. This is not to say, though, that there are no neat things being done in the semantic web framework, though. Amy Lucker from NYU had some very pertinent points about the use of the semantic web in the catalog. She highlighted the strengths of controlled vocabularies (that they create syndetic structures, it helps with collocation and differentiation as well), but also pointed out the problems associated with the combination of the semantic web and those controlled vocabularies we use in cataloging. She highlighted the lack of interoperability of languages, and the need to maintain the syndetic relationships that are so important in a controlled vocabularies as just a few of the problems with the implementation of the semantic web in the catalog. For me, I still think the semantic web is great, but it’s just not ready for libraries to use it to its full extent.
Friday concluded with a really great welcome party at the Walker, where I met all sorts of great people (John Maier at Pratt, and Ross Day at the Met, and Allen Townsend at Yale) and enjoyed that really cool space. Stay tuned for Saturday, and let me hear from you if you have comments or questions!
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