Meditations on Metadata

Fellow Metadata Students! In light of this week’s readings, check out this old (August 31, 2005) Onion article:  Google Announces Plan to Destroy All Information It Can’t Index. 

The readings for this week are about mass digitization, but there seemed to be a kind of sub-theme, too.  Weibel, Peters, Bearman, and Brantley all raised issues related to the apparent  lack of transparency in Google’s book digitization efforts, as well as concerns about a commercial, for-profit business owning such a project.  The readings caused me to remind myself that no matter how ubiquitous Google is in the information world, one must never forget that it is not a “public library,” but a business, with a CEO and quarterly earnings and an eye on profitability always.  I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it is a corporate thing, more than a “for the greater (public) good” thing.   Don’t forget:  Google censored itself in China in order to gain greater access to China’s market. That was a business decision. Period.

In her April 20, 2007,  ZDNet blog posting  Beware: Google Cloud Platform Exposed, Donna Bogatin wrote:

“What is that [Google’s] platform? It is the global, Google cloud. The Googley ‘cloud computing and advertising go hand-in-hand,’ Google-centric, new multi-billion dollar Web-based business paradigm….Of course, rational people and companies are rightly concerned about housing their information in the Google cloud due to risks concerning data integrity, security, privacy, access, control and manipulation.  In fact, as use of the Google platform grows, along with Google’s ambitions, so do the data and privacy risks inherent to reliance on the Google cloud.”

Maybe a corporation isn’t the ideal portal through which to access information, which brings me to this week’s readings in the Health Informatics class about electronic personal health records and my end-of-the-term wariness.   Do I want to compromise ownership and control of my information in exchange for help organizing it?  Does our society - our culture - want that?

Okay, this has nothing to do with metadata, but it does, kind of, relate to libraries:  Last Monday, my daughter was walking to class from the library ( That’s the connection, sorry!) on her campus, when she found a tiny abandoned kitten, umbilical cord still attached, in the gutter.  She took it to the vet; the vet thought it might be three days old and told her how and what to bottle feed it. We went up to visit this weekend and made a picture of the kitten - Newport - at eight days old.  It’s so amazing and cute that I wanted to share….   

1.  Play Semantopoly
2. Extreme Blogging
3. Join The Semantic Web as Social Enjoyment
4. Play fastr - a flickr indexing game
5. Build a Searchbot

I’ve been thinking about  Salo’s Innkeeper at the Roach Motel for several days, especially this sentence from the abstract: “Trapped by faculty apathy and library uncertainty, institutional repositories face a crossroads: adapt or die.”  I guess I find that analysis misses the mark a bit.  In my opinion, in areas where scholars and libraries understand the value of a tool or service or repository - how it makes some aspect of their work better - they are willing to participate.  From my perspective, as someone who is just learning about metadata, institutional repositories, digitization, open access issues, etc., I think that, if repositories are languishing, part of the reason might be that that their usefulness has not been explained or demonstrated in ways that non-technical people can understand.  The quotes under the subheadings Faculty and self-archiving and Libraries, librarianship, and IR illustrate that students, faculty, and librarians don’t even know what IRs are.  To ask people to sign on when you are communicating about new technologies with esoteric vocabulary and strings of acronyms is asking too much.  There is a need for plain-talk and for clear explanations of what IR use means to both faculty and libraries.  First educate potential users, then demonstrate how the technology or service benefits them.  It might seem to slow adoption of a new technology, but, in the end, I think that early investment would help keep repositories from languishing. 

I just read Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine in the April 2008 Harvard Business Review.  It’s an interesting article that lists six key attributes that have contributed to Google’s success.  These attributes are:

• Strategic patience
• Infrastructure built to support innovation
• Ecosystem that enable architectural control
• Innovation built into job descriptions
• A cultivated taste for failure and chaos
• Using data to vet inspiration

It’s an article worth reading, just to think about what libraries might be able to learn from Google.

Throughout the article, Google’s “user-centric” attitude was emphasized.  This quote, on page 60, is an example:  “Everything Google does extends its reach.  It is informational kudzu, always putting down new roots based on the thoroughly internalized principle that information shall be organized by analyzing users’ intentions.”

This week, science writer David Bradley blogged about a question he posted on LinkedIn: 

How can science benefit from online social media (networking, bookmarking, etc)? 

Here’s a summary of the answers he posted, from scientists around the world:

• Collaboration (mentioned several times)
• Mining information from the bookmarks and tags of others
• Organization of information by small dedicated user groups
• Open publication of information
• Closing the gap between experts and others to create virtual communities of people with shared interests

Clay Shirky was on the Colbert Report  (<6 minute interview) last week talking about his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. 

Shirky quotes: “The Internet people are starting to be everybody….” and “Sometimes you only find out what everybody’s interested in by asking everybody.”

My connectivity through a cable connection stinks.  I have called the company, replaced my modem, started logging into class an hour early, etc., etc.  Earlier, I was trying to do an assignment for another class and lost my connection every few minutes.  We don’t have DSL in our area, although I do have a  satellite connection for backup.  The satellite works for doing assignments - when it’s not raining - but is echo-y sounding and slow for class.  And, yes, we know it’s expensive to have both cable and satellite service (as our friends keep telling us!), but this is the way I’m going to grad school, so it’s completely necessary.  So…I got really ticked off when Jim brought this article home this week.  Seems that subscribers don’t have many rights - like, the ISP can read your e-mail, block you, and shut you down if you’re a traffic hog.  This paragraph was particularly insightful:

“For cable ISPs, up to 500 households may be sharing the capacity on a single line, and a few traffic hogs can slow the whole neighborhood down. But rather than saying publicly how much traffic is too much, some cable companies keep their caps secret, and simply warn offenders individually. If that doesn’t work, they’re kicked off.”

When I graduate, I promise I’m going to drop cable like a hot rock.

In the Scorn or SCORM? reading, Godwin-Jones writes of David Wiley:

“[H]e characterizes some aspects of the use of learning objects “oppressive,” because the learner’s access to the learning environment is restricted to a fixed, determined path. He offers an interesting scenario of using SCO’s in combination with “blog-based learning.” Learners might be alerted to new learning objects in repositories (perhaps through subscription to RSS syndication) then participate in blog discussions of the content. He also sees learning objects as potential resources, among others, in a rich problem-solving learning environment, in which they could be drawn upon as needed as learners seek to reach solutions.”

The idea of blog-based learning and RSS subscription as a means of alerting learners to new material seems familiar somehow….I predict that, in the future, blogs will be used more and more as collaborative learning tools.  At the library last week, I met a scientist who was researching new ways to collaborate and share knowledge within his company. We talked for a while about social networking tools and I pointed him to SelectMinds, SocialCast, and Mzinga for ideas.  While these tools aren’t necessarily related to learning objects, I can see where companies might buy into this kind of platform for integrating training, collaborative learning, knowledge sharing, and the exchange of information.