Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How To Read 100 Million Publications: Vivo And Comprehensive Open Publication Databases, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

How Not To Waste Catalogers' Time: Making The Most Of Subject Headings, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

"In The Early Days Of A Better Nation": Enhancing The Power Of Metadata Today With Linked Data Principles#11;, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

We need not wait for the wholesale redesign of metadata and workflows to semantic web and linked data technologies in order to begin taking advantage of their design principles. This talk will show how metadata organized and presented in ways that encourage sharing, widespread reuse, and broad collaboration organized around community "hubs" can significantly improve resource discovery as well as other library services and information needs. Examples will be shown from systems designed around linked data standards and technologies and systems not so designed. While standard linked data formats and interfaces can aid in metadata reuse and maintenance, more general …

Forward To Libraries: Experiences Connecting Digital Libraries, Local Libraries, And Wikipedia, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

The Forward to Libraries service invites users researching a topic, author, or work online to discover related resources in local libraries, or other digital libraries and websites. It can take users to their favorite library’s relevant offerings in a single click. In this session, I will describe ontological, technological, and cultural challenges I dealt with in implementing the service on The Online Books Page and Wikipedia, and how adoption has spread since its initial introduction. I also discuss how we can better connect our libraries, and attract inquisitive users to relevant resources in our collections.

How To Read 200,000 Publications: Vivo And The Intelligent Evaluation Of Scholarship, John Mark Ockerbloom, Anne Seymour

John Mark Ockerbloom

VIVO and the data that it manages enable a variety of new mechanisms for analyzing and evaluating the scholarship of individuals and organizations. These mechanisms provide both opportunities and dangers.

As critics of overuse of impact factors, magazine rankings, and student survey scores know, it can be tempting to rely on short-cuts. Aggregation and automated analysis of readily available data, used wisely, can reveal important information that can help assess and improve scholarly impact. Used unwisely, however, it can replace the thoughtful assessment of scholarly quality with quick comparisons of mechanically-generated scores that may have little to do with the …

Building A Global Open Network Of Discovery: Improving Subject Browsing With Linked Authority Data, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

This is a static version of the visuals of a presentation I gave to the ALA Subject on linked open subject authority data. I described how linked data from the Library of Congress (http://id.loc.gov/) can be used to improve subject cataloging and browsing. I describe how the data is structured (including a brief overview of RDF and SKOS), and explain how I have used it to improve The Online Books Page (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/) and the Penn Libraries' catalog. I also show how I augmented and enhanced the authority data from LC, and discuss how widespread use of linked bibliographic and authority …

The Metadata Challenge: Promoting Discovery, Access, And Usability For Online Books, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

With millions of books, serials, and other documents now digitized, rich troves of information and culture can now be made available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. But these riches are worthless if they cannot be found, accessed, and effectively used by the readers who need them. The key to unlock these treasures is metadata. Networked computing enables techniques for making metadata more effective than ever; yet in practice, online collections all too often either do not have or do not take full advantage of the best metadata they could use.

There is much ongoing work harnessing …

Open Discovery Of Library Resources: The Digital Library Federation's Ils-Discovery Interface Recommendations, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

A NISO webinar presentation on the ILS-DI work, its design, its implementation, and its future. Based in part on my ALA talk in January, but reworked and updated. The PDF file includes both slides and my speaker's script. (My actual remarks in the live presentation differed slightly in places.)

Open Records, Open Possibilities, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

Slides and prepared remarks for an ALA panel discussion on sharing bibliographic records and OCLC's proposed WorldCat policy.

I give some examples of useful innovations that can advance the mission of libraries when records are openly shared, and argue that more restrictive policies like OCLC's proposal can cost the library community dearly in lost opportunities. I show how the open source community has alternative ways to license work openly, and to cover costs. Finally, I argue that, even if WorldCat is not prepared to open access to all its bibliographic records, the members of the cooperative should be empowered to …

Opening The Ils For Discovery: The Digital Library Federation’S Ils-Discovery Interface Recommendations, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

Slides for my ALA talk, giving an overview of the DLF's ILD-discovery interface recommendations, and how they are and can be used to enable a richer environment of information discovery applications across a wide variety of ILS's and other library information bases.

Watching Our Backs: Community Verification Of Digital Preservation Systems, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

Librarians and faculty agree that information preservation is one of the essential roles of libraries. Yet, as the information we manage increasingly becomes digital, we have to rely on new methods of preserving this information that have not been fully tested. While developing and auditing for best practices is important, we must also verify that preservation systems actually perform as we hope they will, preferably long before we have to fall back on them.

In this talk, I will show ways in which this verification can be done now, by the community, with reasonable cost and demonstrable efficacy. Specifically, I …

Promoting Discovery And Use Of Repository Content: An Architectural Perspective, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

Slides and notes for a talk I gave at a NARA/UMD conference. (The notes include a full script, though it differs slightly from the talk as delivered.)

In this talk, I stress the importance of effective discovery as an essential component of (and aid to) preservation. I advocate the importance of opening up information, system, and social architectures to do so, with examples that include subject maps, the DLF ILS-DI work, VCat, and PennTags.

Some of the material in the talk was adapted from the "High Quality Discovery in a Web 2.0 World" talk I gave for Palinet.

High Quality Discovery In A Web 2.0 World: Architectures For Next Generation Catalogs, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

Issues of information and systems architecture underly many of the current debates over the future of cataloging. This talk discusses some ways in which the architecture of the catalog is being redesigned to combine the rich information architecture of library metadata with the robust systems architecture of many Web-based discovery systems. I will show "subject map" discovery systems that better exploit the relationships in complex ontologies like LCSH, and discuss a Digital Library Federation initiative to promote standards supporting interoperability between discovery systems and ILS data and services. I will also touch on the role of networked architectures in improving …

Mapping The Library Future: Subject Navigation For Today's And Tomorrow's Library Catalogs, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

My ALA Mindwinter 2008 presentation slides on subject maps. For more details on how subject maps are created, see the New Maps of the Library white paper from 2006.

The Next Mother Lode For Large-Scale Digitization? Historic Serials, Copyrights, And Shared Knowledge, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

Much of the publicity around recent mass-digitization projects focuses on the millions of books they promise to make freely readable online. Because of copyright, though, most of the books provided in full will be of mainly historical interest. But much of the richest historical text content is not in books at all, but in the newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and scholarly journals where events are reported firsthand, stories and essays make their debut, research findings are announced and critiqued, and issues of the day debated. Back runs of many of these serials are available in major research institutions but often in …