Well, this week readers will get two posts to make up for the dearth of one last week. I was a bit busy, having three assignments due and a conference to attend. But now, as I drink tea and watch the first snow come down outside, I can take some time to talk about standards! Yes, I know, very exciting. On a serious note, however, standards, both of the technical and metadata variety, play an increasingly vital role in librarianship. We have always been a standards obsessed profession, what with our AACR2s, and MARC, and Library of Congress Subject Headings. Since modern American librarianship found its footing in the mid 1900's, librarians have focused around organizing, transferring, and helping people find information. We needed standards then to assure that if someone went to two different libraries, they wouldn't have to learn an entirely new way to look a book up and then find it on the shelf. And we needed standards so that librarians would not have to learn brand new ways to classify something at every library they worked for.
So, as librarians, we gravitate towards creating standards, and now that tendency, according to Pesch, in "Library standards and e-resource management: A survey of current initiatives and standards efforts" and Yue in Electronic resources librarianship and management of digital information., is more important than ever. It is vital for all librarians to realize that information, while easier to access and share than ever before, has also gotten more complicated. More departments are involved in preparing materials for display and access, including acquisitions, cataloging/metadata, licensing, IT, and the new field of Electronic Resources Librarianship. And more information is being transferred, between librarians and vendors, individual librarians and consortia, consortia and vendors, and between libraries themselves through ILL and the web. Standards are essential for insuring that information is comparable, compatible, and communicable.
So where do we stand in terms of standards? According to the above two articles, the library community has made great strides recently, especially in terms of vendor usage statistics (with COUNTER, which is an awesome standard that I love!), electronic resource link resolving (OpenURL), and meta/federated searching. These standards, due to their relative ease of use, are incorporated and followed by many libraries. We are making progress towards others, like defining a data dictionary to talk about important functions and duties of ERM systems.
However, there are many standards with which librarians struggle, where ideas of what should be included and not creates conflict. The problem is if there is a feeling that a standard is handed down without input or too burdensome, it will not be followed. For example, RDA,developed by the Library of Congress, created an XML based cataloging standard that more easily incorporates non-print objects (a serious problem with current cataloging standards). However, due to the fact that many catalogers felt that they had no say in this decision, and that a lot of animosity exists between those who believe AARC2 is fine, those who embrace RDA, and those who believe that RDA does not go far enough, it has been extremely slow to be adopted. It also creates a great deal of work, as all old records need to be transferred to the new format to make resource finding optimal.
As a strange aside, I found out recently that web programmers have been moving away from XML to a data transfer language called JSON. In addition to its faster data transfer, these developers believe that XML has been overburdened by XML schema and standards, created by librarians (METS, MODS, etc, etc). Librarians, in their desire to build standards, have made XML too complex for application development.
So what does this all mean? To me, the lessons to take away are that standards are necessary for librarianship in this electronic age, but they cannot be imposed. If librarians (or other industries) feel that they do not have a voice in the standard process, or if the standard itself will require a huge amount of extra work for librarians, it will not be followed, no matter how ideal and wonderful it would be if it worked. So, do I think we should still try to create standards? Yes, but I think we must make them simple (Dublin Core or COUNTER are excellent examples of this) and they must be developed in a way that the library community feels that they have a say and stake in the outcome.
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