The choices you make extend beyond delivering digital content Envision your library zipping swiftly along in a flow of technological change like the bits and bytes traveling the electronic information superhighway, following those in front and keeping pace with those immediately around but totally unaware of the road map that describes the journey. With all the new advances in library technology—including metadata, social networking, and Web 2.0, along with the advent of nonlibrary and for-profit digital information companies like Wikisource and Google Print—librarians have barely had time to reflect on the nontechnical implications of these innovations. We need to take a step back and consider how librarians in the last decade have found themselves on the fast track from the sequestered content villas of subscription databases to the sprawling information architecture of our new socially networked digital environment. There are basically three competing models at work in the metadata and digital asset management (DAM) world at large. For lack of an existing terminology, we can label these groups the “competitive isolationists,” the “exclusionary collaborateurs,” and the “free mashups and crossovers.” These three groups arose from different reactions to the changing digital landscape and reflect the social and political outlook of their constituent institutions—each has its pros and cons, and a look at each will raise our digital awareness, better preparing us to make proactive choices about our application of these technologies.

The move toward metadata

First, a little context. As libraries move toward the management of digital objects like full-text documents, ebooks, PDFs, and images, the ability to organize, store, and retrieve them requires the use of new management systems. The traditional OPAC, for example, has been adapted to include book covers and links to full-text online resources; however, it can’t handle ingesting XML metadata documents to supplement records, which is one of the benefits of using content management systems (CMS) and DAMs. Integral to this shift is metadata, which applies structured taxonomies and library terminology to documents that lack them within the content itself, allowing a combination of semantic and structured search results. Some documents, like images, have metadata but lack descriptive metadata. Adding this descriptive metadata increases access to the content and, in the case of those with disabilities, creates greater opportunities for providing accessibility. Every institution handles metadata differently, and every library has a different approach to collaborating with other institutions to increase access to its content. In fact, whenever the prospect for collaboration arises at a professionwide level, there are going to be far-reaching implications for both the internal management of a library as well as the external constituents who make up a library’s users. How different libraries either embrace or resist these opportunities will have potentially serious ramifications for libraries themselves and for their services. What’s more, their reactions to the notion of collaboration illuminate exactly how they have stratified themselves into isolationists, collaborateurs, and crossovers.

The competitive isolationists

At one end of the spectrum, there are “competitive” institutions that vigorously and successfully protect their holdings, regardless of copyright status, using expensive software packages. In a way, this model can be viewed as the “top of the food chain,” mostly because the costs for these systems, including software, staff time, and service contracts, usually extend into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and thus are an option only for the elite. Two popular examples of these systems include CONTENTdm and Digitool. These top institutions pay for the best technicians but cannot use their human capital to the fullest owing to software companies’ desire to protect their intellectual property. Library staff and technicians, for instance, cannot access or modify the source code. Other drawbacks to these systems can be a lack of built-in collaborative tools for user input and the inability to be crawled by search engines like Google via deep linking. Another reason that places these systems at the far end of the metadata continuum is the benefit this “isolationist” model derives from their use of others’ metadata without necessarily relinquishing their own, akin to a “we’ll take yours and keep ours” approach. Some competitive isolationists purposefully use systems that disallow others from accessing their original XML metadata encoding. For example, the University of Michigan’s OAIster and Archivopedia’s EAD (encoded archival description) Central Search Engine independently harvest OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) available metadata and content on the Internet but without explicit interinstitutional cooperative exchange agreements.

Social software for isolationists?

Politically, the competitive isolationists operate out of self-interest and have no specific allegiances to any entity other than their funders. They fail to engage the collective challenges facing the library profession, particularly regarding the development of new commercial technologies trying to usurp their position and authority in the knowledge management sphere. Socially speaking, their CMSs are awkward if not backward; they don’t encourage collaboration among institutions and don’t engage any level of participation or input from the end user. A sort of vacuum exists when it comes to metadata and digital content management (DCM) and delivery, and this void is being filled in part by for-profit start-ups that are making the most of these opportunities. The competitive isolationists as a group are most likely to take the lead early to maintain their position—by inventing their own metadata tools and software adaptations (such as Joomla catalog overlays, scraping, data mining, and XML harvesting) as well as demanding Web 2.0 integration from the companies supplying their automated systems. The valuable addition of social interaction to library materials has yet to be fully explored or understood, but there is already great movement in this direction. Social interaction features are immensely popular with users and will likely continue to dominate the marketplace and permeate digital information spaces. Though the product’s popularity is yet to be determined, TLC recently released Indigo, a new tool that lets patrons create and share reviews and personal lists, indexes RSS feeds, allows user-generated folksonomy tags, and associates library items with a graphical location guide using library positioning software. Many of these features are spin-offs of the in vogue Web 2.0 applications like Google maps, LibraryThing, and del.icio.us—but adapted specifically for an integrated library system.

The exclusionary collaborateurs

In the middle of the spectrum are institutions that share copyrighted materials and/or metadata through the use of same-software or standards to form formal “collaborative” groups. Politically, these groups are generally geographically or linguistically oriented and are either regionalized or nationalistic in their cooperative alliances. One of the benefits of this group’s structure is that it can facilitate political and social unity among its member constituents and their stakeholders in the larger community. Another benefit to this approach: a shared pool of technological expertise can mean overall reduced expenditures. Avoiding duplication of material goods purchases, like books, is a collaborative strategy that has been developed among certain institutions, and consortial efforts have evolved to provide services like interlibrary loan and shared access to expensive online databases. Why not look at the management of digital content and metadata in terms of collaboration as well? In terms of a CMS or DAM, a single software package is usually used for these collaborations, and it is generally open source or free to members, such as Greenstone, Fedora, and D-Space. At the regional level, the Online Archive of California (OAC) has obtained cooperative agreements with archival institutions in the State of California for EAD and image sharing, granting free access to the public. Examples of national archival cooperatives in the United States are OCLC, NUCMC, and RLG—all of which are now unified. This type of DCM could be ideal in working to unify regions that have traditionally suffered from political and military strife. For example, a Northern Ireland–Republic of Ireland initiative or a Jewish-Palestine collaboration unifying and making publicly available digitized cultural materials could emphasize a shared heritage as opposed to differences among peoples, encouraging reflection and a desire for change and peace. The disadvantage of this type of model is that the requirements for membership are necessarily rule-oriented and are generally “exclusionary” at some level, either geographically or monetarily. With OCLC, for example, the ability to deposit materials into WorldCat limits access, and in the case of its ArchiveGrid, access to materials is limited to patrons whose representative organizations are able to pay a fee.

The free mashups & crossovers

One of the greatest opportunities for libraries today is the exploration of the intraconnections within a library, the interconnections among libraries, and the extraconnections between libraries and industry. At the far end of the spectrum from the competitive isolationists, there are individuals and organizations that have begun to explore new ways to free their content and metadata, allowing it to be reused and remixed in exciting new ways. One example is those groups that have “relinquished” their noncopyrighted and/or copyrighted holdings by crossing over to the “Creative Commons” (CC) for all noncommercial use. For example, Duke University Libraries now includes the CC license at the bottom of every page of its online special collections. Another example is Wikisource, where archival content can be deposited under the GNU Free Documentation License. My project, Archivopedia, recently announced at the Archivists of Second Life First International Symposium the first example of RSS syndication of EAD finding aids as well as its Wiki EAD. Recently, the Library of Congress (LC) joined a small contingent of archival repositories when it mounted one of its out-of-copyright collections on the social tagging–enabled web site Flickr. It appears its goal, like all of the others, was to increase public exposure and access to its collections and web site, as well as to investigate whether or not the popularity of user-generated rather than structured metadata would substantiate changing the existing system to enable this feature. LC’s bold move brings to the forefront the need to discuss both the opportunities and the pitfalls when exploring the possibilities for for-profit/nonprofit cooperatives in DCM. Librarians need to remember that industry is a different type of stakeholder, with values founded on profit-driven objectives. Whether viewed positively or negatively, digital content sharing has resulted in greater commercialization while the open source movement strives for completely unrestricted usage of materials, including that which generates profit. When placing collections online, librarians need to move beyond their basic knowledge of copyright and learn an entirely new set of licensing rules and regulations. When libraries place their content on another’s web site, for instance, they need to be prepared to relinquish all rights to that material and oversight to how it will be used or reused. That is one reason to stick to items no longer covered by copyright. This is a huge barrier, though, in terms of mounting collections online. Libraries need to do at least a basic investigation into potential copyright or IP ownership before mounting exhibits, say, and not all libraries have the resources of an LC to do this. Even though LC has performed preliminary research into copyright status, it still sidesteps the issue by indicating on its web site that responsibility when reusing images ultimately falls upon the researcher. Perhaps the greatest advantage of these collaborative and Web 2.0 tools is in their ability to facilitate cooperation across all kinds of boundaries. Geographic location is no longer a barrier with computer or web-enabled mobile device access. Language difference is and has been one of the greatest barriers in history to universal communication, identification, and cooperation. But language translation is becoming easier than ever before through automation. In addition to AltaVista’s Babelfish, Google offers a full web page translation option within its search results. Some members of the Archivists of Second Life group are building exhibits using digitized, “real life” archival materials in a virtual world/MMORPG environment. To speak with one another, individuals represent various languages, and nationalities communicate in Second Life through the use of a language translator called a “babbler.”

Digital awareness as social awareness

We often talk about the digital divide that exists among our patrons, but we rarely stop to consider the digital divide among us as librarians and among our own institutions. If we apply a bit of the humanities to the computer sciences, it’s easy to realize the social and political impacts that technology—yes, library technology—can have on society in terms of how people access and interact with information. To do this, we must take even greater advantage of the hugely popular international social networking sites as tools for collaboration and employ those systems to manage content and mount digital exhibits. As we travel outside the comfortable borders we have become used to, it is important to realize that there are opportunities in change. If you take the time to intuit where you fit in this metadata continuum, you just might find a way to help create a more peaceful, equitable, and ethically sound future. The choice is yours, however, whether this will be as a competitive isolationist, an exclusionary collaborateur, or a free mashup and crossover. It is up to librarians to achieve a higher awareness by looking past the technology toward the future social and political potential that should be the real destination of our journey.

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Shannon Bohle (bohles@limalibrary.com) is a Reference Librarian at Lima Public Library, OH, as well as owner and President of Archivopedia (archivopedia.com)