{"id":342,"date":"2009-08-06T10:24:22","date_gmt":"2009-08-06T15:24:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dilettantes.code4lib.org\/?p=342"},"modified":"2009-08-06T10:24:22","modified_gmt":"2009-08-06T15:24:22","slug":"where-is-the-outrage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/2009\/08\/where-is-the-outrage\/","title":{"rendered":"Where is the outrage?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a couple of months this year, the library world was aflame with rage at the proposed OCLC licensing policy regarding bibliographic records<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a justifiable complaint, although I basically stayed out of it:\u00c2\u00a0 it just didn’t affect me very much.\u00c2\u00a0 After much gnashing of teeth, petitions, open letters from consortia, etc. OCLC eventually rescinded their proposa<\/a>l.<\/p>\n

Righteous indignation: 1, “the man”: 0.<\/p>\n

While this could certainly counted as a success (I think, although this means we default to the much more ambiguous 1987 guidelines), there is a bit of a mixed message here about where the library community’s priorities lie.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s great that you now have the right to share your data, but, really, how do you expect to do it?<\/p>\n

It has been a little over a year since the Jangle 1.0 specification<\/a> has been released; 15 months or so since all of the major library vendors (with one exception) agreed to the Digital Library Federation’s “Berkeley Accord”<\/a>; and we’re at the anniversary of the workshop where the vendors actually agreed on how we would implement a “level 1” DLF API<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So far, not a single vendor at the table has honored their commitment, and I have seen no intention to do so with the exception of Koha<\/a> (although, interestingly, not by the company represented in the Accord).<\/p>\n

I am going to focus here on the DLF ILS-DI API, rather than Jangle, because it is something we all agreed to.\u00c2\u00a0 For all intents and purposes, Jangle and the ILS-DI are interchangeable:\u00c2\u00a0 I think anybody that has invested any energy in either project would be thrilled if either one actually caught on and was implemented in a major ILMS.\u00c2\u00a0 Both specifications share the same scope and purpose.\u00c2\u00a0 The resources required to support one would be the same as the other, the only difference between the two are the client-side interfaces.\u00c2\u00a0 Jangle technically meets all of the recommendations of the ILS-DI, but not to the bindings that we, the vendors, agreed to (although there is an ‘adapter’ to bridge that gap).\u00c2\u00a0 Despite having spent the last two years of my life working on Jangle, I would be thrilled to no end if the ILS-DI saw broad uptake.\u00c2\u00a0 I couldn’t care less about the serialization; I only care about the access.<\/p>\n

There is only one reason that the vendors are not honoring their commitment:\u00c2\u00a0 libraries aren’t demanding that they do.<\/p>\n

Why is this?\u00c2\u00a0 Why the rally to ensure that our bibliographic data is free for us to share when we lack the technology to actually do the sharing?<\/p>\n

When you look at the open source OPAC replacements (I’m only going to refer to the OSS ones here, because they are transparent, as opposed to their commercial counterparts):\u00c2\u00a0 VuFind, Blacklight, Scriblio, etc. and take stock of hoops that have to be jumped through to populate their indexes and check availability, most libraries would throw their hands in the air and walk away.\u00c2\u00a0 There are batch dumps of MARC records.\u00c2\u00a0 Rsync jobs to get the data to the OPAC server.\u00c2\u00a0 Cron jobs to get the MARC into the discovery system.\u00c2\u00a0 Screen scrapers and one off “drivers” to parse holdings and status.\u00c2\u00a0 It is a complete mess.<\/p>\n

It’s also the case for every Primo, Encore, Worldcat Local, AquaBrowser, etc. that isn’t sold to an internal customer.<\/p>\n

If you’ve ever wondered why the third party integration and enrichment services are ultimately somewhat unsatisfying (think BookSite.com or how LibraryThing for Libraries is really only useful when you can actually find something<\/em>), this is it.\u00c2\u00a0 The vendors have made it nearly impossible for a viable ecosystem to exist because there is no good way to access the library’s own data.<\/p>\n

And it has got to stop.<\/p>\n

For the OCLC withdrawal to mean anything, libraries have either got to put pressure on their vendors to support one of the two open APIs, migrate to a vendor that does support the open APIs, or circumvent the vendors entirely by implementing the specifications themselves (and sharing with their peers).\u00c2\u00a0 This cartel of closed access is stifling innovation and, ultimately, hurting the library users.<\/p>\n

I’ll hold up my end<\/a> (and ensure it’s ILS-DI compatible via this<\/a>) and work towards it being officially supported here<\/a>, but the 110 or so Alto customers aren’t exactly going to make or break this.<\/p>\n

Hold your vendor’s feet to the fire and insist they uphold their commitment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a couple of months this year, the library world was aflame with rage at the proposed OCLC licensing policy regarding bibliographic records.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a justifiable complaint, although I basically stayed out of it:\u00c2\u00a0 it just didn’t affect me very much.\u00c2\u00a0 After much gnashing of teeth, petitions, open letters from consortia, etc. OCLC eventually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,47,7,14,70,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ils-di","category-jangle","category-libraries","category-oai","category-rant","category-standards-schmandards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions\/343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}