I’m back from ALA. What a time! It was the first ALA conference I’ve been to and, I must say, I was amazed at the sheer number of librarians (I’ve been to AALL and MLA, but they aren’t anywhere near as large). It was a bit mind boggling, to me, to see librarians at every turn. On a related note, it was nice to see some of the Code4Lib people in person (again, for some, and for the first time for others).

The best presentation of the conference (that I saw) was Bill Moen’s (during the MODS, MARC, and Metadata Interoperability session). For those that didn’t attend, Claire Stewart has summarized the main points of Moen’s presentation on the LITA weblog. She did a remarkable job (she must be a fast typist)… it is well worth the read.

Moen suggests that libraries do not play a central role in the metadata world. We do have a priviledged role, since we have been doing it for such a long time, but we need to play well with others. Now that unalog is going to have the ability to perform batch updates on its folksonomy tags (this is coming, but not quite here yet… Dan is working on it), I’m starting to wonder what I will do about my “cataloging” and “metadata” tags (should one be a variant of the other?)

I’ve argued, in the past, that metadata is just a renaming of (a small part of) what catalogers have been doing for a long time. If metadata and cataloging are the same thing, which term should we use? Using metadata is more ‘hip’ (and more savvy politically… e.g., we should be reaching out to them), but I don’t like that it doesn’t recognize our experience with the issues involved.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be necessary. We should make the concessions. We should build bridges rather than worry about who gets credit for the accomplishments (assuming anyone would care… we do play a supporting role after all).

The presentation also made me think about a “switchboard schema” that would allow us to move between the other various schemas. OCLC, Moen said, might be using MARC or MARCXML as the transition format (I know there is something up on their site, but I haven’t looked at it yet). I’m curious, now, about XOBIS’ potential to serve in that capacity (just for us… I have no illusions about world domination (well, okay, I have small ones)).

After all, we keep saying it is a ‘high fidelity’ schema. There would need to be a XOBIS database, though, since some of the mapping data would be in XOBIS content (not just in the schema). I still need to finish the beta version of the schema and get the current bibliographic references converted into XOBIS, and stored in eXist, before I start to think about this though.

Ross Singer, of Code4Lib (among other things), also had a very interesting idea about having multiple transition formats (depending on the source and target schemas). The switchboard, in this case, would negotiate the best path for a transformation. I think this would require humans to put that knowledge into the system… I can’t imagine a system that could handle that negotiation by itself (but maybe I’m not creative enough(?))

Also, somewhat related, after my XOBIS talk, I spoke with a person who characterized XOBIS in an interesting way… he described it as an island. An island on which everything is tightly integrated and logical, but still separate from the world at large. I think it is a fair characterization. It would be idea if everyone lived on this island but, as Moen said, this isn’t going to happen.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t develop XOBIS. If it does what it is supposed to, and does it well, it is worth the investment. We should also focus on building that bridge though.