Please note: This series of posts outlines my opinions and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of my OCLC colleagues or of OCLC as an organization. Also, these opinions are held regardless of any impact the paths I suggest may have on my employer.
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.
…
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live. — Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
Over a decade ago I wrote two columns entitled “MARC Must Die” and “MARC Exit Strategies” for Library Journal. Although provocative at the time, it now appears to be accepted wisdom that we cannot carry on as we have. A major example of this are the Library of Congress’ Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control and the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME for short) that emerged from that work.
Their statement about the BIBFRAME work reads, in part:
The Library of Congress has launched a review of the bibliographic framework to better accommodate future needs. A major focus of the initiative will be to determine a transition path for the MARC 21 exchange format in order to reap the benefits of newer technology while preserving a robust data exchange that has supported resource sharing and cataloging cost savings in recent decades.
Meanwhile, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has not been sitting on its hands. It received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to “support an initiative to develop a community roadmap that will help support movement toward a future bibliographic information exchange ecosystem. The goal of this project is to collectively determine the needs and requirements of the library, higher education, and non-profit networked information communities to ensure they are able to use and exchange bibliographic data in an increasingly networked, linked data environment.” To accomplish this, NISO is organizing a number of meetings (mostly virtual) this year. The first and only planned in-person meeting was just held.
So for the last couple of days I attended virtually as much as I could of the NISO Bibliographic Roadmap meeting held in Baltimore, MD. Their description of the event:
NISO will host a two-day “unconference” to brainstorm and explore topics that will be a core component of the overall roadmap that NISO is working with the library, higher education, and non-profit networked information community to formulate. The goal of this meeting is to engage participants in an open conversation about the future of our collective bibliographic exchange ecosystem.
I ended the event not feeling much more enlightened or inspired than I began, and I’m afraid that this experience may have been shared by not a small number of those in the room. That got me to wondering why. Partly I think it was so all over the map because there was no shared clarity on the problems that need fixing and a lack of agreement about which paths might best solve those problems. For the most part, people left with the personal agendas they arrived with — some of them quite strongly held.
It was then that I remembered Gil Scott-Heron’s message to his black brothers and sisters back in the day. The revolution will be live. It can’t be packaged up and delivered to your computer or TV set so you can passively consume it from the comfort of your couch. It won’t be led and controlled by the few. It won’t be packaged nicely for your consumption. It will be messy, difficult, frustrating, and uncertain. It will be impossible to predict and may only make any kind of sense in hindsight. And it will require your participation.
So for my part I resolved to think more about those issues and write about them here. This is the first of a series of posts in which I will endeavor to put down my best thinking about the subject, which means you may want to lower your expectations now.
Watching the NISO event over the last two days crystallized for me that I had fallen into the trap of thinking that the Library of Congress or NISO or OCLC (my employer) would come along and save us all. I forgot that for a revolution to occur it can’t come from the seats of the existing power structure. True change only happens when everyone is involved. Those organizations may implement and support what the changes that the revolution produces, but anything dictated from on high will not be a revolution. The revolution will not be piped into our cubicles, ready for easy consumption. The revolution will be live.
Photo by Franco Folini, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
About Roy Tennant
It seems very possible for this revolution will start from the bottom up, as Roy Tennant and Gil Scott-Heron describe. But a successful revolution is relatively rare; those that do succeed provide new institutions and structures to replace those overthrown. Since we’re talking about a standard, there will be someone or something at some point that says “Thou shalt use this”. It may be an existing institution that participates and floats to the top fast enough to look like a leader, as the Library of Congress and OCLC seem to be trying for — it may be Schema.org, or an entity yet to be established — but sooner or later, there will will almost certainly be an entity that reigns over, even if not entirely ruling, the new ecosystem.
Teague, I disagree that it will necessarily be a standard. But I am surprised that you used the phrase that I will be introducing and explaining in a later post — a new ecosystem. I think that is exactly what we need and I will describe in some detail what I think that will entail. That is why I am breaking this up into a series of posts — there is way too much to put into one. Perhaps these posts will end up being the first draft of a paper.
I agree that for any change to occur it has to come from the bottom up. I’m a library student just starting to learn Marc coding and can already see that there are problems with it. The best types of revolutions or even development of new standards in libraries have come from individual libraries or groups of them working together. One library starts something then another adopts it. OCLC and the Library of Congress are part of this but not always the initiator. For this problems I think we will also need to think outside the box building on what we have to create something new and great.
Hi Roy,
re: “…people left [the NISO meeting] with the personal agendas they arrived with — some of them quite strongly held.”
My colleagues Diane Hillmann and Gordon Dunsire arrived at, and left, the NISO meeting with the strong agenda of getting the message across that what’s needed moving forward is a revolution and that “…anything dictated from on high will not be a revolution.”
We’re delighted that you got it! But ultimately (as Teague and Rebecca also point out) the revolution will have to have the active participation of “the Library of Congress or NISO or OCLC ([your] employer)” to succeed. This is libraries we’re talking about after all, and the vast majority of librarians, however strong their revolutionary fervor, can’t function without the institutional infrastructure provided by their library, an infrastructure largely dictated by the major ILS vendors and supported by the organizations you mention.
Perversely, there needs to be strong vendor support for innovation and an unusual degree of institutional flexibility (starting perhaps with your employer) for the revolution to succeed.
Roy,
surely you’re catching a lot more attention talking about a revolution, but from my understanding the process will be (and have to be) an evolutionary one.
Eddie