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Image courtesy Wikipedia, public domain.
It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of BIBFRAME,
it was the season of RDA,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to metadata Heaven,
we were all going direct the other way–
in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of
its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
There were a MARC with a large set of tags and an RDA with a plain face, on the throne of library metadata; there were a Schema.org with a large following and a JSON-LD with a fair serialization, on the throne of all else. In both camps it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the Library preserves of monographs and serials, that things in general were settled for ever.
But they weren’t. Oh were they not. It mayhaps would have been pleasant, back in 2014, to have settled everything for all time, but such things were not to be.
The library guilds united behind the RDA wall, where they frantically ran MARC records through the furnace to forge fresh new records of RDA, employed to make the wall ever thicker and higher.
The Parliamentary Library assaulted their ramparts with the BIBFRAME, but the stones flung by that apparatus were insufficient to breach the wall of RDA.
Meanwhile, the vast populace in neither camp employed Schema.org, to garner the attention of the monster crawlers and therefore their many minions, ignoring the internecine squabbles over arcane formats.
Eventually warfare settled down to a desultory, almost emotionless flinging of insults and the previous years of struggle were rendered meaningless.
So now we, the occupants of mid-century modernism, are left to contemplate the apparent fact that formats never really mattered at all. No, dear reader, they never did. What mattered was the data, and the parsing of it, and its ability to be passed from hand to hand without losing meaning or value.
One wonders what those dead on the Plain of Standards would say if they could have lived to see this day.
My humble and abject apologies to Mr. Charles Dickens, for having been so bold as to damage his fine work with my petty scribblings.
About Roy Tennant
This, of course, is what we could have expected when the WWW burst on us with all the abundance of enthusiasm and dearth of critical planning that we have lived with ever since. Of course, format doesn’t matter. Neither, apparently, does consistent metadata, not with Google Scholar being the search engine of choice for academics. We are giving away the kingdom of academic knowledge to tools that have a vested interest in promoting their algorithms over the costly task of doing real metadata work. Sure, Schema.org is trying to imitate what libraries have done all along, but we now have so many competing voices trying to help us make sense of the mess the information world is in, that there is, indeed, no certainty as to how to proceed.
All of this would have been fixed by now (yes, even issues with searching using Google Scholar) if the powers that be (whoever they are) really cared a whit about metadata. Instead, we’ve turned our own library systems into the (utterly misnamed) discovery tools that make a mockery of data records. Until we start caring about the power of metadata again, we will continue moving down the path of turning all our valuable information into vast seas of mush.