John Miedema

The One Big Library Unconference was a wonderful opportunity to talk face-to-face with some people I’ve met on-line, and others I met for the first time.

One Big Library? Catalogue? Community?

When the conference was first announced, Walt Crawford noted with concern the premise that “there’s just One Big Library, with branches all over the world” as stated on the conference wiki. A number of people replied. I think I’m accurate in saying that no one actually wanted all libraries to merge into one entity, that such a development would be a tragedy, but that everyone would like to share more knowledge and practices between libraries. In the closing discussion of the unconference, I suggested it was a mistake to use the word “library” in One Big Library; I suggested that One Big Catalogue might be better, but as others quickly observed, even that is too much. Talking with two cataloguers, Fiacre O’Duinn and Stacy Allison-Cassin, I was reminded of the value of local cataloguing. So One Big What? It is a little more than just sharing knowledge. It includes shared standards so data can be exchanged. It includes shared technologies like Zotero that make research easier. Maybe we’re talking about One Big Library Community sharing knowledge and resources for common goals. But communities are never one and big either. Maybe another model is needed.

The Energy Generation Model of Cataloguing

The closing discussion was probably not the ideal forum for me to start talking about an idea I’ve been kicking around for awhile, a model of information exchange based on Ontario energy generation. I’ll try to state it more clearly here.

Like other places, Ontario has struggled to keep up with rising energy demand while keeping its technology clean at the same time. Its centralized nuclear power is generally a steady source of clean energy but it is expensive to build and maintain, and an outage affects everyone; they have been using dirtier coal-fired technology to supplement it. They have started a net metering program that allows individuals to produce energy via green technologies like wind turbines, and this energy gets fed back to the grid, discounting the bill of the individual producer. I think it is a brilliant advance — get the general consistency of the grid, backed up green technologies that can serve people during outages. Other regions are trying this too.

This model can be applied to library cataloguing. There are advantages in centralized cataloguing. It certainly helps the small libraries that can’t afford to do it for themselves. It is quicker when detail does not matter. The downside of course is the loss of localization. I was pleased to see this stated by Karen Calhoun, Vice President, WorldCat and Metadata Services for OCLC. So let’s use both. This is not so different from the concept of pace layering, discussed by Morville regarding tagging, and recently discussed by K.G. Schneider at The Free Range Librarian. Local and global cataloguing would be “federated” in the library search system so that library patrons can take advantage of both kinds of cataloguing as their needs require.

This idea is somewhat different than a social OPAC with user tagging because librarians would still be doing the local cataloguing, contributing their professionals skills. User tagging could represent a further layer on top of this. You can see how this concept is associated with the idea of an information ecology.

Many Thanks to York University Libraries

Closing words — many thanks Stacy Allison-Cassin, William Denton, and John Dupuis for organizing this event. I really enjoy the unconference format for the chance it gives to talk directly with all those smart library people and to present a few ideas of my own.