Very interesting posting from the venerable Library of Congress on its blog (which by itself is pretty cool). Here’s a snippet:

Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.

We’re also very excited that, as part of this pilot, Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called “The Commons.” Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well.

Except for my general nervousness about putting this stuff into a privately held, for-profit organization, I think this is quite cool. It has the advantage of putting the data where the people already are. As a footnote to the posting says, it takes a photo of a grain elevator as an example “because it helps illustrate that there are active Flickr user groups for even such diverse subjects as grain elevators.” As the Commons page says,

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

You’re invited to help describe photographs in the Library of Congress’ collection on Flickr, by adding tags or leaving comments.

Gives me little goosebumps.

And, by the way, the photos are fantastic. [Tags:library_of_congress tags flickr folksonomy taxonomy photographs metadata ]

I had a stimulating dinner conversation with someone who works for an institution that preserves the work of a well-known choreographer. (I’m being a bit cagey because I may not be representing this person’s views accurately.) The institution licenses productions very carefully and is stringent in insisting that every element of the productions be authentic, i.e., be as the work was originally produced. Predictably, I wondered why the institution didn’t loosen up. The choreographer would have more influence because her (or his — caginess!) works would be more frequently performed. After all, if the Beethoven Institute insisted that all performances must be on original instruments, using exactly the same pacing, intonations, sonic dynamics, etc., as Beethoven intended, our culture would be far poorer because we’d hear much less Beethoven and many fewer creative interpretations of his works. In fact, Beethoven would have copyrighted himself right out of culture.

But, replied my dinner companion, it’s different with the work of a great choreographer. The work consists of the details of music, costume, lighting and gesture. The gap between composition and performance is smaller than with a musical score; in fact, there is no gap.

I am not convinced. Nor am I not unconvinced. I think I think that the magic of metadata could let us have our cake and dance it too: the association could authenticate those performances that met its criteria, while freely (liberally, if not for free) permitting non-canonical performances. I don’t know the status of Gilbert and Sullivan’s copyrights, but the D’Olyly Carte group performs a similar metadata function: There are many productions of Gilbert and Sullivan works — a couple of weeks ago, we saw a delightful Mikado that updated lyrics with references to Dick Cheney’s little list — but if you want to see an authentic version, you go to D’Oyly Carte.

But, much as a I like metadata, I’m not confident that I understand the dimensions of the issues in copyrighting something that seems to fall between a score and a performance. [Tags: copyright copyleft choreography dance arts mikado]

If you append a tag prefaced by a #, the hashtags site will cluster them.

This is a cool example of metadata being layered in from outside an app. Well, the metadata is being created inside the app (Twitter) but it’s only metadata, and not noise, because an external app (hashtags) says so….

Kathy Gould at The Palos Verdes Library District blog has a very interesting post (which I’m proud to say was kicked off by something in my book) on the role of librarians as catalogs are enabled to sort themselves based on why someone is searching for something. The post grew out of a conversation with Betth Jefferson at Bibliocommons.

“So what happens when this role of helping people find the information that meets their particular needs is transferred from the librarian to the user community at large?” Kathy asks. The answer she gives presents librarians as creators and maintainers of the systems (an information architecture role, as I’d call it), as guides to and through the system, as voices in the system, and as facilitators of the library’s role in the community. But she puts it better than I just did.

Sounds right to me. [Tags: ]

I just published a new issue of my free newsletter. The main article is, entirely by coincidence, about ebooks and libraries — a coincidence because Amazon just announced Kindle, its ebook hardware.

The main article is a response to Anthony Grafton’s recent article in the New Yorker that tries to de-hype claims about the future of libraries.

By the way, Everything Is Miscellaneous is available for Kindle.

Also by the way, I just got a link from Urs Gasser to a recent conference on the future of books. [Tags: books ebooks kindle amazon libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

The estimable Lorcan Dempsey of the OCLC points to a presentation by Michael Panzer (also of the OCLC) about how to “webbify” the Dewey Decimal System.

The question Michael addresses is how to take the Dewey Decimal Classification system to the “networked level,” defined as “Infrastructural improvements to make a KOS [Knowledge Organization System] web-scale accessible, to make sharing, syndicating, leveraging of its data feasible.” He begins by scoping the problem. He then talks about the issues in webbifying the DDC, which he boils down to three: URI design, caption design, and format considerations.

He proposes a scheme for URI’s (which, especially in the condensed form of a PowerPoint presentation I don’t fully understand, but are probably beyond me even if spelled out), with examples such as http://dewey.info/concept/338.4/en/edn/22/. Notice the DDC number after the “concept” designation.

Captions he acknowledges depend on context, and with Web services (Michael points out), one cannot always know the context in which one’s captions are going to be used. He also discusses the importance of maintaining the hierarchy, but the bullet points are too compressed. (Not a criticism. The PowerPoint deck wasn’t intended to be self-standing, and I don’t know enough to be able to fill in all the missing context.)

To the third point, he looks at adopting either the MARC 21 or (and?) SKOS formats.

As Duncan says, “This is part of an ongoing investigation of what it means to release more of the value of ‘classic large-scale vocabularies’ in a web environment.” There’s lots of info packed into Dewey’s system. How can we best liberate that info?

[Tags: dewey_decimal_system libraries kos michael_panzer]

There’s a transcript of a long chat about my book among librarians in a book club, led by Stolvano Barbosa. They give it a good going over, including frequent drubbings. Fascinating, at least to me; I kept wanted to jump in, but that’s sort of hard to do with a transcript :)

Terrific post by Stu Henshall about what sounds like a fantastic talk by Dave Snowden (whose blog is here) at KMWorld. Dave combines the broad and deep with the incisive and the practical. Yikes! (Don’t miss the four posts from Dave that Stu points to as “must reads.”) [Tags: dave_snowden stu_henshall kmworld ]

Pandora.com explains some of the 400  metadata attributes it tracks so that it can tell that Song A is like Song B…

If you’re interested in the future of books and libraries, and if you’re in Cambridge MA on Tuesday, you should come to the Berkman Center at 12:30 to hear Aaron Swartz talk about the Open Library project, which is gathering a global, open and free list of every book it can find out about. It’s also attempting to help with the problem that books exist at multiple levels of abstraction: There’s Hamlet, editions of Hamlet, Hamlet in anthologies, Hamlet in translation, books based on Hamlet, etc. This is an important and fascinating project.

We serve lunch. Please RSVP. See you there…or on the webcast. (Details) [Tags: open_library aaron_swartz libraries ]