Just When You Thought Standards Were Simple

The amazing metadata map above is simply called Seeing Standards: A Visualisation of the Metadata Universe and is truly mind-blowing and a tribute to the creator Jenn Riley. It demonstrates not only the vast range of standards, the communities they serve, their purpose,function and domain.

Metadata is the data that describes data. We often refer to it as bibliographic data and it is the information that enables us the search, find, retrieve the appropriate information and allows us to talk to each other through a common language.

The book world is widely adopting ONIX which originated from the music industry in the 90s, whilst the library world with its more complex requirements has retained its MARC records.

However, it would appear that time is being called on the MARC record.

The Library of Congress is now being asked to take action by two expert groups with the aim of funding the work to create a new bibliographic framework that will serve a wide range of associated library communities well into the future.

In the late 1960s, early 1970s, the Library community created the MARC21 standard. At the time was a giant step forward and enabled libraries to share machine readable bibliographic data and also to reduce the cost and effort of cataloguing. The MARC standard has been a huge success and is responsible for the global creation of millions of bibliographic records. The structure was approved as a National Information Standards Organization (NISO) (Z39.2) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (2709) standard, which helped establish it as the standard used by libraries. It also was used to describe other material, such as serials, sound recordings, still and moving images, maps, archival material, computer software, digital resources etc. Today there are over a billion MARC 21 compatible records.

Now some 40 years later the a working group from the community have found that MARC is ‘no longer fit for the purpose, work with the library and other interested communities to specify and implement a carrier for bibliographic information that is capable of representing the full range of data of interest to libraries, and of facilitating the exchange of such data both within the library community and with related communities.’

This call for change is echoed from tests of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) conducted by the National Agricultural Library, the National Library of Medicine, and the Library of Congress.

So when we read the statement from the Library of Congress we find ourselves drowning is a sea of acronyms and names. We are familiar with some we have no clue about others. So we are lucky to have been pointed to work that Jenn Riley has done which could be described as a ‘dummies guide’ to standards and their relationships, which we highly recommend and share links to below.

Read the Library of Congress Statement, October 31, 2011

Seeing Standards: A Visualisation of the Metadata Universe by Jenn Riley

Glossary of Metadata Standards by Jenn Riley

Glossary of Metadata Standards (poster form) by Jenn Riley

Half The UK Registered on Facebook!

Experian Hitwise’s latest report claim that social networks are the UK’s favourite online destinations. Facebook and Twitter registered 2.4bn Internet visits in the UK in January and Facebook claim that it now has 30 million registered users in the UK alone which equates to half the population!

This comes at the same time that the BBC released its latest stats for the iPlayer, which reveal that more people than ever, some 125 million hits, were streaming live content through over the service. They also claim 2.1 million requests were delivered to the iPad alone in February. The total hits in the month was down from 162 million to 148 million but interestingly some 23 million of these were from Virgin Media iPlayer TV requests.The BBC also claim that there are proportionally more daytime and late-peak users of the service and the majority of users are under 55.

The blurring of the entertainment and social services is seen as one of the main drivers in UK traffic. Sites such as Facebook are increasingly hosting content from entertainment sites and this is driving more social interaction and stimulating more take-up. This in term attracts more businesses to advertise, promote and generally position them on the social map.

There are still strong calls, especially in the EU to tighten security on the social networks and EU law and directives. The main EU thrust today remains focused on "the right to be forgotten", letting users "withdraw their consent" to their data being held. It is felt that service providers should prove that they need to keep the data, rather than individuals having to prove that collecting their data is not necessary.

So we are now clearly seeing a step change from the vertical web services of email, blogs, flikr, youtube etc to one which overlays these within a social network construct that is wider in its appeal and deeper in its richness. Mobile technology such as tablets and smart phones are enablers that now are increasingly permanently connected. It doesn’t mean that the verticals disappear it merely means that these become the feeds that are consolidated through the likes of Facebook.

With half the UK population apparently signed up it clearly now says that we are starting to socially communicate, interact with media, express ourselves and collect and share content and opinions.

One Cable Connects So Many

We have written before about the dependence much of Africa has to the undersea SAT-3 cable running down its west coast from Portugal and Spain to South Africa.

We now discover that much of West Africa has suffered a major fault and are still struggling to get back online. The fault has caused a communications blackout and many problems in Benin, Togo, Niger and Nigeria. Some 70% of Nigeria's bandwidth has been effected, disrupting; banking, government and mobile phone networks. Companies have been forced to use satellite links just to maintain connections to the rest of the world.

The 9,300mile SAT-3 cable lands in eight West African countries as it winds its way between Europe and South Africa. On the other side of Africa the countries have had no alternative but to go to mobile communication, but the disparity and poor connectivity across the continent, shows the difference between the highly connected western world and the poorly unconnected third world.