Christine says I am taking on the cataloging establishment. That surprised me; all I did was comment on a report, and as a non-cataloger, I doubt the “cataloging establishment” feels one bit tooken-upon by me, if that is the right verb.

However, I’ll expand on something I said in a comment on her blog: the WoGroFuBiCo draft report seems to be at war with itself. There are at least two authorial voices: the voice of resistance and the voice of change.

The voice of resistance says to suspend work on RDA (though note, work has proceeded so slowly it might be hard to detect its cessation…); it also says to do a lot more testing of FRBR and to conduct research on user behavior. This voice is silent on funding the Dublin Core work I discussed last summer on ALA Techsource.

Voice of Resistance employs a typical librarian strategy: resistance by obfuscation. I’ve seen it in action in libraries, and I saw it on ALA Council. Stall. Postpone. Resist timelines. Do more “studies.” Plan actions around a massive one-time report to be released at some unidentified date in the future.

I’m all for user research, the more the merrier, but the idea that we know nothing about user behavior that can be applied to the theory and practice of information organization is sheer historical revisionism (I refuse to believe it is ignorance). Just this past summer Karen Markey published a two-part series (here’s a citation for part 2) summarizing twenty-five years of user behavior. What we need to do is start acting on what we know.

Voice of Change takes different tactics. Put authorities on the Web. Consider pulling in data from other sources. Rethink cataloging. It’s a different, fresher, more flexible voice. It’s the voice of the future. It suggests experimentation, rapid iteration, responsiveness.

Both voices are still somewhat stuck in the “record” paradigm, and by that I mean thinking in terms of bibliographic records, versus bibliographic data. We are too often still trapped in professional literalisms. A book, ergo a physical record. This gets in the way of rethinking how data is used, reused, remixed, populated into the network cloud, and associated with other rich data.

Both voices also miss the chance to discuss the question of how open we make our data. Which brings up that Christine also has some good comments about OCLC’s response – with which Talis provided its own response (Talis has its own dog in this fight — then again, don’t we all?). My initial take on the WorldCat response to WoGroFuBiCo’s draft report is that I’d be on it like white on rice if only it didn’t come from a vendor-like organization struggling with issues of sharing and trust. I think of OCLC, and I am reminded of the final, heartbreaking scene (at least as I remember it) of the movie version of The Remains of the Day, in which Emma Thompson (representing LibraryLand) crumples her face in grief as she bids farewell to Anthony Hopkins (representing OCLC), who cannot release himself into the trust necessary for love.

Really, I need some gingerbread.

In any event, I appreciate how the library community has conducted a lot of this discussion in the wild. I hope for the final WoGroFuBiCo report that community response and engagement is solicited a) with a longer time frame (they got ten months, we got 16 days) and in a more 2.0-ish, iterative, public-commentish sort of way.

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“Scrambling” is a key term here, because the 16-day response period was extremely short, in a 1.0-ish, “We’re giving you a response period but not with enough time to seriously discuss or respond anything of substance” sort of way. Discuss, that is, in the public sphere, leveraging the collective wisdom of LibraryLand. (I try to avoid the phrase “hive mind,” which makes me think of boils and bee-stings.)

I know that the report is in many ways daring; it will certainly ruffle a few feathers, and I don’t mean just Michael Gorman’s. But I’ve heard scattered complaints that the report is top-downish (Hillmann even used the phrase “noblesse oblige”), and I agree. It’s a wee bit top-downish in tone, but it’s also very top-downish in production.

Should there be WoGroFuBiCo or something like it in the future, this is what I suggest (and this also goes for reports from the Big O and various library sages):

• Build in decent response time — long enough to underscore that you really want thoughtful responses that could in fact influence the document.
• Plan an iterative approach. Put out a solid draft early and let everyone respond to it, then take it back and work on it some more. (This is also how we need to do future cataloging standards such as RDA, quite frankly. Polishing and polishing the be-all end-all document isn’t going to work.)
• Make it easy for the community to engage with the document. Publish the document in a section-by-section basis on a wiki or blog (CommentPress is an interesting thought) and encourage paragraph-by-paragraph responses. (Much in the same way that we need to open descriptive enhancement to a broader base of community input.)
• Open the response silo and build discussion and engagement. This is crucial, whether you stick with the PDF format or not: allow respondents to decide if they want to make their responses public and commentable. This would not only provide organizations the option to share their ideas with the world, but would save the time of organizations and individuals that might simply want to say “me too.” Others might find points to engage with in the comments.

If you are a WoGroFuBiCo veteran and you are reading this, right now your mouth may be pursing to say “But.” Set aside “but” for a moment and replace it with words or phrases such as “maybe,” “how,” or “what if.”

A lot of this has to do with relaxing a bit and leaning into sharing and trust. I remember the first time I saw LibraryThing I was startled that people would want to expose their book collections. But if the Justice Department wants to spy on me they have so many other, far better ways to do it, and I benefit from sharing my collection with others. (For one thing, it means my LibraryThing secret santa has an idea what to get me. ) As Roy says, it’s all about giving up control — ultimately, for something a lot better.

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