Reminder: Call for review of new metadata documents

[Helen Aristar-Dry]

Extremely sensible remarks, Jeff.  I agree especially with the points 
about 'signal to noise' ratio and think that Gary's remarks on 
provenance or your revision, which gives an example, would be much more 
helpful.

-Helen

Jeff Good wrote:
> Dear Gary (and others),
> 
> Thanks a lot for that clarification. The relationship between the 
> mission statement and the granularity guidelines is much clearer to me 
> now. I agree with Helen that the reasoning should be made explicit 
> somewhere more prominent than this list. Your interpretation is not how 
> I have interpreted the mission statement largely because I missed out on 
> the significance of the word "library". I also find "virtual library" to 
> be ambiguous between what one might call a "digital library" and what 
> one might call an "aggregated library" (the latter sense being my label 
> for your understanding of the OLAC use).
> 
> I think it might be worth adding two questions to the FAQ (or answering 
> these questions in some other appropriate place): (i) What does OLAC 
> mean by "virtual library"? and (ii) What does OLAC mean by "language 
> archive"? That should help a lot with possible ambiguities in the 
> mission statement.
> 
> An important open issue, which is still not clear to me from your 
> explanation is whether OLAC is focusing on a "card catalog" now because 
> that's all OLAC ever sees itself doing or if it, instead, views getting 
> the card catalog part right as the first step towards a deeper kind of 
> interoperability. (My reading of the mission would be that the latter 
> interpretation is correct, but I already missed out on the importance of 
> "library" in the mission. So, I'm probably missing several other points. 
> I think the crucial point in this regard is understanding what the level 
> of interoperability one hopes to achieve with respect to the  
> "interoperating repositories".) I don't think this is a merely pedantic 
> issue right now because it matters a lot for how we "advertise" OLAC. Do 
> we say, "OLAC is all about search!" (my simplification of something 
> Helen said) or do we say, "OLAC aims for digital linguistic utopia 
> starting with search!". (For what it's worth, I don't really care 
> strongly about which path OLAC takes, but I would like to be confident 
> I'm describing OLAC's goals correctly to other people.)
> 
> 
>> aggregated catalogs, and (3) maintaining a catalog to help users find
>> resources.  The OLAC metadata standard is, of course, the 
>> specification for
>> how to create an entry for the catalog.
> 
> I'm actually somewhat confused by the fact that you say OLAC is 
> maintaining a catalog of resources. It was my understanding that OLAC is 
> right now only maintaining one kind of "catalog", but not one of 
> resources. Rather, it maintains a list of participating archives. The 
> full catalogs of resources (for linguists, at least) are maintained by 
> the two service providers: LINGUIST and the LDC. (I know there are lots 
> of connections between OLAC and these catalogs, but, strictly speaking, 
> I didn't think OLAC was in the catalog maintenance business but, rather, 
> defined a way through which a catalog could be maintained by outside 
> parties.)
> 
> 
>> book, rather than an individual recorded session.  Thus I think this
>> interpretation of desired granularity is straightforwardly implied by the
>> OLAC mission of creating a virtual library.  If you have any ideas of
>> specific wording changes in the granularity guidelines that might help to
>> clarify this, I'll be glad to hear them.
> 
> I think your response already has all of the required points. Helen 
> seemed to suggest adding an explanation to the mission statement. I'll 
> let you and Steven decide if that's appropriate. (I'm not sure what the 
> process is for adding explanations to the mission statement.)
> 
> With respect to the guidelines, I recommend changing the first paragraph 
> of the granularity discussion to something like the following (based on 
> my understanding of your explanation):
> 
> "Determining the right level for units to be described as language 
> resources in the OLAC context involves multiple factors. The level of 
> unit appropriate for inclusion in an aggregated catalog like OLAC's may 
> be different (typically higher) than the level desirable for the catalog 
> of a specific institution's holdings, which in turn is typically higher 
> than the level desirable for describing the detailed contents of a 
> resource. Consistent with its mission to create a virtual _library_ of 
> language resources, a basic rule of thumb for making determinations 
> regarding what kinds of units to treat as language resources should be 
> that they should be comparable to the kinds of units treated as 
> resources in a traditional library catalog. For example, libraries 
> typically assign a single record to each book, not to each chapter 
> within a book. A parallel example in the OLAC context would be treating 
> all the objects associated with a particular field trip as a single unit 
> rather than treating each of the individual resources created during 
> that field trip as separate units. The following discussion is aimed at 
> assisting an OLAC participant to find the right level of description."
> 
> It might the be nice to give lots of concrete examples, maybe you could 
> get some of the participating archives to do this?
> 
> One thing I deleted from that paragraph was reference to the 
> recommendation given in the Repository guidelines:
> "A metadata repository should not degrade the 'signal-to-noise ratio' 
> for language resource discovery."
> 
> I don't find this recommendation very helpful because (for me, at least) 
> it is too dependent on what kinds of resources I want to discover. In 
> other words, "language resource discovery" is too broad an activity for 
> there to be one "signal-to-noise ratio". For example, if I already know 
> I'm looking for resources on Nahuatl, I would probably not want to find 
> a record saying, "There's a bunch of material on Nahuatl that's part of 
> some bundle over at AILLA." The signal would be too weak for me--what 
> I'd prefer is the search result I'd get from AILLA's catalog. Of course, 
> for the next person, lots of detailed records about Nahuatl would 
> constitute "noise". Signal and noise just don't strike me as constant 
> enough to form the basis of a recommendation.
> 
> I also don't like that this recommendation privileges language resource 
> _discovery_ over other possible uses of the catalog. For example, 
> library catalogs have at least one other function in addition to 
> discovery: retrieval. Often I know a resource exists, but I don't know 
> where it is, which is why I consult the catalog (this is my primary use 
> of WorldCat, for example). (The word "discovery" is potentially 
> ambiguous enough to cover "find something previously unknown" and 
> "retrieve", but that's not my initial reading.) So, I would prefer a 
> recommendation that was more agnostic regarding the use of the metadata.
> 
> I personally find your new discussion of provenance in the metadata 
> usage guidelines much more helpful than 'signal-to-noise ratio', since 
> it's not dependent on particular uses of OLAC service providers. So, I'd 
> actually recommend the following revision to the repository guidelines 
> regarding granularity from the present recommendation to something like:
> 
> "A metadata repository should treat resources with a single provenance 
> as constituting a single unit with respect to OLAC metadata and should, 
> therefore, describe them within a single record."
> 
> Another advantage to talking about granularity in terms of provenance in 
> my view is that the current guidelines seem to be asking data providers 
> to hypothesize about what search scenarios their data will be put to, 
> but I don't think it's reasonable to expect data providers to be very 
> good at this, or to even to ask them to spend time thinking about this. 
> That's a job for service providers. Framing the issue in terms of 
> provenance allows data providers to use a kind of information they are, 
> in principle, experts about to structure their collections, which is 
> presumably a good way to achieve consistency. Furthermore, it allows 
> service providers to be reasonably confident that they are aggregating 
> records of the same basic kind from different service providers. It is 
> thus more consonant with the overall OAI model wherein data providers 
> and service providers interact in terms of a well-defined series of 
> agreements without the one having to pay attention to the internal 
> activities of the other.
> 
> Jeff

-- 
Helen Aristar-Dry
Professor of Linguistics
Director, Institute for Language Information and Technology (ILIT)
Eastern Michigan University
2000 Huron River Rd., Suite 104
Ypsilanti, MI 48197

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734.487.7952 (faculty office)
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hdry at linguistlist.org