MODELS 11 Presentation

Tactics from the Trenches

David Kay, Strategic Development Director, FDI

David.Kay@fdgroup.com
http://www.fdgroup.com/fdi

Slide 1 – Title & Preface

As I am unable to attend MODELS 11 on account of a reasonably severe bout of flu, the following notes are provided to accompany the Powerpoint presentation separately circulated. I hope they might add some value both to the slides and to the discussions at MODELS 11. 

As you might guess, I believe from my personal experiences with a number of recent implementations that effective use of appropriate controlled vocabularies is crucial to the well being and evolution of our information ecology. Definition of ‘effective’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘controlled’ may however lead to major challenges in our joined-up but competitive knowledge society.

In that respect, my title of ‘Tactics from the Trenches’ was chosen both to indicate that the ideas herein came from working information organisations meeting real requirements and also to indicate the war of attrition that seems a fixture in the standardisation of metadata and authorities – especially across domains.

Slide 2 – Controlled Vocabularies

•	It is hard enough to get people to recognise the value of tagging outside the established curatorial traditions (see efforts in Government, Education Content and Community Information); it might be argued that the adoption of controlled vocabularies to enhance that process would be one step too far

•	There may also be a feeling from the laissez-faire heart of the internet community that the introduction of such vocabularies is fundamentally at odds with the ‘as found’ text indexing ethic of the web. Furthermore, even without the ethical dimension, it is surely a losing battle in terms of the likely response of the majority of organisations – especially if a common set of authorities is required.

•	The more cynical might even suggest that this is a good example of a breed of information professionals attempting to reinvent by decree their bygone role.

•	Nevertheless, one cannot deny that the issue refuses to die – and it is not always librarians, archivists and curators who raise the flag. The need for controlled vocabularies to support key facets of information retrieval (such as place & topic) is a concern of anyone running very large web sites (such as LDS) or attempting to ‘join-up’ previously discreet sources (such as CITU).

Slide 3 – Project Experiences

The Fretwell-Downing Group (both FDI & FDE) has been involved in a number of projects of significant scale that have emphasised the requirements for controlled vocabularies in their different ways – with a number of common underlying themes.

The five listed here represent outstanding examples – but one should not ignore other complementary projects which include

•	Elib3 Projects introducing Collection Level Descriptions (eg the Riding regional gateway & the Agora hybrid library)

•	The Public Record Office PROCAT implementation (though FDI was only involved upto Logical Design – of which two examples are included)

•	The AHDS Gateway which is deliberately predicated on the basis that the affiliated sites will not share any common vocabularies and therefore searches across the DC elements ‘as found’

Slide 4 – Controlled Vocabulary Comparisons

This table indicates for each project the use of four controlled vocabularies which we might regard as good candidates for a standardised approach : 

1.	Geographic / Geospatial
2.	Subject / Topic
3.	Name (Personal / Corporate)
4.	Resource Type

The following analysis arises

•	There is wide use of each vocabulary type

•	The purple shadings indicate where organisations have had cause to invent their localised form of an authority that one might imagine to be on the market; this is often done for good local reasons of timing or specialised purpose or simplicity of data

•	The green shadings indicate where organisations are using a market product (eg from LC or Getty) or something in the same spirit (eg UK locality divisions)

Slide 5 – Suggested Themes

Certain themes for discussion are suggested arising from Slide 4

•	Geographic Authority – there is a clear case to be made for adopting either a global or national standard (are these mutually compatible in the UK?); nevertheless there would be much local implementation work to do where organisations have pioneered their own solutions – of whom LDS would be a major example; public sector organisations should be expected to buy in.

•	Subject – there is a widespread desire for high level Subject terms organised in a simple manner (not full ISO Thesaurus standard); these terms would be used for simple search filters, reliable cross-searching and information ‘push’ (eg NewsAgent channels and topics); such a vocabulary would complement and might be linked into fuller specialist subject listings as will always exist; good examples of such lists have been developed by NNDP and NARA 

•	Name - approaches to Name indexing and searching seem to be domain specific more often than not; it is the nature of the beast that if names matter, then their treatment will be crucial; for example LDS uses surnames only and in a special normalised / standardised format; this is not a good area for concerted action.

•	Resource Type – as organisations consider their data as part of a larger cross-searching environment (as per the proposed Learning Portal example in the next slide), there is a readiness to recognise the need for authority terms to broadly classify the records by type – Resource Type being an example of typing on the basis of intellectual content rather than format (as per Media Type); some organisations already need it to differentiate within their collections – such as LDS who use it to broadly categorise anything Parish Registers from Ship Logs, and a Learning Portal that would need to distinguish Courses from Awards

•	Others? – Other broad categorisations may also be useful as soon as data is exposed in a cross searching and multi-domain manner; for example Language, Level (especially in Education) and Media.

Slide 6 – Why Interfere? (1) Precision

•	Before we get too excited we must recognise that this area is already covered by a mass of standardisation efforts and data suppliers (for example Getty & LC). Surely further players (for example, CITU or JISC or DC Education) will only add to the confusion? The only justification for new initiatives may be in the emergent areas of ‘thin subject lists’ and ‘resource types’.

•	Furthermore the ready availability of controlled vocabularies means that search precision is achievable for any organisation that will take the trouble of implementation. 

•	There are however pressures for greater consolidation in the key authority areas of place and topic in order to introduce greater precision into cross searching (many datasets – targets in Z39.50 terms) and cross domain searching (many datasets covering a range of domains which do not use the same detailed classifications – such as libraries, archives, museums and learning content). 

•	These needs to improve search precision with some certainty are clearly illustrated from the UK plc perspective of ‘joined-up’ services – whereby a citizen might expect to search reliably across those datasets illustrated in the Learning Portal, drawing familiar geographic and subject terms from pick lists rather than random words from personal memory.

Slide 7 – Learning Portal Diagram

The currently theoretical idea of the Learning Portal is based on the use of common terms in key areas of record description – including geographic, subject and resource type.

Slide 8 - Why Interfere? (2) Site & Portal Navigation

•	When considering delivering a collection or dataset over the web, the value-added of having reliable vocabularies and supporting rich authority records is considerable; for organisations like LDS, NARA and PRO it transforms how they can present searching  and navigation of even the largest resources. Proven benefits available to a site include

•	Pre-search filtering which saves the time of the user as well as ICT resources – as used by LDS, NNDP & elib3 CLDs

•	Terminologies (such as gazetteers) are searchable in their own right – as used by LDS, NARA and learndirect

•	They open up the integration of secondary resources such as supplementary guidance documents – as used by NARA & PRO

Slide 9 – NNDP Diagram

References Slide 8 – pre-search filtering

The NNDP demonstrator for archives (developed in 1997-8 under JISC funding) was an early adopter of subject and geographic terms to filter the datasets to be searched – an early instantiation of the Collection Level Descriptions approach under review in elib3.

Slide 10 – Public Record Office Diagram (Crown Copyright)

References Slide 8 – integration of secondary resources

The logical design for the PRO Catalogue (PROCAT) was based on the use of authority files as access points not only to the archival hierarchy itself (the ’catalogue’) but also to the Supplementary Finding Aids (SFAs) that are so important to guide users of all levels (eg Subject specific ‘how to’ guides cutting across the catalogue – for example, Titanic, Auschwitz). This re-use of the same authorities means that the catalogue and SFAs can be seamlessly navigated in the Web environment with a controlled term query providing results from both document types.

Slide 11 – Public Record Office Diagram (Crown Copyright)

This slide illustrates the spectrum of precision and utility (fitness for purpose) that can be achieved through different indexing and saved search strategies.

Slide 12 – LDS Diagram

References Slide 8 - Pre-search filtering and terminologies are searchable in their own right 

The design for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Family History Library Catalog for Web and CD took advantage of much of the thinking set out above on the exploitation of strong authority control to deliver a highly navigable and massively hyper-linked application.  Users may chose to search the main records (called Titles) directly - but genealogists generally value the opportunity to browse the authorities (geographic locality, resource types and author names) in their own right before linking direct to associated titles – the ultimate objective.

LDS CD Demonstration

The final slide was to have been followed by a brief presentation of the LDS Family History Library Catalog CD. This application is built using Z’mbol (from Index Data) on the principles set out in Slides 6, 8 & 12 and expands the approach already used in the FHLC internet site - which is part of http://www.familysearch.org. 

If you would like a free fully licensed copy of the FHLC CD when it is formally released in the Spring, all you need do is email Mark Hundleby at FDI with your name, institution and full postal address and referencing MODELS 11.

Mark.Hundleby@fdgroup.com