Notes from Sun Pasig - Fri morning session

A more discursive entry today

Listening to the various presentations over the past couple of days it occurs to me that the kind of solutions that people come up with and the kind of issues they face are infuenced by a number of factors:

• The problem that they are trying to solve
• The remit of the organisation that they work for
• The culture of that organisation
• The character of the person that is trying to solve the problem.

In discussion this comes out as a tension between people who empasise adherence to standards and planning exactly what you a going to do and how before you do it, and those who are more emphasise being flexible to peoples needs rather than trying to change them and trying to get to 80% rather than 100% (I'm really trying hard not to let my prejudices show here).
To give a couple of examples:

• The Family Search people are dealing with vast amounts of scanned images of family records. So for them the scale is the problem but file formats and metadata aren't (they're all the same)
• The Oxford University people are trying to provide services for people who want to run their own archives and to do something sensible with stuff that literally turns up at their door. So for them, scale is a bit of a problem (although nowhere near that of Family Search) but they have a huge problem deciding even how to classify what they have, let alone encoding that in some sort of metadata schema.

The danger is that people push each other apart and we end up with two camps, the Calvinists and the Maeneds (worshippers of Bacchus or Dionysus), shouting at each other from opposite sides of the conference floor.

I think that in reality there is a spectrum of needs and issues and we should acknowledge that each institution inhabits a different range in the spectrum.
I have had a bit of a think and have identified a number of axes that determine the kind of needs that an organisation will have and the issues that the organisation will face. I have also had a go at placing the BL on these axes/planes and showing the direction of travel (that is, this is where we are now and this is where we expect to be in the future):

1. There is an axis with Linear Ingest workflow at one end (mainly Libraries and Archives) and iterative creation workflow (Universities and Research groups using a publishing workflow or Virtual Research Environment) at the other
   
   
   


2. There is a triangle with unstructured heterogeneous data as one vertex, structured homgeneous data as a second and structured heterogeneous data as the third
   
   
   
   


3. There is an axis relating to the amount of engagement (ceremony) with providers of data before the providers start to deposit. At one end there is low ceremony, where you tell the provider where to put it (could even just be your postal address) and you sort it out, and the other end is high ceremony where you spend months deciding on data formats and metadata standards before you allow the depositer to place a single object.
   
   
   


4. There is a triangle with document-centric deposit at one vertex, database centric at the second and system centre (e.g. deposit of a web application) at the third
   
   
   
   
5. There is an access with preservation at one end and access at the other.