Aurlog

Cows and stuff

Flexi hours calculator (online and for Excel)

I have tidied up and moved my ancient flexi hours calculator which now lives at http://www.aurochs.org/flexi/flexi.html. Several people have emailed me out of the blue recently about setting up an Excel version, which I have done and which now lives at http://www.aurochs.org/flexi/flexi.xlsx.

This is a version of one of the oldest useful programmes I ever wrote. My dad used to manage an office where everyone filled in paper flexi-time forms. My dad then had to add them all up at the end of every week, which he did manually. I wrote something in AmigaBasic to make it easier for him. The main point of it was that it had to be easy and quick to enter the times in, which is why it uses the simple four figure times and no drop downs (although I’m not sure how or if you can do drop down lists in AmigaBasic (nor do I intend to find out now)). Eventually my dad got the IT people at work to replace their version of a flexi calculator with something based instead on mine, which is silly considering how simple this was. Sometime after starting at my current employer (1997), I thought it would be a useful exercise to convert the programme to work on the web as I was learning Javascript at the time. It still exists and hasn’t changed a lot since then, barring a bit of explanation and some atrocious styling: the last time that file was touched was in 2003.

Although it is really hard to find (I can never remember where I left it and it seems impossible to Google), people do seem to come across it quite often and find it useful. I’ve been emailed a couple of times about getting bespoke versions done in Excel which led me to create a version initially to record multiple users, and another with additional days and more complicated working patterns. I’ve put a more standard version up with seven days and two sessions per day. It can easily be altered if you’re into Excel or, if you have something particular in mind, do let me know and I might be able to do something with it.

The original online version is written in Javascript. If you’re learning Javascript, please don’t look at it as it is a most outdated and inefficient way of adding Javascript to a webpage. However, it works, and the effort of making it all elegant would I think be counterproductive. It works on the idea that the first two digits of a four digit time (HHMM) are hours, the second two digits minutes. It converts these both to minutes (HH * 60 + MM) and does all the necessary maths. The slightly more tricky bit is converting a total of minutes back into hours and minutes. This is one rare (for me) real life use of the modulo (%) operation (although looking at the code source I seem to have invented my own weird convoluted version of the same thing). If you have x number of minutes, the number of hours will be x divided by 60 with any remainder taken off, i.e. Math.floor(x / 60); the number of minutes will be that remainder, i.e. x % 60. These can be put together into a pretty string.

I’m always interested to know if people find this useful, come across problems with it, or would find a slightly different version useful.

Cataloguing coding

I am not a trained programmer, coding is not part of my job description, and I have little direct access to cataloguing and metadata databases at work outside of normal catalogue editing and talking to the systems team, but I thought it might be worth making the point of how useful programming can be in all sorts of little ways. Of course, the most useful way is in gaining an awareness of how computers work, appreciating why some things might be more tricky than others for the systems team to implement, seeing why MARC21 is a bastard to do anything with even if editing it in a cataloguing module is not really that bad, and how the new world of FRDABRDF is going to be glued together. However, some more practical examples that I managed to cobble together include:

Customizing Classification Web with Greasemonkey. This is a couple of short scripts using Javascript, which is what the default Codeacademy lessons use. Javascript is designed for browers and is a good one to start with as you can do something powerful very quickly with a short script or even a couple of lines (think of all the 90s image rollovers). It’s also easy to have a go if you don’t have your own server, or even if you’re confined to your own PC. Aleph-formatted country and language codes. I wrote a small PHP script to read the XML files for the MARC21 language and country codes and convert them into an up to date list of preferred codes in a format that Aleph can read, basically a text file which needs line breaks and spaces in the right places. It is easy to tweak or run again in the event of any minor changes. I don’t have this publicly available anywhere though. PHP is not the most elegant language but is relatively easy to dip into if you ever want to go beyond Javascript and do more fancy things, although it can be harder to get access to a server running PHP. MARC21 .mrc file viewer. I occasionally need to quickly look at raw .mrc files to assess their quality and to figure out what batch changes we want to make before importing them into our catalogue. This is an attempt to create something that I could copy and paste snippets of .mrc files into for a quick look. It is written in PHP and is still under construction. There are other better tools for doing much the same thing to be honest, but coding this myself has had the advantages of forcing me to see how a MARC21 file is put together and realising how fiddly it can be. Try this with an .mrc which has some large 520 or 505 fields in it (there are some zipped ones here, to pick at random) and watch the indicators mysteriously degrade thereafter. I will get to the bottom of this…

The following examples are less useful for my own practical purposes but have been invaluable for learning about metadata and cataloguing, in particular, RDF/linked data. I was very interested in LD when I first heard about it. Being able to actually try something out with it (even if the results are not mind-blowing) rather than just read about it, has been very useful. Both are written in PHP and further details are available from the links:

Lodopac: Linked Open Data OPAC. My entry for the UK Discovery Developer Competition. In Our Time booklist. A forerunner to Lodopac, written in response to an idea raised by psychemedia for the Open Bibliographic Data Challenge: the BBC â€œIn Our Timeâ€ Reading List. Sadly it no longer works as the BNB service it relies upon was taken down.

Nothing to do with cataloguing, but what I am most proud of is this, written in Javascript: Cowthello. Let me know if you beat it.

Update: Shana McDanold also wrote an excellent post on why a cataloguer should learn to code with lots of practical examples.

Tom's Excellent Website Snow (using Greasemonkey)

Behold: a version of Tom’s Excellent Javascript Snow (unobtrusive and customisable javascript snow for web pages using no images) that works on all websites you open on your browser (provided your browser is Firefox or something else that can run Greasemonkey scripts)!

To install it:

Install Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/ Make sure the monkey (probably at the top-right) is happy and colourful. Click on it if not. Install the tomsnow script by going to http://www.aurochs.org/zlib/js/userjs/tomsnow.user.js then Click on the Install button. Go and look at a new web page or reload one.

If you want to turn Greasemonkey off altogether, click on the monkey so heâ€™s grey. If you want to stop individual scripts, click on the monkey, click on Manage User Scripts, and click on Disable next to the script.

These instructions were tested on Firefox 3.6.24 on Linux although I imagine they would be fine on any recent version of Firefox. I would be interested to hear anything confirming or undermining that assertion.

If youâ€™re happy to play around, the snow is very customisable: you can easily alter the amount, speed, and style of snow, and so forth:

Click on the monkey Click on Manage User Scripts Select tomsnow from the list Click on Options Click on Edit this user script (you will probably have to select a text editor at this point) Look for the section under the line of asterisks where more instructions can be found on how to make customisations. Save the file and reload any pages to see changes.

The Greasemonkey version of the script uses slightly different default settings to the previous version, in particular using a lower density of flakes as a huge blizzard of snow is not likely to be welcome if used on all sites one browses.

I haven’t found any particular problems and it doesn’t seem to stop any sites working although sites that are already very script heavy are obviously less happy about running more, e.g. Twitter which is fine but can get sticky, although Gmail seems curiously OK. My cPanel was the only one which was really not happy. When you manage a Greasemonkey script, you will see a box where you can specify websites that you don’t want it to work on. For example, put https://twitter.com/* and it will stop tomsnow working on that URL with anything after it.

*

Lodopac example searches

Yay, my entry for the Discovery & DevCSI Developers Competition- Lodopac- was awarded a commendation for its use of the Cambridge University Library (CUL) dataset. During the judging I was asked for searches which were known to work well- the timeout issues I discussed under Limitations being not insignificant, especially with author or title searches. I submitted a version of the following brief general notes which I hope are helpful to anyone else who wants to play:

The British National Bibliography (BNB) server is generally more responsive than the Cambridge University Library one; title seems to work better than author. The following are hopefully useful examples useful:

author=”fisher” seems to work (at least in BNB) so long as the number of hits to return is small (e.g. 5). title=”fisher” works well for both. ISBN=”0709039425″ should very quickly give you a single hit in both BNB and CUL.

I would really like to try and think of ways of improving free text regular expression search times for things like author and title in Sparql* although I doubt there is one that doesn’t rely on the configuration, processing power, or indexing of the server being searched.

* thinking aloud, some ideas might include: downloading a larger imprecise set for further local searching (e.g. for an author/title search downloading the title matches and searching the authors locally: although this would also be slow, it would get round the timeout at least); forcing a look-up in a controlled vocab first in order to get an exact string match (esp for authors, although even if this is possible, this forces a user to do more work, which isn’t the point);Â local indexing of the triple store (this is probably the best way but I’m not sure how to go about it, whether I really have the server capabilities to do it, and can be committed to the updating required).

Test for brackets in captions

Example without square brackets:

bee”]

This is a [hairy

Example with square brackets:

This is a [longhorn] cow

Sparql recipes for bibliographic data

One of the difficulties in searching RDF data is knowing what the data looks like. For instance, finding a book by its title means knowing something about what how a dataset has recorded the relationship between a book and its title. There is no real standard for publishing MARC/AACR2-style bibliographic data as RDF: it seems libraries publishing RDF are approaching this largely individually, although they are using many of the same vocabularies, dc, bibo, etc. This was one reason why I wanted to create Lodopac: to present some kind of interface so that searchers didn’t need to know these different models but could start to explore them. Below are the Sparql recipes for the different search criteria I used for the BNB and the Cambridge University Library datasets, so they can be compared, re-used, or corrected. All examples use prefixes, which are defined anew in each example. The examples are of course fragments and don’t have all the necessary SELECT and WHERE clauses.

By the way, for an excellent Sparql tutorial with ample opportunity to play as you go along, do have a look at the Cambridge University Library’s SPARQL tutorial. It also gives clues to the way their data is structured. Of use for the BNB is their data model (PDF), which is not nearly as scary as it looks at first, and incredibly helpful.

Author keyword search

This would be relatively straightforward-the unavoidable regular expression being the main complication- but for the fact that the traditional author/editor/etc of bibliographic records can be found in dc:creator as well as dc:contributor which necessitates a UNION. The BNB used foaf:name:

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>

{?book dc:creator ?author} UNION {?book dc:contributor ?author} .
?author foaf:name ?name .
FILTER regex(?name, “author”, “i”) .

Cambridge uses much the same recipe except that it uses rdfs:label instead of foaf:name:

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>

{?book dc:creator ?author} UNION {?book dc:contributor ?author} .
?author rdfs:label ?name .
FILTER regex(?name, “author”, “i”) .

Title keyword searches

This is more straightforward and is in fact the same for both the BNB and Cambridge University Library:

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>

?book dc:title ?title .
FILTER regex(?title, “title”, “i”) .

Date of publication (year)

I imagined this one being simple and for Cambridge University Library it is. However the BNB took some unravelling as they have modelled publication as an event related to a book. The various elements of publication are then related to the event. So, for the BNB we have this:

PREFIX bibliographic: <http://data.bl.uk/schema/bibliographic#>
PREFIX event: <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>

?book bibliographic:publication ?pub .
?pub event:time ?year .
?year rdfs:label “date” .

By contrast, Cambridge University Library has it in one line:

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>

?book dc:created “date” .

ISBN

As an identifier, ISBN is relatively straightforward in both models, although care must be taken with the BNB as 10 and 13 digit ISBNs are treated as separate properties and the following assumes that the search will cover both:

PREFIX bibo: <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/>

{?book bibo:isbn10 “isbn”} UNION {?book bibo:isbn13 “isbn”} .

For Cambridge University Library, also using the bibo ontology, this is:

PREFIX bibo: <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/>

?book bibo:isbn “isbn” .

Conclusion

I didn’t set up to provide ground-breaking conclusions. However, it is remarkable how different data models can be formulated for modelling the same type of data by similar organisations. The real question is whether this is a good, a bad thing, or doesn’t really mattter. Will it need to be standardised? My understanding of how this works is probably not. I think the days of monolithic library standards are probably now gone. I wonder, for instance, if there ever will be a single MARC22 (or whatever you like to call it) and doubt RDA will ever completely replace AACR2 in the way we imagine. What will emerge I suspect will be a soup of various standards and data models, some of which will be more prevalent. One thing I picked up from various linked data talks is that information has frequently been published then re-used in ways that the issuers never imagined; if that is the case, the precise modelling and format is probably not as important as the fact that it is of good quality and intelligently put together. The BNB and Cambridge University Library models are clearly quite different but quite capable of being mapped and used despite this.

If there are any other bibliographic data Sparql endpoints, I would like to include them in a future version of the Lodopac search. Do let me know if you come across them.

More mundanely, do say if there are errors in my Sparql recipes or if there are ways they could be done more efficiently.

Lodopac : simple Linked Open Data OPAC

Lodopac is my entry to the UK Discovery Developer Competition. Aside from obvious mocking of the name, comments on Lodopac are very welcome. If anyoneÂ installs it locally, I’d also be very interested to know.

About Lodopac

Lodopac is a simple linked open data opac using Sparql to search remote bibliographic RDF data. By default it is set up to search the BNB and Cambridge University Library datasets, but is designed to allow easy setup of additional datasets with Sparql endpoints (see Installation, source code, and configuration below). It was written in response to the UK Discovery Developer Competition.

The purpose of Lodopac is to provide a simple standard OPAC-style interface to perform searches of various bibliographic RDF datasets without having to know how to formulate a Sparql query and without having to know the structure of the database. I hope it is especially useful for people wanting to get a grip on how bibliographic RDF is put together, what it looks like, and what a Sparql query looks like. For example, an author search is possible without knowing about dc:creator and dc:contributor, or how these need to be linked together in a Sparql search. Similarly, a searcher wouldn’t need to worry about how to construct date searches in different datasets. For the BNB and CUL, these are very different (three lines in the BNB, one for CUL), but in Lodopac, there is only search box to search both. Lodopac displays the Sparql query it constructed to perform the search, as well as the combined RDF for all results found in XML, JSON, N3, and TTL.

How to search Lodopac

Select one or more of the available datasets using the checkboxes.

Author and Title searches are free text phrase searches. In other words, a string you search for will match with any exact match, including spacing and punctuation, and in the middle of words. E.g. searching for “shake” will match “Shakespeare”, “milkshakes”, and “More hits that you can shake a stick at”. Searching is case insensitive. The following punctuation is removed from searches: \”‘<>$^%.

You are strongly advised to keep author and title searches simple: e.g. one word of a title or a surname only.

ISBN searches 10 or 13 digit ISBNs. Any dashes or other non-digit characters are stripped from the search.

Date search will accept a year.

N.B. Keep searches as simple as possible, especially with author and title searches, to avoid them timing out. ISBN and date searches are generally quicker.

Limitations

A bad workman blames his tools and I’m no exception. The greatest limitation is the time taken by Sparql endpoints to perform a Sparql query, especially one that involves a regular expression, such as the Author and Title searches. What is needed is some more robust indexing or some cheat like Virtuoso’s unorthodox bif:contains, which the old version of the linked data BNB used. I touched on this in a blog post about the In Our Time Booklist script I wrote (see section 6).

The load and current capacity on the Sparql endpoints at the time the query is made is another important factor. A search which times out one minute can work fine the next.

The search options are obviously limited but do I hope represent the most common methods of searching normal library catalogues aside from, of course, a general keywords search. The manipulation of results is also rather sparse but allows click through to full data associated with a book, the structure and contents of which can be more fully explored. The aggregation of RDF data in various formats is I hope useful illustratively as well as having potential for further manipulation.

Installation, source code, and configuration

The source code for Lodopac is available as a zip file, which contains all the necessary PHP, Javascript, and CSS files. In addition, you will need to install ARC2, which makes the Sparql queries and manipulates the resultant RDF. Edit the first line of lodopac.php so that it points at your local installation of ARC2.

The programme is basically one long script- there is only one page- but is split for convenience of editing. The key file is lodopac.php which includes the other files as it goes along. The main core of the script which builds the queries and does the searching is all in lodopac.php.

I have attempted to make the script as easily configurable as possible so that additional Sparql endpoints can be added. There are probably more components hard-coded into the script that I have overlooked, but all the setup for the endpoints is in the file setup_endpoints.php. The first part of this file is a list of necessary prefixes that are needed for any possible queries from any of the endpoints and, although not ideal, all these prefixes are sent with any Sparql query. Following that and the declaration of an array of the endpoints, each endpoint has a dedicated block with the information added to a hash. To add another endpoint, duplicate a block and configure the search recipes as appropriate. The keys marked “brief_” are used to fetch information for the brief results display. I have conspicuously chickened out of providing an author and the attendant main entry and multiple author headaches involved.

Customizing Classification Web with Greasemonkey

Classification Web is ace, but there are a couple of things about the interface that annoy me and, in one colleague’s case, seriously put him off using it, in particular:

The opening of a new tab/window when you click on the MARC view for a subject or name. The confusing menu. We don’t use LCC or DDC, and the browse options don’t really add much, so we only really need two options: Search LC Subject Headings and Search LC Name Headings.

I managed to work out a simple way of modifying how Classification Web works on Firefox using the Greasemonkey add-on and a couple of simple scripts, all of which is quick and easy to install:

Install Greasemonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/ Make sure the monkey in the bottom-right corner is happy and colourful. Click on it if not. If you want to prevent the MARC view opening a new window, install the classweb_no_new_ window script by going to http://www.aurochs.org/zlib/js/userjs/classweb_no_new_window.user.js then Click on the Install button If you want to reduce the main menu, install classweb_prune_menu script by going to http://www.aurochs.org/zlib/js/userjs/classweb_prune_menu.user.js then Click on Install button Reload/refresh Classweb if it’s still open and it should work.

If you want to turn Greasemonkey off altogether, click on the monkey so he’s sad and grey. If you want to stop individual scripts, right click on the monkey, click on Manage User Scripts, select a script from the list, and un-tick the Enabled box in the lower left corner.

These instructions were tested on Firefox 3.5.3 although I imagine they would be fine on any recent version of Firefox. I would be interested to hear anything confirming or undermining that assertion.

If you’re happy to play around, these scripts can be further altered. In particular, you can choose which menu items appear in the pruned menu script:

Right click on the monkey Click on Manage User Scripts Select classweb_prune_menu from the list Click on Edit (you will probably have to select a text editor at this point) Edit the list of pages under the line var menu_items_to_keep = Array (. Enter each page you want to appear on the menu on a separate line in quotes, with a comma at the end of each line except the last line. The menu item must appear exactly as it does on the Classification Web menu, including capitals. E.g., the default set up looks like this:

var menu_items_to_keep = Array ( // end each line with a comma except the last line
  "Search LC Subject Headings",
  "Search LC Name Headings"
);

Save the file, and reload Classification Web.

If anyone else finds this useful or can think of more customizations let me know.

Sketch for Eurovision linked data

I’ve been looking around to see if Eurovision data exists as linked data, or openly in any format. I can find relatively little, mostly just data about one of the recent contests, or about UK performances. None of it is RDF or linked. I suspect that some linked but not open data of this sort may be held by the BBC or the EBU, but can’t see any trace of it.

In some ways I am not disappointed as it means I can have a go at playing with the idea myself, both for fun and as something to learn from. The idea would be to do something similar to what I have done with this Sandy site, preferably also with a Sparql endpoint if I can figure out how to set one up. It would have the twin benefits of being a larger pool of data than I entered in the Sandy site but also reasonably finite: there are only so many contests and so many entrants each year. It would also be of interest to a somewhat wider group of people.

There are two main differences that make creating the new site more tricky: the data needs to be modelled a little more rigorously; and, I am looking at creating my own elements and properties, although I will use existing ones where possible. Below is a sketch of a simple Eurovision Song Contest linked data (escld:) model with the data types I would need to establish. My main aim is to record songs, artists, countries, positions, and total points. Links out can enrich this too. Recording the individual voting scores (who gave douze to whom) is not my immediate concern although I wouldn’t want to rule it out. I’ve therefore had a stab at how it could be done. I think it would need something clever like blank nodes. The purpose of the sketch is to get an idea of structure rather anything like anÂ exhaustive list of possible relationships to be included.

Any comments or suggestions on this set up would be most welcome!

Entities:
<contest>
<country>
<song>
<artist>
<composer>

Relationships:
<inCity>
<performedBy>
<composedBy>
<representing>
<position>
<score>
<receivedPoints>
<pointsFrom>
<noOfPoints>

Example triples (lazily punctuated and laid out) using namespace escld

<escld:Eurovision Song Contest 2010>
  <dc:date> "2010"
  <escld:inCity> <dbpedia:Oslo>

<escld:Germany>

<escld:Satellite>
  <escld:performedBy> <Lena Meyer-Landrut>
  <escld:composedBy> <Julie Frost>
  <escld:composedBy> <John Gordon>
  <dc:date> "2010"
  <escld:representing> <Germany>
  <dc:title> "Satellite"
  <escld:position> "1"
  <escld:score> "246"
  <escld:receivedPoints> _:rP1
    _:rP1 <escld:pointsFrom> <UnitedKingdom>
    _:rP1 <escld:noOfPoints> "12"

<escld:Lena Meyer-Landrut>
  <foaf:name> "Lena Meyer-Landrut"

<escld:Julie Frost>
  <foaf:name> "Julie Frost"

<escld:John Gordon>
  <foaf:name> "John Gordon"

RDA as a closed standard

Resource Description and Access (RDA), the new bibliographic standard to replace AACR2, was released in 2010 on the web as a closed standard sitting behind a paywall. This really worries me. I strongly believe it should be an open standard.

What do I mean by closed?
By closed I basically mean that you have to pay or subscribe to access it. In many ways, this is not dissimilar to AARC2. For decades, libraries (and individuals) paid for various editions of AACR2, which has always been primarily a print product, as well as for various updates when it changed to looseleaf format. Recently it has also been available on the web via Cataloger’s Desktop. RDA is primarily a web product via the RDA Toolkit, although a concession was eventually made to release it in print as well.

An open standard would be one that, according to Wikipedia, “is publicly available” even if it “has various rights to use associated with it”. This would be one which any cataloguer, librarian, or crucially, non-librarian, could see and benefit from.Â A practical definition for the purposes of this post would be a standard I could go and look at right now without subscription.Â I can if I wish apply the standard without hindrance, I can assess it with ease, and, ideally, build on the standard without restriction. RDA is not open, although to be fair, a part of RDA has been released openly, the element set and vocabularies.

Other open standards
Open (publicly available) standards are quite common. Some well known-examples:

Data: XML, Dublin Core, RDF, MODS, MADS, MARC21, ISBD Documents: HTML, PDF, ODF, Images: PNG

The following are open although I’d have a lawyer to hand if you wanted to do anything with them:

Documents:Â DOC, Images: JPG, GIF

Some closed ones for comparision:

Data: AACR2, RDA

These are of course more subjective lists than they look, but you get the idea. The closed list was actually bigger until upon examination I found that JPG, GIF, and even MS Office standards are publicly readable even if I’m not sure what more you could legally do with them. I’d be happy to add more to the closed list to balance things out a little.

Why is RDA not open?
Money. This is a delicate matter that I don’t want to delve into too much although it is obviously central to the openness of the standard. It’s also hard to talk about without appearing to make wild assertions, and I hope I haven’t been unfair. I’ve heard Alan Danskin of the JSC explaining that they’d thought about releasing RDA openly but that they had to cover costs. I’m not exactly sure what the costs of production were, although presumably included expenses and staff costs, and production of the product itself. The last is I think unfortunate as I would like to have seen a far simpler publication of RDA without all the bells and whistles, login barriers, and the need to learn a new interface as well as a new standard. Compare with the HTML4 standard which is a set of simple HTML documents with normal links. I don’t need to learn how to use that. Or, come to that, the MARC21 site. I wonder how much of the fee goes towards setting up and maintaining the RDA Toolkit platform.

With my tin foil hat on, I also wonder how much theÂ fee isÂ needed to resume revenue to the co-publishers since AACR2 has been in unrevised abeyance.Â

Why does it matter?
It matters because RDA (and with it all the high quality traditional cataloguing techniques) will not be widely used without being open. I think you can divide the potential RDA userbase as follows:

Libraries with enough money to switch to RDA Libraries without enough money to switch to RDA Non-libraries dealing withÂ metadata

Those in group 1 will buy RDA, but some libraries- Group 2- will not see the benefit for the costs of conversion and training, let alone the costs of subscription. For ‘traditional’ cataloguing to thrive, therefore, we need to involve Group 3. However, those in Group 3 will not be able to even have a look at RDA to see if it meets their needs. I think RDA will be lucky to retain the same user base as AARC2, let alone break into new areas and influence the way other metadata is carried out. Those in the metadata community who, I suspect, have already been put off by AACR2, are unlikely to even try looking at RDA if it involves forking out a subscription.

I recently sat in a room with about 15 or so people mostly involved in metadata for institutional repositories and the like. During some discussions they flagged up two problems they were having: establishing a consistent form of name, and a standard set of data elements. I asked myself, would I recommend RDA to them to help solve these problems? Even if I thought it met their needs, could they even have a look to see if it did? No. They will either come up with their own solution or look elsewhere for it, which is already what they have been doing. I can’t see us taking more people with us, just a proportion of the people already using AACR2.

Openness also matters because haven’t a closed standard doesn’t reflect terrribly well on librarianship in general. I have a friend in IT who Laughed Out Loud* when I said the new library metadata standard was behind a paywall. In the new world of openness where even Microsoft loosely adhere to web standards, traditionally closed governments are leading the charge to release more data, and the world has been transformed by the the open standards of the web, are we to follow The Times behind a paywall? Personally I feel libraries, librarians, and library data should be at the forefront of openness, not grudgingly following behind or not following at all.

What could be done?
This is the nub of the matter. I’m no marketing expert and maybe I’m naive and there is nothing that could be done. However,Â working on the assumption that all that needs to be done is to break even and pay the costs of production for RDA, I would suggest the following ideas for a start:

Make a flashy web product anyway and charge lots more for it. Many more well-off libraries would pay for a product like the Toolkit if it’s good enough. There is a need for a more accessible version or versions of RDA, e.g. just for books or in a more convenient format like, say, the Chan books on LCSH or the green editions of AACR2. The co-publishers could fulfill this need which I imagine would be easily done by re-using the data they already have. Explanatory books. There are a number of these on the market or on the way already. The co-publishers could publish an official companion. Consultancy and training. There is going to be a big demand for this soon in any case. Involve more organisations in the drafting and publishing of RDA to share the costs, e.g. publishers, LMS vendors, commercial metadata suppliers, other metadata initiatives. I think it would be a positive and pragmatic move to have these parties on board anyway. They would be more likely to use the high quality standard produced and we would be more likely to be using metadata that meets all our purposes.

See Also
I notice a post covering some of these issues by carolslib from a few days ago. From the Catalogs of Babes also has a similar post, RDA: why it wonâ€™tÂ work, from a few weeks ago which much more succinctly makes some of the same points:

Many librariansÂ are balking at the cost of implementing RDA, I think rightfully so, although not for the same reasons. Iâ€™m not bitching about it becauseÂ itâ€™s unaffordable for smaller libraries, or becauseÂ itâ€™s a subscription rather than a one-time printed book cost (although I think those are valid points). Iâ€™m bitching because putting a dollar amount on something, now matter how low it is, will stop people from using something, especially if thereâ€™s a free alternative. In this case, I see the free alternative as â€˜ignoring rules altogether and/or making you your own standards.â€™ Requiring a price makes adhering to standardsâ€“a key value-added serviceÂ of libraries and librariansâ€“inaccessible. Which is pretty ironic, considering that libraries are supposed to be all about access. Weâ€™re all proactive about offering access to our patrons, but we canâ€™t extend that same philosophy to ourselves, to help us do a better job??

*** He literally LOL’d, although no ROFLing took place admittedly.