Credit for the photo to UK Serials Group. Credit for the alteration of the speech bubble (you can see the original slide here if you care to) to Steve Lawson.

Incidentally, I should have a postprint of an article based on this presentation up shortly. I’ll leave word here when I get my act together and post it.

He also left a comment here, part of which I will make bold to reproduce:

As to RDF underpinning the Linked Data Web – it is only as necessary as HTML was to the growth of the Web itself. Documents were being posted on the Internet in all sorts of formats well before Tim Berners-Lee introduced us to the open and shared HTML format which facilitated the exponential growth of the Web. Some of the above comments are very reminiscent of the “why do I need to use HTML” discussions from the mid 1990′s.

It is an open and shared format, such as RDF, that will power the exponential growth of the Linked Data web, but the conversations around it are still at the equivalent of 1995 stage.

If I read this right, Richard is not actually saying that the web is all HTML and therefore HTML is Good and All Web Things Must Be HTML. That’s good, because that would be a silly thing to say. The web I use has plenty of CSS and Javascript and XML and JSON and JPEGs and PNGs and Flash (gah) and PDF (double gah) and other stuff on it.

What Richard is saying (again, as I read it) is more subtle: widespread growth of the data web requires an open standard to cut through the Babel of competing and closed formats the same way that HTML cut through the Babel of document formats, because without that interoperability is too much effort and so no one realizes the benefits.

Richard is welcome to check my understanding; I may have this completely wrong. Nonetheless, I don’t believe a word of it, and I especially don’t believe it if RDF is the HTML analogue (which, let’s be clear, Richard very carefully did not say). Here’s why I don’t.

First, HTML was hardly the only part of the web stack necessary to its explosion. TCP/IP, anyone? Moreover, HTML by itself is obviously insufficient as the driver of that explosion, or we’d all still be on Gopher (remember Gopher?). Formatted strings of words are not all we monkeys interact with. Neither are assertions, about documents or anything else. (The whole thing about “not all data are assertions” seems to escape some of the die-hardiest RDF devotees. I keep telling them to express Hamlet in RDF and then we can talk.)

Second, I don’t know that we need to rely on a single data format for interoperability. It’s not impossible, but remains to be proven. The data web that I personally think is more likely closely resembles today’s mashup and microformats cultures: lots of formats with suitable documentation (one hopes) and APIs, available for use by whoever’s willing to suss out how the various datasets work and write code to glue them together. It’s a rough-and-ready sort of interoperability, arguably an inefficient one, but eppur si muove, as Galileo did not say of the web.

Third, I’m not entirely convinced we need to rely on interoperability and its network effects as our incentive toward data-sharing. Tim BL certainly did; there wasn’t much technical precedent for what he was up to. But we have the web already, a cogent argument if ever there was one. We also have governments, grant agencies, and businesses wanting to multiply return on investment in data. RDF seems downright small-potatoes by comparison, as incentives go.

Finally, the HTML:RDF analogy falls down in one area that I think is utterly crucial: ease of adoption. I can teach enough HTML (and CSS) to be going on with in a couple of hours; I’ve done it. I still touch RDF only with great fear and loathing and a constant sensation that I must be doing it wrong, and I’ll teach it only when I absolutely must and with a great many “I don’t pretend to understand this” disclaimers. You can’t frighten me with XML namespaces, XPath, XSLT, or regexes, but RDF scares me stiff. This is not an open standard that’s going to rule the world. Not today, not tomorrow, and in my opinion not ever.

There’s another danger lurking in the one-format-to-rule-them-all argument, a danger I hinted at above: what happens to data that for whatever reason aren’t expressible in the format of choice? Second-class citizens? Invisible? I hope not.

Anyway, I say again: if the data web depends on RDF, the data web is a pipe dream and we should look for something else to do. I’d much rather believe the “if” clause counterfactual.

Advance disclaimer: this is me talking, not either of my illustrious co-bloggers. We have not yet made a decision about what to do; one co-blogger is across the pond at a conference and the other is vacationing, so that discussion will have to wait a bit. This is just my take.

Book of Trogool is very small fry at ScienceBlogs. Very small. SB was a bit dubious about it at the start, to tell the truth, and if their info-science stable had been better-established I doubt they’d have taken it on. I’m very grateful that they did, because I needed them.

One of the reasons SB’s info-sci stable isn’t larger is that librarianship is a very difficult profession to blog in. It doesn’t like blogs or bloggers, or social media generally, much less trust them or those who engage with each other and the world using them. Because libraries and librarians feel beleaguered, they especially don’t like discourse critical of libraries or librarianship in social media coming from one of their own. Library vendors aren’t fond of critical discourse in librarian blogs either. For individual librarian bloggers or public social-media figures, this has absolutely meant trouble at work. I’m one example, but very far from the only one?and I earned my problems more than most folks I know in similar straits.

This leaves the beleaguered library blogger who wishes to continue to blog with a few options. One is to be part of a group blog to create strength in numbers; In the Library with the Lead Pipe is a sterling example (and a fabulous blog; if you’re interested in libraries from the inside, this is not one to miss). Another is to adopt some of the trappings of the formal library professional literature, such as length, exclusivity, and beta-reading-oops-I-meant-peer-review. ItLwtLP does this as well. A third option is to find a blog home with enough accumulated strength of character and good reputation as to afford some protection?and now you know why I chose ScienceBlogs.

Insofar as letting PepsiCo cadge cachet from SB’s stable of bloggers damages SB’s reputation (never mind strength of character) it causes me pressing difficulty. I’m not happy about that, because my sense watching events unfold is that SB has seriously damaged its reputation, both by casting its processes into doubt and by losing quite a few talented, brilliant bloggers. Moreover, based on the trajectory of other sellout properties like LiveJournal, unless Adam Bly learns a lot from this experience?and signs point to “not so much with the learning” at this juncture?he will likely err seriously again. And again. Until SB is not only not a shield, but an actual stain on a blogger’s escutcheon.

These are petty, selfish concerns, to be sure. They are the tiny concerns of a small-fry blogger. Given that SB is rapidly alienating its big-fish bloggers, however, SB would be advised to heed these concerns, if it wishes to rebuild any sort of a stable.

To be perfectly clear, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with an individual industry scientist or big-pig-publisher employee coming to ScienceBlogs to blog on his or her own initiative. (Me vs. big-pig-publisher employee could be amusing!) I would hope that SB would provide such individuals the exact protections (from their workplaces not least) they have afforded me and other SB bloggers. What’s wrong is selling a corporation the chance to trade on the collective cachet accumulated by SB’s blogging stable by emitting corporate newspeak under the SB label?and I don’t credit for an instant that Dr. Khan or Dr. Mensah or anyone else from PepsiCo will be blogging freely and uninterfered-with. I don’t believe all the “advertorial” drapery fixes that basic wrongness.

So I labor under a dilemma. SB has been unique; there are other science-blogging stables, but none of them quite fits Book of Trogool. (Catch me blogging at Nature Networks! Not in this lifetime.) I sincerely doubt any of the group library blogs would take me on; I’m a bit Tabasco for this profession. I can’t go back to solo blogging. If SB folds (a possibility, the way things are going), if my co-bloggers are too affronted to continue here, if I decide that I am too affronted to continue here?well, chances are I just hang it up, retreating to the slow, ponderous library literature to get my licks in.

That’s not what I want. (Ask my writer’s block why. I have named it George…) I hope, instead, that SB can get its managerial act together.

My reaction to this particular brand of reductionism is? shall we say, impolitic. I just want to pat Richard on the head and croon “Who’s the clever boy, then? You are! Yes, you are!” This is terrible of me, no question about it, and I apologize unreservedly.

Here’s the problem, though. Aside from my friends the open scientists (and not even all of them, to be honest), practically all the data-producing researchers I know are firmly stuck on Step 1. Firmly stuck, not to say “immovably.” As for Step 2? trust me, these folks are not data modellers. I sincerely doubt my own capacity to teach RDF to someone who approaches me asking, “Is it okay if I record my data in Excel?”

Noting that I have been a longtime RDF skeptic so that you all can discount my peculiar biases, I will say that this disconnect between Linked Data proponents and Joe Q. Researcher concerns me a great deal, mirroring as it does the prior disconnect between RDF advocates and web programmers and content producers, a disconnect that has thus far prevented RDF from becoming common currency on the web.

The bar is too high, folks. It is too high. For my part, I’m starting somewhere both simpler and more complex: working on convincing people that exposing data in any form, emphatically including Excel, is a worthwhile thing to try.

I pledge my full and free support. After all, my brain is basically purée anyway?

(Apologies to those who saw this briefly yesterday. John jumped the, er, gun yesterday, and so did I.)

It’s the zeroes and near-zeroes that concern me (why, hello there, Yale, and hello again, Yale), though I also believe quite strongly that libraries that have made significant investments of money, staff, and/or political capital should be recognized and praised for it.

The difficulty here is that it isn’t just the scale of open-access investment that varies. The nature of investment varies as well. Some libraries pour resources into their institutional repositories, while others have one but don’t support it well (or indeed even adequately), and still others don’t have one at all. Some libraries have flourishing open-access publishing programs. Some libraries have a plethora of memberships with open-access publishers, while others have a few strategic ones, and still others none whatever. Some libraries have dedicated staff to questions of scholarly communication, at various heights in the hierarchy; others have not. A few libraries have open-access author-fee funds.

At this early date, I don’t think it wise to constrain experimentation and local decision-making by assessing only certain sorts of open-access investment. (I am aware I differ in this from other open-access advocates, and that bothers me not in the slightest.) Institutional repositories make more sense at some institutions than others, as do author-fee funds and almost any other intervention one could name. Likewise, we want to encourage new kinds of open-access advocacy, such as collaborations between libraries and university presses to make more work open access, or work toward campus-wide mandates; nailing down a laundry list of interventions too soon might damage library incentive to innovate.

I do think it’s time and past that academic libraries should be evaluated on the scale of their open-access investment, however. Because all academic libraries benefit when library resources are usefully reallocated to open access, it behooves academic libraries as a group to discourage freeloading. Naming freeloaders in a nationwide assessment context should do beautifully, because like it or not, libraries pay significant attention to their position in such rankings. It would also be useful for academic-library decisionmakers to have a general sense of how libraries are allocating open-access resources, so that they can gauge their own commitments and shift them as seems appropriate.

In the United States, two organizations dominate nationwide academic-library assessment: the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College and and Research Libraries division of ALA. It has sometimes been noted, and not favorably, that the criteria these organizations use to assess libraries are mired in last-century practices. I suggest that assessing commitment of resources to open access is an important way to shift that perception usefully, while helping academic libraries to make smart choices about their own open-access investments, and employing judicious peer pressure to increase the size of everyone’s open-access pie.

(You’ll have to excuse me if I go over my exclamation-point quota. I’m just so excited about this!)

I will let them tell you about themselves; I’ll just say that Sarah works for the University of Illinois, and Elizabeth works for Binghamton University, and they’re both fabulous librarians I’m very proud to know.

Please expect some dust over the next few days or weeks as I fiddle with the templates to make them co-blogger-friendly and ensure that it’s clear who’s written what. And please welcome Sarah and Elizabeth in the comments!

• It’s funny because it’s true! Daily Life in an Ivory Basement offers the NSF a data-management plan.
• Along those same lines, coping with data ranks high in worry factor in this OCLC report on research-related info needs faculty say they have. Rings true, though I don’t entirely believe that faculty don’t look to the library on copyright; what I believe is that they mostly don’t think about it, but on the rare occasion that they do, they look to the library. See also Local scientist learns about digital archiving, among other things. If you need to learn, too, talk to your campus librarians and archivists. This is what we do!
• Remember my jaunt into the wild woolly world of authority control? Here’s what happens without it. Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
• Anecdotal Perceptions of DataSharing from DataOne.
• Astronomy is often credited as pioneering data sharing, but the New York Times asks In the Hunt for Planets, Who Owns the Data?
• Learning from Libraries: The Literacy Challenge of Open Data You know what irritates me? I’ll tell you what irritates me. This blog post uses libraries as historical example, quite effectively too, but doesn’t even stop to consider that libraries might have something to contribute to contemporaneous data problems.
• A wonderful interview with the Library of Congress’s Leslie Johnston, of the NDIIPP web-preservation program.
• A nice open-movements slidedeck from Tracey P. Lauriault: The Secret Life of Data. See also Mark Dahl’s notes toward a code4lib talk on creating thematic digital-preservation projects.
• SciBling John Wilbanks talks about scaling open data up through offering technical and legal solutions. See also wise observations on necessary cultural shifts at Wood for the trees. And Effect Measure reminds us what it’s about: open science, openly arrived at.
• I loved this: Forensic astronomer solves Walt Whitman mystery. It’s a humanities-data approach to the problem!
• O’Reilly Radar asks What is data science? See also Bringing Big Data down to size, from Dataspora.
• Is Secrecy Hurting Drug Research? Anyone smart enough to ask the question knows the answer.
• Seed Magazine profiles Science 2.0 Pioneers.
• Ars Technica reports an attempt to build one database to rule them all, track global temperatures.
• Not all governments have signed on to open data: When public records are less than public: How governments try to use copyright to limit access to data. The feds are working on it, though: NIST workshop takes first steps toward standards for preserving digital data
• Stanford steps forward: Got Data? – New Social Science Data Site | SULAIR
• The Kojo Nnamdi Show talks about Preserving Video Games and Virtual Worlds. See also Ars Technica’s article, and kindly note the library involvement.

As always, feel free to drop links I ought to see in comments, or tag them “trogool” on del.icio.us.

• Think this is a one-off moment of insanity on NPG’s part? Bernd-Christoph Kaemper demonstrates the pattern.
• Steve Lawson of Colorado College shares text of an email he sent to faculty at his institution. He is graciously allowing the rest of us to plunder his wording. Go ye and spread the signal!
• The next domino? How many more will there be?
• Have you read Bethany Nowviskie’s Fight Club Soap post yet? If you haven’t, do. If you have, you might want to check back for the comments, some of which are astonishingly good. (I wish Twitter widgets for blogs dropped retweets of the blogger’s own tweets on the floor; it would cut down on the noise.)
• MetaFilter takes on the question. Once again, we see that NPG has few friends.
• Library Journal has a straightforward summary, useful if you need to get someone up to speed quickly.

Official press-release salvos have ceased for now; I can only assume that heavy-duty negotiation is going on behind the scenes. I’m well content with the last public word being CDL’s. It’s quiet?very quiet.

In the meantime, NPG is leaving boilerplate comments on blogs that have discussed the matter. Two such comments have appeared here on Book of Trogool, apparently left by different NPG employees. Their substance is identical.

Boilerplate comment shellack is a poor substitute for genuine engagement with online critics. (I note with raised eyebrow that even NPG’s official Twitter news outlet is avoiding this contretemps aside from bare news tweets.) Fair warning, NPG: any more boilerplate comments, like or unlike the previous two, will be deleted as spam as soon as I see them. Also, I have removed the link to your press release that your second commenter left as your URL, not wishing to give it any more Googlejuice, and I recommend that my fellow bloggers do likewise. If your employees wish to engage here, responsively, as human individuals with human rather than corporate voices, I welcome that.

Now, this is not the worst reaction NPG could have, not by a long shot. At last count, I know three library/higher-ed bloggers who have had their work supervisors contacted by vendors over posts critical of the vendors on non-work blogs. (Just to eliminate any potential confusion, I myself am not one of the three. Also, I will not identify or link to any of them; one wrote me via a private Twitter feed, and given the sensitivity of this issue, I don’t feel comfortable identifying the others.) I shouldn’t wonder if the count were much higher. I congratulate NPG for not being stupid enough to do this? and I hereby leave NPG be for the nonce, to talk more about vendors and online social media generally.

I shan’t argue that going up a blogger’s chain-of-command behind the scenes is meanly vindictive, though it is; vendettas are anything but unusual either online or in the Just Bidness crowd. I argue, as I did at UKSG 2010, that doing it is bad tactics, liable to backfire.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that this isn’t a blogger easily ignored?not rabid, not penny-ante?and the issue at hand is substantive, not contentless. Let’s also leave the “who’s right?” question off the table; disagreements are normal, the truth is usually somewhere in the middle, and all that good philosophy and sociology stuff. Let’s just follow what happens when our vendor goes up the chain.

The first thing that happens is that word gets around. Perhaps the blogger is too intimidated to blog the contretemps himself; that doesn’t mean he doesn’t tell ten, a hundred, or a thousand of his closest professional friends via Twitter or Facebook. That’s a lot of people who now have a personal bone to pick with our vendor.

The next thing that may happen is that someone who isn’t the original blogger blogs the contretemps?I’ve seen this! How many more people are now angry at our vendor, over and above those who are upset over whatever was being blogged about? Was it worth it? Truly?

The next thing that happens at most workplaces (and all intelligent workplaces) in libraryland and higher-ed-land is that the supervisor does nothing to her blogger employee. No reprimand on file, no punitive action, nothing. Leaving aside that libraries are vendors’ clients and usually not under any obligation to hush a problem up for a vendor’s sole benefit, libraries and universities are not run as straitly as businesses. For most, freedom of expression (especially off the clock) is a major professional value; others recognize the tactical outreach value of bloggers saying openly what the strictures on official institutional communication organs might otherwise forbid. In many cases, in fact, the supervisor (who may wield budget power, let’s not forget) will herself become displeased with the vendor: for trying to scare her employee, for wasting her time, and for whatever the problem is, as likely as not. How’s this tactic looking now?

And finally, if this happens often enough (and it may only take once), the vendor attaches the adjectives “secretive,” “manipulative,” and “retaliatory” to its brand in the general consciousness. I’m guessing this is not ideal, especially if negotiation and reputation for fair dealing are a major aspect of sales.

Note what does not happen in most (though admittedly not all) cases of vendor-blogger conflict I know of: the critical blog post does not come down. Vendors, you do not and cannot control the conversation about you any more, if you ever did, and you cannot stop that conversation going public on the Web, as many conversations have. You can, if you choose, participate in the conversation, but note well that this is an open conversation. There’s no way I’m aware of to participate in an open conversation privately. This doesn’t stop people from trying, of course, but I don’t know of any successes.

Well, but look, says our vendor, I’m only trying to repair a troubled client relationship here! Fine, but you’re going about it the wrong way. The gold standard is public participation in the conversation, but if you can’t bring yourself to do that, the way to proceed is to contact the blogger out-of-band first. If you and the blogger can reach a mutually beneficial arrangement, the blogger will rehabilitate your brand all by himself by posting something about your fantastic service. If the blogger isn’t the right person to resolve the problem, he will (if he thinks it worthwhile) point you to the right person himself, and will not think any the worse of you for it.

Finally, if you don’t have any way to resolve the problem, and you are pretty sure you’ll lose if you engage about it publicly, the right thing to do is clam up. Anything else makes the black eye you’re suffering worse.

My advice is worth what you’re paying for it. As for NPG, comment spam is the least of their worries just now, but that doesn’t at all mean they are improving their situation by engaging in it.