This probably doesn’t come up often, but it took awhile to piece this together, so here it is so I can find it again.
If you use the Event Calendar plug-in for WordPress and don’t want the dates to show up in the RSS feed, this post has the answer. Comment out line 570 in eventcalendar3.php, like this:
//$text=$schedule.$text;
This will stop it from prepending a plain-text schedule to your text.
The other solution is to comment out this function entirely in lines 594 and 595, but I was having problems with the excerpt showing up for any post in the event category. And I didn’t feel like creating a new template for just that category since this isn’t really an earth-shattering problem.
There are some other broken things too about this function, but haven’t figured those out yet. Boo.
Robert Darnton asked in the New York Review of Books blog nearly two years ago: “Can we create a National Digital Library?” 1 Anyone who recalls reference homework exercises checking bibliographic information for United States imprints versus British or French will certainly remember the United States does not have a national library in the sense of a library that collects all the works of that country and creates a national bibliography 2 Certain libraries, such as the Library of Congress, have certain prerogatives for collection and dissemination of standards 3, but there is no one library that creates a national bibliography. Such it was for print, and so it remains even more so for digital. So when Darnton asks that–as he goes on to illuminate further in his article–he is asking a much larger question about libraries in the United States. European and Asian countries have created national digital libraries as part of or in addition to their national print libraries. The question is: if others can do it, why can’t we? Furthermore, why can’t we join those libraries with our national digital library? The DPLA has announced collaboration with Europeana, which has already had notable successes with digitizing content and making it and its metadata freely available. This indicates that we could potentially create a useful worldwide digital library, or at least a North American/European one.The dream of Paul Otlet’s universal bibliography seems once again to be just out of reach.
In this post, I want to examine what the Digital Public Library of America claims to do, and what approaches it is taking. It is still new enough and there are still enough unanswered questions to give any sort of final answer to whether this will actually be the national digital library. Nonetheless, there seems to be enough traction and, perhaps more importantly, funding that we should pay close attention to what is delivered in April 2013.
Can we reach a common vision about the nature of the DPLA?
The planning for the DPLA started in the fall of 2010 when Harvard’s Berkman Center received a grant from the Sloan Foundation to begin planning the project in earnest. The initial idea was to digitize all the materials which it was legal to digitize, and create a platform that would be accessible to all people in the US (or nationally). Google had already proved that it was possible, so it seemed that with many libraries working together it would be concievable to repeat their sucesses, but with solely non-commerical motives 4.
The initials stages of planning brought out many different ideas and perspectives about the philosophical and practical components of the DPLA, many of which are still unanswered. The theme of debate that has emerged are whether the DPLA would be a true “public” library, and what in fact ought to be in such a library. David Rothman argues that the DPLA as described by Darnton would be a wonderful tool for making humanities research easy and viable for more people, but would not solve the problems of making popular e-books accessible through libraries or getting students up-to-date textbooks. The latter two aims are much more challenging than getting access to public domain or academic materials because a lot more money is at stake 5.
One of the projects for the Audience and Content workstream is to figure out how average Americans might actually use a digital public library of America. One of the potential use cases is a student who can just use DPLA to write a whole paper on the Iriquois Nations. Teachers and librarians posted some questions about this in the comments, including questioning whether it is appropriate to tell students to use one portal for all research. We generally counsel students to check multiple sources–and getting students used to searching one place that happens to be appropriate for searching one topic may not work if the DPLA has nothing available on say, the latest computer technology.
Digital content and the DPLA
What content the DPLA will provide will surely become more clear over the following months. They have appointed Emily Gore as Director of Content, and continue to hold further working groups on content and audience. The DPLA website promises a remarkable vision for content:
The DPLA will incorporate all media types and formats including the written record—books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts, and digital texts—and expanding into visual and audiovisual materials in concert with existing repositories. In order to lay a solid foundation for its collections, the DPLA will begin with works in the public domain that have already been digitized and are accessible through other initiatives. Further material will be added incrementally to this basic foundation, starting with orphan works and materials that are in copyright but out-of-print. The DPLA will also explore models for digital lending of in-copyright materials. The content that is contributed to or funded by the DPLA will be made available, including through bulk download, with no new restrictions, via a service available to libraries, museums, and archives in the United States, with use and reuse governed only by public law. 6
All of these models exist in one way or another already, however, so how is this something new?
The major purveyors of out of copyright digital book content are Google Books and HathiTrust. The potential problems with Google Books are obvious just in the name–Google is a publicly traded company with aspirations to be the hub of all world information. Privacy and availability, not to mention legality, are a few of the concerns. HathiTrust is a collective of research universities digitizing collections, many in concert with Google Books, but the full text of these books in a convenient format is generally only available to members of HathiTrust. HathiTrust faced a lawsuit from the Authors Guild about its digitization of orphan works, which is an issue the DPLA is also planning to address.
Other projects exist trying to make currently in copyright digital books more accessible, of which Unglue.it is probably best known. This requires a critical mass of people to actively work to pay to release a book into the public domain, and so may not serve the scholar with a unique research project. Some future plans for the DPLA include to obtain funds to pay authors for use–but this may or may not include releasing books into the public domain.
DPLA is not meant to include books alone. Planning so far suggests that books make a logical jumping off point. The “Concept Note” points out that “if it takes the sky as its limit, it will never get off the ground.” Despite this caution, ideally it would eventually be a portal to all types of materials already made available by cultural institutions, including datasets and government information.
Do we need another platform?
The first element of the DPLA is code–it will use open source technologies in developing a platform, and will release all code (and the tools and services this code builds) as open source software. The so-called “Beta Sprint” that took place last year invited people to “grapple, technically and creatively, with what has already been accomplished and what still need to be developed…” 7. The winning “betas” deal largely with issues of interoperability and linked data. Certainly if a platform could be developed that solved these problems, this would be a huge boon to the library world.
Getting involved withe DPLA and looking to the future
While the governance structure is becoming more formal, there are plenty of opportunities to become involved with the DPLA. Six working groups (called workstreams) were formed to discuss content, audience, legal issues, business models, governance, and technical issues. Becoming involved with the DPLA is as easy as signing up for an account on the wiki and noting your name and comments on the working group page in which are interested. You can also sign up mailing lists to stay involved in the project. Like many such projects, the work is done by the people who show up and speak up. If you read this and have an opinion on the direction the DPLA should take, it is not difficult to make sure your opinion gets heard by the right people.
Like all writing about the DPLA since the planning began, turning to a thought experiment seems the next logical rhetorical step. Let’s say that the DPLA succeeds to the point where all public domain books in the United States are digitized and available in multiple formats to any person in the country, and a significant number of in copyright works are also available. What does this mean for libraries as a whole? Does it make public libraries research libraries? How does it change the nature of research libraries? And lastly, will all this information create a new desire for knowledge among the American people?
Original image available at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/
Librarians need to understand what the semantic web is and how to use it, but this can be challenging. While the promise of the semantic web has existed for over a decade, to the uninitiated there may not seem to be many implementations that are accessible to the average person.
One implementation that most people use daily is Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol, which is their version of the semantic web. This is a useful example to illustrate the ideas behind the semantic web and linked data. Libraries and other cultural institutions want and need to make their data open, and Facebook’s openness is highly questionable, so it will also illustrate some of the potential problems with linked data that isn’t open. There is much great work being done in the library world with the semantic web and linked data, which will be addressed in more detail in further posts.
The Semantic Web and Linked Data
The “semantic web” describes a web where data is understood by computers in some of the same ways humans understand it. Tim Berners-Lee illustrates this wonderfully in his 2001 Scientific American article with a future in which the diagnosis of a family member with cancer is made easier by the smart device which can find the most appropriate specialist in a convenient location at a convenient time, with very little work on the part of the searcher. This is only possible, however, when data is semantically meaningful. Open hours for a doctor (or a library) written on a website mean something to a human, but very little to a computer. Once those hours are structured in a way that can be made meaningful, the computer can tell you if the doctor’s office is open–and if it has access to your calendar, what you have to cancel to go there.
Linking data takes this implementation a step further and makes it possible to connect data, to avoid, as the W3C says “a sheer collection of datasets”. Berners-Lee outlines the steps that need to be followed to make linked data in a 2006 post, namely to use uniform resource indicators (URIs) as names, to present those URIs in the hypertext protocol, use a standard format such as RDF to present useful information, and link to additional URIs with related information. A 2010 follow-up points out that to be linked open data, the data must be presented with a license that allows free unimpeded use, such as the Creative Commons CC-BY license. Such data doesn’t have to be structured in any particular way as long as it’s open. He says that “…you get one (big!) star if the information has been made public at all, even if it is a photo of a scan of a fax of a table — if it has an open licence.” But “five-star” linked open data meets all of the above requirements as well.
Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol
Moving into a different world, let’s consider what the semantic web and linked data look like at Facebook. First, it is interesting to consider what Facebook was before it was semantic. When Facebook first started in 2005, you could make a list of things you “liked”. You might have said you “liked” the movie Clueless and “liked” running, but these were just lists that would let others in your college classes know a few facts about you next time you saw them in class or at a party. In theory you could use these lists to find others that shared your interests, but this required a person to understand what interests matched each other.
But starting in 2010 these “likes” took on a real semantic meaning. Suddenly “liking” the movie Clueless meant that, among other things, the owners of the “Clueless” identity on Facebook could directly send you marketing announcements. In addition, you could “like” content outside of Facebook completely as long as that website used the correct markup on the page to speak to Facebook, and thus link together content with people. Unlike Facebook’s earlier scheme of Beacon, it was easier to understand how you were exposing yourself to advertisers and to control privacy and sharing, though this still left people troubled.
In late 2011/early 2012 Facebook opened up this system even more to third party developers, which went along with the new Facebook Timeline. Now any person could perform any verb with any application. So “Margaret read a book on Goodreads” or “Margaret listened to a song on Spotify”–real world actions–turn into semantically meaningful statements on my Facebook Timeline. As long as the user authenticates the application, the application can access the necessary information to grab the information about the object from the webpage and show the user’s interaction with it.
Developing for the Open Graph
The Open Graph protocol was developed based on the idea of the “social graph”, which represents the connections between people and the types of relationships they have with each other. In the Facebook universe, this includes the relationships people have with other types of entities, such as media, products, and companies. It was developed by Facebook to make a quick and easy way for websites to include semantically meaningful data. It is based on the standard RDF specification for linked data and includes basic and optional metadata, as well as different types of structured data about objects, of which music and videos are the most well-defined.
To see the Open Graph in action, simply replace “www” with “graph” at the beginning of any Facebook page. For instance, let’s take a look at my own library’s information at http://graph.facebook.com/rebeccacrownlibrary. You can see that this page describes a library, and get our phone number, physical location, and open hours. Most important, a computer viewing this page can understand this information. For complete details, see the Graph API documentation–even for non-developers this is interesting; for instance, find out how to get the URL for your current profile picture to embed in other sites. To get access to this information, you can use various methods, including the Facebook Query Language.
Of course, you only get access to this information if it’s explicitly made public by the page. For anything beyond that, applications must use authentication in order to access more. Linking information from outside of Facebook is one way only–you can’t pull very much at all out of Facebook into the open web. Note that, for instance, Google searches will pull up only basic information from a Facebook page rather than any content that page has posted.
Outside of Facebook–How “Open” is the Open Graph?
It is precisely this closed effect that has a lot of people worried about Facebook’s implementation of the semantic web. Brad Fitzpatrick described the problems in 2007 inherent in implementations of the “social graph” on the web, which was that standards were quirky, non-interoperable, and usually completely walled off. The solution would be a Social Graph API that would create a social graph outside of any one company and belonging to all. This would allow people to find friends and connections without signing up for additional services or relying on Facebook or any other company. Fitzpatrick did later create a Social Graph API, which Google recently pulled out of their products. Some of the problems of an open social graph are familiar to librarians: people are hesitant to share too much information with just anyone about with whom they associate, what they like, and what they think (Prodromou). The great boon for advertisers in social networking services is that inside walled gardens with reasonable privacy controls is that people are willing to share much more information. Thus the walled garden of Facebook, inaccessible to Google, means that that valuable social data is inaccessible. It is perhaps not coincidental that around the same time Google stopped supporting the open Social Graph API that they released the API for their own social networking service Google Plus.
Concerns with the Open Graph remain that it is not actually open, and in particular that it uses the open standard of RDF to ingest but not share content (Turenhout). The Open Graph Protocol website states that a variety of big websites are publishing websites with Open Graph markup and it is ingested by Facebook (of course), Google, and mixi. It remains unclear how much this particular standard will be adopted outside of Facebook.
Conclusion
Whether or not you think you have any idea what linked data is, any time you click a “like” button on a website or sign up for a social sharing app in Facebook, you are participating in the semantic web. But every time that data link goes behind a Facebook wall, it fails in being open linked data. Just as librarians have always worked to keep the world’s knowledge available to all, we must continue to ensure that potentially important linked data is kept open as well–and with no commercial motive. The LODLAM Summit has outlined and continues to work on what linked open data looks like for libraries, archives, and museums. The W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group released its final report in fall 2011, which provides a thorough overview of the roles and responsibilities of libraries in the world of linked open data. There is a lot of possibility around this area right now, and the future openness of the world wide web may very well depend on action taken right now.
In a future post, we will examine some specific examples of work being done in the library world around the semantic web and linked data.
Berners-Lee, Tim, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. “The Semantic Web.” Scientific American 284, no. 5 (May 2001): 34. doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican0501-34
