FYI France (since 1992) --
http://www.fyifrance.com
File 3: Ejournal & archive, by Jack Kessler,
kessler@well.sf.ca.us
-- archive copy of an issue of the
FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, distributed via email on April 15, 2012, and a little later here on
http://fyifrance.blogspot.com, and at Facebook on
Jack Kessler's Notes.
Friends in France have asked me what is the most exciting thing going on in US digital librarianship, these days, and I have told them it is
EPub.
That needs some explanation... It's "ebooks", a variant edition of the even more general "digital libraries" topic:
EPub is an essentially industry-led effort to standardize all or most of the work of uploading all that invaluable stuff lurking on your hard disk, plus all your offline archives, & DVDs & CDs & floppies & tapes & the rest, & photos, & paper, onto the Internet -- the enormous & cavernous
Online Digital World is out there, now, and it's hungry!
It's not an easy process, yet. But digital publication, and crucially its current development process, must be understood -- by anyone in publishing, or in libraries, or anyone with authorial intentions, pretensions, occupations, obligations...
The easiest and most interesting introduction to the "ebooks standards" topic I've found so far is provided by the Webinars offered online by NISO, the US standards organization: these Webinars can be viewed, and viewers even may participate, online from anywhere --
NISO is the US "National Information Standards Organization": every major nation has its standards outfit, some have several -- in France for example there is AFNOR,
http://www.afnor.org/ -- ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, is the umbrella group,
http://www.iso.org/iso/home.htm -- and all I'm sure are worrying over ebooks now, but I'm not sure that anyone else is doing a better job yet at explaining all this and inviting public participation, than is NISO.
So I suggest these NISO Webinars to all of you: not only because they are out there on the cusp of controversy -- "ebooks", "metadata", the question of the online digital survival of "the book as a thing" as versus "the text" -- but also because these online NISO resources are reached easily online, by someone in France or elsewhere, either for research and simple lurking and contemplation, or even for active participation via Skype and Cisco's latest and very elegant Cisco econferencing software --
* NISO is at,
http://www.niso.org/home/
* and NISO's 2012 online offerings are at,
http://www.niso.org/news/events/2012/
-- librarians in France can participate in these! -- en américain peut-être, mais... --
* the NISO 2012 Webinar schedule still includes,
April 9: Open Discovery Initiative (NISO Open Teleconference)
April 11: What to Expect When You're Expecting a Platform Change: Perspectives from a Publisher and a Librarian (NISO Webinar)
April 25: Schema.org and Linked Data: Complementary Approaches to Publishing Data (NISO/DCMI Webinar)
May 14: IOTA: OpenURL Quality Metrics (NISO Open Teleconference)
May 16: Part 1: Can I Access the World? Involving Users in E-book Acquisition and Sharing (NISO Webinar)
May 23: Part 2: Heritage Lost? Ensuring the Preservation of E-books (NISO Webinar)
June 13: Making Better Decisions with Usage Statistics (NISO Webinar)
June 21-26: NISO at American Library Association / ALA Annual 2012 (Anaheim, CA)
June 21: NISO/BISG Forum: The Changing Standards Landscape (Pre-conference workshop, Anaheim, CA)
August 8: Content on the Go: Mobile Access to E-Resources (NISO Webinar)
August 22: Metadata for Managing Scientific Research Data (NISO/DCMI Webinar)
September 10: KBART (Knowledge Base And Related Tools) Update (NISO Open Teleconference)
September 12: Understanding Critical Elements of E-books: The Social Reading Experience of Sharing Bookmarks and Annotations (NISO Webinar)
September 24: Tracking it Back to the Source: Managing and Citing Research Data (NISO One-Day Forum - Location: Denver, CO)
September 26: Discovery and Delivery: Innovations and Challenges(NISO Webinar)
October 8: NISO E-Book Special Interest Group (NISO Open Teleconference)
October 10: MARC and FRBR: Friends or Foes? (NISO Webinar)
October 18-19: The E-Book Renaissance, Part II: Challenges and Opportunities (NISO Two-Day Forum - Location: Boston, MA)
October 24: Embedding Linked Data Invisibly into Web Pages: Strategies and Workflows for Publishing with RDFa (NISO/DCMI Webinar)
November 12: Specification for Resource Synchronization (NISO/OAI Effort) (NISO Open Teleconference)
November 14: Beyond Publish or Perish: Alternative Metrics for Scholarship (NISO Webinar)
December 12: Connecting the Dots: Constellations in the Linked Data Universe (NISO Webinar)
*
Also, and I think invaluable to librarians outre-Atlantique and elsewhere whose English & l'américain may be "rusty", the NISO Webinar archives are online, and they include full session audio tapes & presenter slides & even live-participant-chat-discussion records -- I myself am in these somewhere :-) -- the event in which I just participated, not as a presenter altho I did ask some questions, is described with its slides and some Questions & Answers / Q&A at the following links --
NISO Two Part Webinar: Understanding Critical Elements of E-books: Standards for Formatting and Metadata
Part 1: EPUB3: Putting Electronic Books into a Package -- March 14
http://www.niso.org/news/events/2012/nisowebinars/ebooks_epub 3/ -- outline & slides
-- and its audio archive for Part 1 now is available online at,
http://tinyurl.com/7xstqc4
-- and event Q&A is transcribed from chat to text at,
http://www.niso.org/news/events/2012/nisowebinars/ebooks_epub 3/questions
Part 2: Find That E-book, or Not: How Metadata Matters -- March 21
http://www.niso.org/news/events/2012/nisowebinars/ebooks_meta data/ -- outline & slides
-- and its audio archive for Part 2 now is available online at,
http://tinyurl.com/c4m3hdj
-- and event Q&A is transcribed from chat to text at,
http://www.niso.org/news/events/2012/nisowebinars/ebooks_metadata/questions
* The NISO Webinars appear generally to follow a standard format of including representatives of industry and actual user institutions -- formal presentations, by such people, with slides -- and then Q&A conducted via chat. The presentations assume some prior knowledge, but there is enough intro done by each presenter to provide at least the general context to anyone remotely familiar with the general problem involved. At the same time, though, there is not too much topic-drift, the great enemy of most online discussion of these things: these NISO Webinar presenters are professionals, so your time will not be wasted in hearing what they have to say -- those I heard in these two sessions were very concise and detailed and on point.
* Costs: live participation in these NISO Webinars is not free-of-charge, access to the 2 sessions described above cost US$179, $74 for a student -- but that was "per site", so several participants gathered around someone's big iMac, or a screencast in a nice meeting room, or at a comfortable-if-noisy cafe table somewhere, may join in, sharing costs. The outline & slides, and the Q&A, both apparently are free-of-charge, online; a password is required for hearing the audio archives, but I suggest NISO may provide that free-of-charge as well, at least to some, upon application to them.
--oOo--
A Note... though... about "standardizing" things:
I am somewhat of a sceptic, about NISO's and other standards efforts generally, myself. I am not certain that there is not a category-mistake at work, in fact, in standards development here: that if a "book" is what is sought, in information search & retrieval, then copious metadata about that object understandably may be useful, yes -- but if what is being sought nowadays is a "text", an æthereal thing sometimes contained in a book but increasingly not, then metadata assisting in the search for a book may be "un ange qui passe" -- exactly like, yes, the visiting newly-minted & presumably-US philosopher standing in Carfax, at the middle of Oxford, and demanding, "But where is the university?" -- see Gilbert Ryle & Jonathan Miller, both, on that...
The standards groups -- NISO, ISO, AFNOR, the many others -- may represent our best chance for eventually establishing some order in the current chaos surrounding
ebooks, then.
For now it seems the commercial folks rule, with their secrets and competing approaches and furious incompatibilities. I remember the similar "protocol wars" of the early Internet, where tcp/ip fought against OSI. And we all remember the earlier famous rivalries of Messrs. Steve Jobs & Bill Gates.
Only the Paranoid Survive, was what Intel chief Andy Grove entitled his memoirs book about that ferocious era. The
ebook is in its own such critically-incunabular(?) phase now.
Eventually things do settle down and "standards" do win -- the
EPub standard is our current best hope for that -- these NISO Webinars present and discuss that topic simply and thoroughly.
What happens, however, if our current
Age of Digital Incunabula, unlike the 15th c.
Age of Print Incunabula, does not adopt the book container used by the text paradigm which preceded it? Gutenberg's printed work was crafted to resemble the manuscript formats of his own era -- but already and increasingly the "texts" used by modern readers look and feel and act nothing like "books".
There is little resemblance, in other words, between two phenomena:
1) a multimedia online digital "texts" search & reading session through, say, Wikipedia plus a cellphone / mobile Web browse plus several online Webinars & econferences & downloaded course-reader pdf selections all supplemented with a few music clips & videos from YouTube..., and,
2) the albeit-thorough read-through of a single or even several cardboard & paper printed "books".
So which of the above two is being done more by users, now? It depends, somewhat, on which users... To me it appears that, most places, the younger generation(s) and active workers -- professionals, of any sort -- do #1 above, now, nearly entirely, while only the elders and those with much leisure time do much of #2.
And so all the attention devoted exclusively to
e"books", of any design or format, may be misplaced: the market may have moved on, to "texts" irrespective of their containers -- and thus precise definition of "book"-style formats and metadata and the rest, imitating the printed-book format with which fewer and fewer of us really are familiar, may be an idea the time of which has past. The young student being guided through the reference room by the librarian is said to have remarked, when shown the multi-volume ancient leather-bound encyclopedia-set, "Whoa, you mean somebody actually downloaded the entire thing?!"
But then maybe all this is just a realignment: maybe, instead of either 100% "texts" formats versus 100% "books" formats, we are headed for some new balance, perhaps 60/40, or 80/20, maybe there always will be "books"... digital or otherwise...
Such, anyway, perhaps is, or appears to be, the dream of the
e"books" people. Kudos then to them for trying...
I happen to be of a generation and by persuasion raised on book formats, and I love to see the mise-en-page and page-turning properties of e"books" -- to me it is fun, and importantly it gets me "involved" with the text, to highlight, and scribble notes, and jump from
Table of Contents to
Chapters and back, in downloaded files from my
Kindle &
iBooks &
GoogleBooks collections, and do all the other tricks already enabled greatly by standards such as
EPub.
But to others, perhaps younger and less book-bound than me, it may be cumbersome and, even worse, unnecessary... "Whoa, you mean somebody actually downloaded the entire thing?!"... that young student may find the elaborate arrangements and conventions of the old "book" paradigm to be unnecessary, in a multimedia & interactive & essentially-immediate online digital etext world...
But it's an
Age of Incunabula, one even more adventurous than that of the 15th century, so nowadays, both virtually and In Reality, anything can happen.
Jack Kessler,
kessler@well.com
