Readers will be the creators of the most important metadata describing books. Period. There is no second-guessing that conclusion, which has been proved again and again in every hypertext environment in human history. Defining the problem of book metadata without treating the reader as the fulcrum of the process is missing the point.

Poking around a bit more to find connections between “metadata” and the “metaphorical marginalia” of user annotations, I found interesting commentary in 2005 around David Weinberger’s article Crunching the metadata (Excerpt from Weinberger, boldface added):

We’re going to need massive collections of metadata about each book. Some of this metadata will come from the publishers. But much of it will come from users who write reviews, add comments and annotations to the digital text, and draw connections.

As the digital revolution continues, and as we generate more and more ways of organizing and linking books–integrating information from publishers, libraries and, most radically, other readers–all this metadata will not only let us find books, it will provide the context within which we read them. … The real challenge to traditional publishing today comes not from the digitizing of books, then, but from the very nature of the Web itself. Using metadata to assemble ideas and content from multiple sources, online readers become not passive recipients of bound ideas but active librarians, reviewers, anthologists, editors, commentators, even (re)publishers.

Weinberger doesn’t use the word “marginalia.” But the word IS used in Ben Vershbow’s articles commenting on Weinberger. In Vershbow’s first article (tagged with “marginalia”) he says:

The book in the network is a barnacled spirit, carrying with it the sum of its various accretions. Each book is also its own library by virtue not only of what it links to itself, but of what its readers are linking to, of what its readers are reading.

And in another article by Vershbow that continues on the same theme, Daniel Anderson, in a comment, is reminded of Billy Collins’ poem, “Marginalia,” which, he says, “points to the conversations that take place as readers jot their reactions in the margins of books.” Excerpt from the poem, as quoted by Anderson:

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. …

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer . . .

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

****************

The Talmud page with marginalia at left is from Vershbow’s article Web marginalia.

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

Kelly’s comments parallel the static print libary of Borges and the flowing, connected library of Rushdie:

(Kelly) The common vision of the library’s future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

Metadata as the real magic (cross-linked … extracted … indexed … analyzed …) — Mike Cane should like this! :

(Kelly) Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

Clive Thompson says the community of digital book readers will transform books by building a web of linked commentaries. Kelly says much the same:

Once a book has been integrated into the new expanded library by means of this linking, its text will no longer be separate from the text in other books. … Books, including fiction, will become a web of names and a community of ideas.

Peter Brantley imagines a world in which digital books become connected as long winding rivers that flow together. Here’s Kelly sounding similar:  …

Search engines are transforming our culture because they harness the power of relationships, which is all links really are. … This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives the Web its immense force. The static world of book knowledge is about to be transformed by the same elevation of relationships, as each page in a book discovers other pages and other books. Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together.

Rushdie describes the countless currents in the Stream of Stories “weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry” — Likewise Kelly:

When books are digitized, reading becomes a community activity. … In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book. … So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? …

What Happens When Books Connect? – This is the title for one of the sections of Kelly’s article from which most of the quotes above are taken, and it is really an overriding theme for all of the them — The digitized books of the future will talk easily to each other, which will transform books in the same way the Web has already transformed other aspects of culture.

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

Most of the Eccles digital image collections are listed on the Digital Collections page, although they’re mixed in with resources from other sites around the US, and sometimes difficult to identify as having been developed at Utah. Several of the Utah collections are described below.

NOVEL is the Neuro-Ophthalmology Virtual Education Library. This collaborative effort between Eccles Library and the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society (NANOS), brings together 11 collections of visual resources from personal working in the discipline around the US.

NOVEL is the only one of the Utah segments that uses the ContentDM digital collection management system. ContentDM is widely used by libraries in the US for historical/archival subjects, but for some reason it’s rarely used for biomedical or scientific subjects. The NOVEL project is notable because it’s one of the few sites anywhere that does this.

In addition to pictures, some of the collections in NOVEL also have videos. A good example of this is the collection of Shirley H. Wray, from Harvard Medical School — See link below for Nerve Palsy.

NOVEL: Nerve Palsy	WebPath : Emphysema	Derm Images : Insect Bite

WebPath, the Internet Pathology Laboratory for Medical Education, includes over 1900 pictures along with text and tutorials. It was developed by Edward C. Klatt MD in the Pathology Dept at Utah; Klatt is now on the faculty at Florida State University. The heart of the WebPath collection for disease-specific pictures is in the Systematic Pathology section, which has images broken down by organ system.

Notable in the Knowledge Weavers section of the Eccles site is the Dermatology Image Bank, done in collaboration with dermatologist John L. Bezzant. This contains striking dermatologic pictures, which are often found by Google Image Search. Knowledge Weavers also includes well-known sites such as Slice of Life and HEAL.

Yale is unusual for other reasons — They are one of the few medical/health sciences libraries that have included biomedical/scientific pictures in their digitization efforts, in addition to the historical/archival subjects more commonly done by libraries using content management systems. Also, Yale is unusual in using Greenstone software for digital content management, rather than the more commonly used ContentDM.

The main grouping of digital resources at Yale are described on the Digital Library Collections page. This includes 7 collections, which are mainly historical, but also includes the Pathology Teaching Collection (see sample below), which continues to be used as a teaching resource at Yale. The resources in this section, done with Greenstone, have metadata descriptions, and are searchable.

Pathology Teaching Collection	Fuchs Herbal

Other resources are available on the Electronic Texts in the History of Medicine page. This includes 13 historical works, some of which are notable for their illustrations — See example above from Fuchs’ pioneering 16th century herbal, Primi de stirpivm. Also notable are colored illustrations from the herbal of Christian Egenolff. The Electronic Text sources appear to be image scans only (apparently not done with Greenstone), with no metadata, or other associated text, so they unfortunately are not searchable.

About Greenstone — Yale is one of the few US groups using this digital library system, which originated in New Zealand, and is used widely in other countries. Here’s a list of Greenstone sites.

Because NYPL is an active participant in Google Books, their recent text digitization efforts seem to have gone into this. They’ve done a good job of making links from CATNYP to the books from their collection that have been digitized for Google Books.

A searchable list of all NYPL’s Google Books in CATNYP (32000 titles) is here ….
catnyp.nypl.org/search/XGoogle+Books+Library+Project

To search a subset of this, add a keyword, either in the address bar directly …
catnyp.nypl.org/search/XGoogle+Books+Library+Project+botany
… or add a keyword in the search box.

It’s helpful to have this easy access to NYPL books that are in Google Books through CATNYP, but it’s surprising that the CATNYP record gives no information indicating the print version from which the Google Books version has been digitized. Here’s an example of a book title found in CATNYP, with separate entries for the Google Books and print versions, with neither record linking to the other.

While NYPL’s book digitization efforts seem to be concentrated in Google Books, they continue to do their own image digitization work. As with Google Books, they do a nice job of making links in CATNYP, from the catalog records of books from which they’ve digitized images to the images in the Digital Gallery. The screen-shots below show an example :

This shows links between the CATNYP record for the book American medical botany to the images from the book in the NYPL Digital Gallery.

I see on pages in the Digital Gallery that they’re working on a “new look” for Gallery pages. Here’s the new look for Gallery pages for American medical botany. It’s an improvement in many ways, more streamlined, but doesn’t seem to have a link back to the record for the book in CATNYP.

From the Digital Gallery IT Architecture and Delivery : “Runs on an open, extensible architecture … managed through an Oracle database … ColdFusion software provides the application programming interface that integrates metadata and images for web delivery…”