DIALLED

Distributed Index of All(*) Library Location and Event Data

Dan Scott

schema.org

Evergreen logo

Koha logo

VuFind logo

Visualization of RDFa for a book in Evergreen

Visualization of RDFa for a book in Evergreen, focusing on the schema:Offer section

Visualization of RDFa for a book in Evergreen, focusing on the schema:seller section of the offer

schema.org/seller

This was a sticking point...

schema.org/Library : A library. Usage: Between 100 and 1000 domains
schema.org/Museum : A museum. Usage: Between 10 and 100 domains
schema.org/Archive : In the process of being defined.
schema.org/Cemetery : A graveyard. Usage: Between 10 and 100 domains

Evergreen does this!

Visualization of RDFa for a library branch, including opening hours, contact info, and hours

Most other ILSs do not

Meta-institutional data

This should be in our wheelhouse!

WorldCat Registry

authoritative single source for institutional metadata

Problematic non-commercial license
Mostly missing or out-of-date data

Why should you care?

Visibility and accuracy in common search engines
Ease of building lightweight applications
General linked open data use cases

Why does this matter, beyond the unfortunately abstract "linked open data enables others to build exciting new services!"? People increasingly search on mobile devices, meaning that they're getting funneled through Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and when they search for their local library they should get accurate information back.

Unfortunately, resources like Google Maps, Bing Maps, Yahoo Local, etc are a hodge-podge of data culled from social media properties like Google+ and FourSquare, drive-by edits, and attempted parses of the human-oriented markup on pages.

Like it or not, this data is effectively considered authoritative; if Google Maps has the right name and location, but says your library is closed because it couldn't figure out the difference between your summer hours and your fall hours, then many people aren't going to make the extra effort to click through to double-check on your web page.

Inspired by CWRC

Screenshot of the CWRC map of libraries and archives in Canada

Thinking about the challenge of turning this around, and of convincing thousands of libraries and archives to adopt schema.org on just the most basic of all of their web pages, I *almost* gave up. That's a lot of inertia to overcome. But in January, members of the Royal Society of Canada expert panel report on the future of libraries in Canada presented their work at the OLA SuperConference--and part of that work included a map of almost 5,000 Canadian libraries and archives. That map was an effort contributed by the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), and the work on the initial version wrapped up in June 2014.

I was impressed--every one had lat/long data, along with some related institutional data, including URL. For sure, there were problems: all of the lat/longs for Toronto were the same, perhaps for clustering purposes. But still!

A challenge was that it was almost entirely a manual effort, dated June 2014. And the clock continues to tick, and things continue to change, and the data continues to get more out of sync.

It drives me crazy that, despite more than 90% of the entries having URLs, we can't simply regularly crawl the sites and update and augment the data.

Which is why this summer I was delighted to meet Susan Brown, who spearheaded the CWRC effort. She recognizes the problem, understands the value of linked open data, and wants to collaborate on solutions to keeping the data fresh and relevant.

"Leading an effort"

In which I reveal I am not as persuasive as digital humanoids

Education efforts

Scott, D. (2015). White Hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Structured Web Data for Libraries. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 10(1). Retrieved from https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/3328

Education by demonstration

Screenshot of the Library One-Pager template for library websites

Education by demonstration

An augmented Library One-Pager
Live at dialled.ca/one_pager
git branch at github.com/dbs/One-Pager/tree/schema.org

Standard RDFa tactics

@@ -14,14 +14,14 @@
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="deps/ie.css">
        <script src="//html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
        <![endif]-->
-</head><body><div class="page">
+</head><body vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Library"><div class="page">
 
 <header>
        <nav>
                <a href="#">Log in/Sign up</a>
                <a href="#footer">Location/Hours</a>
        </nav>
-       <h1><a href="#">Niceville Library</a></h1>
+       <h1 property="name"><a href="#">Niceville Library</a></h1>
        <form id="search"><fieldset><legend>Search Catalog</legend>
                <label for="searchText"><a href="#">Catalog</a></label><input id="searchText" placeholder="Search books and more" type="search">
                <input type="submit" value="Search">

Reality check

How many of you use a static HTML library web site?
How many use a CMS like Drupal?
How many of you want a deep knowledge of RDFa and HTML to be the minimum bar for someone to change the opening hours on your website?

Drupal One-Pager

A theme with user-friendly widgets that hide any implementation details.
So easy, a University Librarian could use it!™

I've also taken that One-Pager and converted it into a Drupal theme, with a handful of associated modules (as is the Drupal way), that builds on standard modules such as Opening Hours and Addressfield to create a schema.org-enhanced website. My goal was to prove that it should be possible to build a CMS template based on something reasonably rational that normal humans can use to set opening hours, contact information, etc, without having to even think about what's happening with schema.org under the covers; it should just work.

And it does. It's not perfect; a Drupal expert could probably clean up a lot of the rough edges pretty quickly, and all of the "tailor to your specific users and environment" warnings apply, but as a proof of concept I think it's a damn fine start.

Location and contact info

Screenshot of standard Drupal form for entering telephone number, email, and address via the Addressfield widget

This really isn't hard!

NO WEBSITE REDESIGN NECESSARY
Nobody needs to know except you and the world of linked open data

Incentives

Cleaner data for personal agents (Hi Siri! OK, Google?)
Inclusion in OpenStreetMap, wikidata, and the LOD Cloud
A more dynamic CWRC map
Making dialled.ca a possibility

I think there are a few clear incentives; there's the very simple "cleaner data for consumption by search engines so that people will show up at the right place at the right time" argument.

Combine that with the possibilities for personal agents like Siri and Google Now to alert people who have never been to the library to events that might be of interest to them, and I think that's a winner right there.

Then you add friendliness towards map-making applications like CartoDB, and the inclusion in OpenStreetMap and wikidata argument (and I guess the whole LOD cloud) for the linked / open data geeks.

Back to more concrete examples, I believe that enabling sites like the CWRC map of all libraries and archives in Canada to be a living entity, rather than a snapshot, is pretty compelling. Towards that end, I've proposed the creation of "DIALLED"--the Distributed Index of All Library Location & Event Data (or Distributed Index of Archives and Library Location & Event Data) and picked up the domain name dialled.ca.

Right now you'll just find this presentation and links to the git repositories and example websites, but I hope to build on CWRC's effort and to start generating data based on regular crawls of all of the library & archives sites that incorporate markup.

Advocacy

Partnering with CWRC
Reaching out to co-operatives like SOLS, OLS North
Connecting with the smartest minds in library technology

So I hope to partner with CWRC to reach out to libraries and archives.

I've also talked with people at Ontario Library Services North and the Southern Ontario Library Service, who are collectively responsible for providing the basic infrastructure for hundreds of library websites, and I'm optimistic that they will be able to integrate meta-institutional data into their sites.

But as part of the effort is getting the word out to people who can magnify the impact, what better place than Access?

Surely we have some people from the Toronto Public Library here who can roll this out--you've already got OpenGraph Protocol metadata on your library branch pages, presumably for the purposes of showing up nicely in Facebook, now how about focusing a little more on utility and providing hours and location?--that would be another 100 branches in one shot. I bet there are a number of people here who each could have an impact on dozens of libraries and archives at a time.

Any BC Libraries Co-op people here? Let's talk!

ccess, assemble!