An Emergent Theory of Digital Library Metadata. By Getaneh Alemu and Brett Stevens. Amsterdam: Chandos, an Imprint of Elsevier, 2015. 122 p. $78.95 softcover (ISBN: 978-0-08-1003855); $78.95 e-book (978–0-08–1004012). Chandos Information Professional Series.

This slim volume is a recent release in the long-running Chandos Information Professional Series. Author Getaneh Alemu has an international work history, and is currently cataloguing and metadata librarian at Southampton Solent University in the United Kingdom. Co-author Brett Stevens is a lecturer in the School of Creative Technologies a few miles down the road at the University of Portsmouth.

Alemu and Stevens’ main objective is to state a case for library systems that support the creation and use of socially constructed metadata as a diverse and contemporary addition to expert-created metadata. Users, they argue, are currently relegated to passive consumers of library metadata rather than participants in its creation. The authors posit that effective use of socially constructed metadata is only possible in an atmosphere of open, linked data.

The book opens with a foreword “Re-thinking library metadata,” which provides a concise abstract of the authors’ aims. The first two chapters offer a summary of the history of cataloging beginning with Pannizi’s 1841 Rules of the Compilation of the Catalog and touching on the works by fathers of librarianship Cutter and Ranganathan.1 The authors then cherry-pick four principles from Svenonius to apply to their argument by explaining how these four principles are no longer adequate for describing information resources in a digital environment.2 They make some valid points in this section; for example, that the principle of sufficiency and necessity “may significantly impact users’ needs” (12). A weakness of the text is that the authors spend the time working through problematic aspects of these principles yet only barely mention any effect of these issues on the theory they are evolving after this portion of the book.

The first three chapters, where Alemu and Stevens lay the groundwork for their theory, have some properties of a literature review, but their strategy here is frustrating. Throughout these chapters the authors present information that is often followed by four or more citations of articles or books without any page references. They largely fail to directly address any cited authors’ distinct contributions. This approach leaves the reader in doubt about the specificity and grounding of the opinions presented in the book.

Alemu and Stevens recognize and discuss the need to monitor and apply some controls to socially created metadata such as homonym elimination. Other forms of control, such as deletions of malicious comments, would evolve in the hypothesized system much like the self-healing qualities of Wikipedia. The authors give a great deal of responsibility to users for contribution, discernment, and knowledge regarding competing metadata elements.

The background and conclusions of this book are directly related to a trio of reports issued by the OCLC Social Metadata Working Group relating to social metadata; however, the authors do not cite any of the findings of that group.3 For example, the OCLC Executive Summary (2012) states clear findings about the success of user-contributed metadata that directly supports the authors’ assertions about the utility and importance of socially constructed metadata. Additionally, the OCLC reports enumerate trends and themes that emerged from their survey that correlate on several points to Alemu’s and Steven’s arguments from their own survey. The text would have benefited from the inclusion and discussion of OCLC’s findings.

The bulk of the authors’ conclusions rest on a series of “57 in-depth interviews … with metadata librarians, metadata experts and library users” (45). Unfortunately, only their results are reported without any additional information about the interview structure or questions asked, leading readers to question the extent, specificity, and uniformity of the interviews. This is the first opportunity to understand the academic nature of the theoretical work. Although the series this volume belongs to is targeted to academic librarianship, this individual work never identifies their specific audience. Their interviews were almost exclusively conducted at universities (forty-six), which is the first clear indication of the constituencies they are addressing. The results of these interviews are selectively quoted throughout the rest of the text. This reviewer found it curious that in more than twenty-five quotations from interviews in a text focused on user-generated metadata, only four unique users were quoted in the text.

There are at least two key components related to the authors’ theory that are either scantily addressed or altogether omitted. One is an all-too-brief discussion of how to engage users in metadata creation. In three short pages they summarize both the barriers to user participation and their solutions for eliminating those barriers. Additionally, they do not address the idea that users will only contribute to a small portion of any institution’s resources, but socially generated tags and reviews may have the effect of causing users to prefer certain materials without considering the full range of information available.

The evidence for the authors’ theory is often martialed in a nonlinear manner. They have presented what, to a reader, appears to be a complete theory at the end of chapter 4 but then take up with the second part of their argument regarding open, linked data that is largely based on reiterating the main points of their previous conclusions about socially constructed metadata.

The text itself sadly manifests many distracting qualities. Certain words are used too habitually (i.e., “however” and “obviate”), and the text suffers from grammatical mistakes and poor copy editing. The volume is illustrated with several charts, but they generally either illustrate concepts that are abundantly clear from the text, or the graphics are so confusing that they becoming meaningless.

Alemu and Stevens have evolved a professionally interesting theory that bears discussion and consideration. Regrettably, they have not presented it in this volume with sufficient precision to adequately bring the theory to light.—Elizabeth Shoemaker (shoemakerelizabetha@sau.edu), St. Ambrose University, Davenport, Iowa

References

1. Anthony Pannizi, Rules for the Compilation of the Catalogue (London: Printed by the Order of the Trustees, 1841).
2. Elaine Svenonius, The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
3. Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Cyndi Shein, “Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives and Museums,” OCLC Research, 2011–2012, http://www.oclc.org/research/themes/data-science/aggregating.html.