One Big Library.

(zero points if you're not guessing)

"Our national courage has been clear in times of depression and war, when defending common dangers defined our common good. Now we must choose if the example of our fathers and mothers will inspire us or condemn us. We must show courage in a time of blessing by confronting problems instead of passing them on to future generations."

Just in case I forget over the holidays.

• Building an LED chanukiah
• Taking the web more seriously
• learn2code lesson 2..n
• More details on alt.code4lib.dc
• Okay, fine, I get twitter now. (nevermind, that just wrote itself.)
• Eliminating software
• Library Geeks 014..n
• Practical linked data
• Caching and proxying linked data

Maybe the test of a record that really grabs me is how many multiples of ten it lasts the "at least once per day" test. This was a year with several 1s, but not really any 2s. Which makes it a down year, but that's okay... there was a lot of good new stuff to listen to in 2008. There were also several records that just never quite kicked in for me.

New records I liked a lot in 2008:

• To Survive, Joan as Police Woman
• In Ear Park, Department of Eagles
• Un Dia, Juana Molina
• We Brave Bee Stings and All, Thao Nguyen
• Fleet Foxes
• Dear Science, TV on the Radio
• Retribution Gospel Choir
• Everything that Happens, Byrne and Eno
• Med Sud ..., Sigur Ros
• The Renaissance, Q-Tip
• Provisions, Giant Sand

Old records I liked a lot for the first time, for whatever reason, in 2008:

• Go Home, Art Ensemble of Chicago
• Dublin Blues, Guy Clark
• For Emma, Bon Iver (it came out in 2007, right? i just heard it this year)
• Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen
• Adobe, Tony Malaby

New records I didn't like that much in 2008, even though there are several reasons one might presume I would have liked them quite a fair bit actually:

• Stay Positive, The Hold Steady
• Vivian Girls
• Microcastle, Deerhunter
• Nouns, No Age
• Rip it Off, Times New Viking
• At Mount Zoomer, Wolf Parade
• April, Sun Kil Moon
• Volume One, She and Him
• The Stand Ins, Okkervil River
• Field Manual, Chris Walla
• Receivers, Parts & Labor

New records I might like but haven't really heard enough of yet in 2008, and plan to hear more of, but just haven't yet, and I'm fixin' to correct that, honest:

• Dig Lazarus Dig, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the Exclamation Points
• Third, Portishead
• A Thousand Shark's Teeth, My Brightest Diamond
• Break Up the Concrete, The Pretenders
• There's Me and There's You, Matthew Herbert Big Band
• Real Animal, Alejandro Escovedo

We didn't go to very many shows this year, but of the ones we did see, Guy Clark performing on the mall was a highlight. Not because it was over-the-top great or anything, but because of just how damned good he is. It was ridiculously hot, he was wearing a cast and was in obvious pain, but he worked through all the favorites the crowd called for, graciously, and sounded great throughout. Not to mention his impeccable songwriting and playing to begin with.

On January 3, 2008, I asked: "will I need to understand the semantic web in 2008?" On December 20, 2008, I'm here to tell you: no. I didn't, and I still don't.

As I wrote in my last post, though, I'm increasingly keen on linked data, which I think isn't really about RDF or the semantic web of "understanding".

I'm certain I need to understand that in 2009 because I'm already spending most of my waking hours thinking about it in December 2008.

Yesterday was a bit of a downer in the office when Ed filled me in on what was going on in with lcsh.info. And it was sadder still to log on tonight and see the site down and replaced for good, though it's nice to see that the in-its-place blog post's comments coming in are encouragingly positive.

I didn't really have much to do with this project, nor with its demise. I'd guess, though, that this will be one of those things that can feel like something of a failure today, in the immediate now(), but will be remembered as a clear success later on. Here's why I think that way:

• It worked. It showed off what was possible, and was useful, in just the way it was supposed to be.
• It was fun for humans to explore.
• People noticed it. Lots of people.
• People at LC were proud of it. This is from first-hand discussions, and from having heard it trumpeted as an important experiment by LC leaders in public statements.
• People got it. Even the non-semwebbers in the room saw what it was about and could relate to that.
• It filled a need. Many people had called for something like lcsh.info, and when it appeared, it seemed a plausible promise of answering their calls.
• It's not just the geeks and semwebbers who were calling for it and things like it. The wogrofubico report explicitly recommended several steps much like the ones taken with lcsh.info.
• It was, in part, the output of diverse staff at LC who, in part, have been active participants in a related w3c initiative.
• It looked cool. Those graphs were nifty.
• It was an important enough success that it was taken down. If it never gained notice, if it weren't useful, if it didn't promise something bigger, if it didn't make sense, if nobody cared, it would still be up. Yknow?

Ultimately, if linked data is going to work as infrastructure -- which, as something beyond linked data for linked data's sake, I hope it becomes -- there will be more fits and starts on the way to What Works. It seems cheap to remember that "this was always labeled an experiment", even though it was, and rightly so, but to get things right in the long run you have to try some stuff and learn from it along the way. Even simply having this minor crisis is going to drive people, hopefully, to taking issues of persistence and stewardship very seriously as they figure how to move this exciting idea ahead.

--

(Title appropriated, with apologies, from William Kentridge.)