Spoonfeeding Library Data to Search Engines

CC-NC-BY rocketship

When you talk to a search engine, you need to realize that it's just a humongous baby. You can't expect it to understand complicated things. You would never try to teach language to a human baby by reading it Nietzsche, and you shouldn't expect a baby google to learn bibliographic data by feeding it MARC (or RDA or METS or MODS, or even ONIX).

When a baby says "goo-goo" to you, you don't criticize its misuse of the subjunctive. You say "goo-goo" back. When Google tells you that that it wants to hear "schema.org" microdata, you don't try to tell it about the first indicator of the 856 ‡u subfield. You give it schema.org microdata, no matter how babyish that seems.

It's important to build up a baby's self-confidence. When baby google expresses interest in the number of pages of a book, you don't really want to be specifying that there are ix pages numbered with roman numerals and 153 pages with arabic numerals in shorthand code. When baby google wants to know whether a book is "family friendly" you don't want to tell it about 521 special audience characteristics, you just want to tell it whether or not it's porn.

If you haven't looked at the schema.org model for books, now's a good time. Don't expect to find a brilliant model for book metadata, expect to find out what a bibliographic neophyte machine thinks it can use a billion times a day. Schema.org was designed by engineers from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Remember, their goal in designing it was not to describe things well, it was to make their search results better and easier to use.

The thing is, it's not such a big deal to include this sort of data in a page that comes from an library OPAC (online catalog). An OPAC that publishes unstructured data produces HTML that looks something like this:

<div> 
<h1>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author: Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span> 
 <span>Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

The first step is to mark something as the root object. You do that with the itemscope attribute:

<div itemscope> 
<h1>Avatar</h1>
 <span>Author: Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span> 
 <span>Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

A microdata-aware search engine looking at this will start building a model. So far, the model has one object, which I'll denote with a red box.

The second step, using microdata and Schema.org, is to give the object a type. You do that with the itemtype attribute:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book"> 
<h1>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author: Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span> 
 <span>Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

Now the object in the model has acquired the type "Book" (or more precisely, the type "http://schema.org/Book".

Next, we give the Book object some properties:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book"> 
<h1 itemprop="name">Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author: 

<span itemprop="author">Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span></span> 
 <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

Note that while the library record for this book attempts to convey the title complexity: "245 10 $aAvatar /$cPaul Bryers.$", the search engine doesn't care yet. The book is part of a series: 490 1 $aThe mysteries of the Septagram$, and the search engines don't want to know about that either. Eventually, they'll learn.
The model built by the search engine looks like this:

So far, all the property values have been simple text strings. We can also add properties that are links:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book"> 
<h1 itemprop="name">Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author: 

<span itemprop="author">Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span></span> 
 <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg" 

itemprop="image">
</div>

The model grows.

Finally, we want to say that the author, Paul Bryers, is an object in his own right. In fact, we have to, because the value of an author property has to be a Person or an Organization in Schema.org. So we add another itemscope attribute, and give him some properties:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book"> 
<h1 itemprop="name">Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <div itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org.Person">

Author:  <span itemprop="name">Paul Bryers</span> 

(born <span itemprop="birthDate">1945</span>)
 </div>
 <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg" 

itemprop="image">
</div>

That wasn't so hard. Baby has this picture in his tyrannical little head:

Which it can easily turn into a "rich snippet" that looks like this:

Though you know all it really cares about is milk.

Here's a quick overview of the properties a Schema.org/Book can have (the values in parentheses indicate a type for the property value):

Properties from http://schema.org/Thing

• description
• image(URL)
• name
• url(URL)

Properties from http://schema.org/CreativeWork

• about(Thing)
• aggregateRating(AggregateRating)
• audio(AudioObject)
• author(Person or Organization)
• awards
• contentLocation(Place)
• contentRating
• datePublished(Date)
• editor(Person)
• encodings(MediaObject)
• genre
• headline
• inLanguage
• interactionCount
• isFamilyFriendly(Boolean)
• keywords
• offers(Offer)
• publisher(Organization)
• reviews(Review)
• video(VideoObject)

Properties from http://schema.org/Book

• bookEdition
• bookFormat(BookFormatType)
• illustrator(Person)
• isbn
• numberOfPages(Integer)

This post is the second derived from my talk at ALA in New Orleans. The first post discussed the changing role of digital surragates in a fully digital world. The next will discuss "Like" buttons.