Friday Flashback: Standards Study Meeting, 1995
I’ve been sorting through my storage unit and found some great historical documents for the Premier Award and NEEDS (A Digital Library for Engineering Education and precursor to NSDL.org and EngineeringPathway.com).
I’ve always respected Cliff Lynch‘s thinking and clarity on networking and standards in academic technologies. Little did I know that what he said back on May 6, 1995 would be as true today as it was then.
A couple snippets from Cliff as recorded in my personal notes (PDF, 8.3 MB) from a meeting where the Synthesis Coalition brought together participants from coalition schools to discuss NEEDS as “an entirely new courseware development and distribution system.”
Cliff described:
SGML as the way to manage data long term, can deliver in different ways over time.
In the early days of the web, HTML was described as a specialized form of SGML (they’re both markup languages). Fortunately and unfortunately HTML for a long time included display markup as well some semblance of semantic markup. I wonder how much better structured the Web might be if we had separated display from semantics back in the early days.
And he also described:
MARC records as horrible thing[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][s]. Use [them] as an interchange format. Doesn’t mean [systems need] to store [metadata] in MARC!
This is spot on for some of the problems that plagued IEEE Learning Object Metadata, IMS Metadata and to some extent Dublin Core metadata. It took me years (maybe 5 of them) of developing and working with these “standards” to understand that they are great interchange formats, but that systems don’t need to support them as-is, natively. I’m not sure how many others, even after an additional decade, have this same clarity.
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