It’s that time of year when offspring start to leave home and strike out on their own.  Young children may be starting kindergarten.  Older ones may be heading off to university.  And in between, children slowly gain a little more independence every year.  If parents are fortunate, and do our job well, we set our children going in good directions, but they then make paths for themselves.

Standards are a little like children that way.  You can invest lots of time, thought, and discussion into specifying how some set of interactions, expressions, or representations should work.  But, if you do well, what you specified will take on a life apart from you and its other parents, and make its own way in the world.  So it’s rather gratifying for me to see a couple of specifications that I’d helped parent move out into the world that way.

I’ve mentioned them both previously on this blog.  One was a fairly traditional committee effort: the DLF ILS-Discovery Interface recommendation.  After the original DLF group finished its work, a new group of folks affiliated with OCLC and the Code4lib community formed to implement the types of interfaces we’d recommended.  The new group has recently announced they’ll be supporting and contributing code to the Extensible Catalog NCIP toolkit.  This is an important step towards realizing the goal of standardized patron interaction with integrated library systems.  I’m looking forward to seeing how the project progresses, and hope I’ll hear more about it at the upcoming Digital Library Federation forum.

The other specification I’ve worked on that’s recently taken on a life of its own is the Free Decimal Correspondence (FDC).   This was a purely personal project of mine to develop a simple, freely reusable classification that was reasonably compatible with the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress Subject Headings.  I created it for Public Domain Day last year, and did a few updates on it afterwards, but have largely left it on the shelf for the last while.  Now, however, it’s being used as one of the bases of the “Melvil Decimal System“, part of the Common Knowledge metadata maintained at LibraryThing.

It’s nice to see both of these efforts start to make their mark in the larger world.  I’ve seen the ILS-DI implementation work develop in good hands for a while, and I’m content at this point to watch its progress from a distance.  The Free Decimal Correspondence adoption was a bit more of a surprise, though one that was quite welcome.  (I put FDC in the public domain in part to encourage that sort of unexpected reuse.)  When the Melvil project’s use of FDC was announced, I quickly put out an update of the specification, so that recent additions and corrections I’d made could be easily reused by Melvil.

I’m still trying to figure out what further updating, if any, I should do for FDC.  Melvil already goes into more detail than FDC in many cases, and as a group project, it will most likely further outstrip FDC in size as time passes.  On the other hand, keeping in sync specifically with LC Subject Headings terminology is not necessarily a goal of Melvil’s, as it has been for FDC.  Though I’m not sure at this point if that specific feature of FDC is important to any existing or planned project out there.  And as I stated in my FDC FAQ, I don’t intend to spend a whole lot of time maintaining or supporting FDC over the long term.

But since it is getting noticeable outside use, I’ll probably spend at least some time working up to a 1.0 release.  This might simply involve making a few corrections and then declaring it done.  Or it could involve incorporating some of the information from Melvil back into FDC, to the extent that I can do so while keeping FDC in the public domain.  Or it could involve some further independent development.  To help me decide, I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who’s interested in using or developing FDC further.

Projects are never really finished until you let them go.  I’m glad to see these particular ones take flight, and hope that we in the online library community will release lots of other creations in the years to come.