> > Make the system friendlier, spend less money on hand-hewn metadata
> > and more on books and services, etc. I have to wonder if a tool such as
> > LibraryThing wouldn't support such a library's needs better than any
> > traditional ILS.
>
> You do realize that LibraryThing is chock-full of "hand-hewn metadata?"
Yes, actually, I do. If I my post seemed to imply that LibraryThing offered
any sort of automated entity extraction, let me clarify that I wasn't trying
to say that.
> FWIW, I certainly would agree that cataloging as it exists now is much
> more complicated, labor-intensive and expensive that it needs to be. So
> greatly simplify it yes, but don't pretend that there's no human source
> behind the metadata in services like LibraryThing.
No pretensions whatsoever. My comment about LibraryThing was a broader
observation on the order of "a significant amount [but by no means not most
or all] of whatever it is we get from the traditional library ILS may be
delivered just as well by LibraryThing." It's a parallel analogy to "cheaper
metadata is not necessarily worse than expensive metadata." If two brands of
potato chips are just as good, then buy the cheaper brand; it leaves more
money for onion dip.
Not only that, but just in case this point gets lost in this response, I
also weighed in with my 2 cents that I believe librarians have a role in
shaping and refining computer-assisted metadata.
Infomine has some interesting capabilities in the automated-extraction
department, and I'd really like to see the Infomine folks pitch in on these
discussions. It could be that after all they've done in the web portal arena
(in re iVia) one highly relevant application ends up being traditional
library stuff.
Karen G. Schneider
kgs_at_bluehighways.com
Received on Mon Jun 19 2006 - 15:18:20 EDT