> Carolyn MCDONALD said in part:
>...
> What if our "catalogue" is nothing more than a venue to enable
> people to meet over a book (or other piece of information)? Or rather,
> what if our catalogue is nothing more than a data source which feeds the
> user's catalogue, and their own personal catalogue is the only thing
> that matters to them? And all they care about is if our catalogue is
> built on standards that allows their personal catalogue to pull out of
> it what they want?
>...
Excellent.
What's new here, however, is only the social function of the catalog.
Otherwise, that's how card catalogs were used too: people copied stuff
into personal notebooks or cards and built their own catalog that way.
Now, of course, there's (potentially) an enormous increase in
efficiency AND shareability, enabling ever more people to actually
operate that way, for the first time.
What does it mean for NG catalogs?
1. New functions to support the social dimension
2. New data elements not hitherto recorded.
3. Question: What old functions and data elements can be dropped?
Legacy data must therefore have a difficult start into NG territory but
aren't easily gotten rid of.
But what about new cataloging? Is RDA really what we need? Is it but
a first step - or one into the wrong direction?
Or is a radically different approach called for: where complete scanning
and OCRing of book content is not feasible, scan covers, title pages,
tables of content, forwords, abstracts and make all the text matter
retrievable and the images displayable - and no rules for entry and
heading anymore. Which is what "Google Book Search" is doing (they seem
hell-bent to avoid all manual-intellectual input), so we need
not double that work but find a way to add "location symbols", as it
were. Could "Google Book Search" become the new OCLC?
What if they (or publishers) don't want that?
But seriously: how good can GBS really become, and what edge can an RDA
catalog have over it? Both have limits, which one's are more acute for
the real world?
B. Eversberg
Received on Tue Jun 27 2006 - 07:20:05 EDT