Great article, thanks for the link.
I see things going somewhat the other way, though. Rather than the
library community getting more chaotic I see a significant and rising
minority of the web trying to get more diligent.
The web at the moment is a very hostile place for computers, while all
the information is machine readable virtually non is _machine
understandable_. Libraries have a long history of structuring
information in a machine friendly way.
Sure there are problems with getting every single name right, especially
people with two word surnames, but overall the semantics of rules like
AACR2 are quite amazingly complete.
In my mind though, two key things have to happen for libraries to be a
key part of this future.
The profession has to embrace internet standards - force, cajole and
bully your vendors to support SRW/SRU and XML. Not just MarcXML, but
Dublin Core and any other flavours that appear. Force, cajole and bully
your vendors to react faster to feature requests like Tagging; not to
replace the cataloguing effort, but to complement it. Get rid of
Marc-Speak! Sure that's going to be really hard, but as long as we use
100$a in our day-to-day language to mean an author's name there will be
a barrier between the catalogue and the rest of the world.
Secondly, the profession must break down the walls of the silos. The
free-flow of information about what you have and how people can get
access to it is crucial. Anything that stands in the way of that
free-flow of unencumbered bibliographic and holdings data has to change.
You must become masters of your own catalogues.
And whenever I say "two key things" there are bound to be three...
Engage with the standards communities on the net. They are in desperate
need of the understanding and rigour that this profession has developed
through its rich history.
rob
Rob Styles
Technical Lead, Talis
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan
> Sent: 16 January 2007 15:26
> To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
> Subject: [NGC4LIB] coyle/hillman article from dlib
>
> I encourage people on this list to read the the Coyle/Hillman article
> from D-Lib Magazine on the topic of Resource Description and Access
> (RDA). Some quotes from the article include:
>
> The library's signature service, its catalog, uses rules for
> cataloging that are remnants of a long departed technology: the
> card catalog. Modifications to the rules, such as those proposed
> by the Resource Description and Access (RDA) development effort,
> can only keep us rooted firmly in the 20th, if not the 19th
> century. A more radical change is required that will contribute
> to the library of the future, re-imagined and integrated with the
> chosen workflow of its users.
>
> At first seen as amateurish, the Internet gained in bona fides to
> the point that today some disciplines give preference to online
> publication, taking advantage of increased speed of delivery to
> an audience and broader geographical coverage. The library
> catalog and its conventions, valued by libraries as both an
> inventory of regularly published items and as the sharing
> mechanism for catalog entries, does not have a means to respond
> to this new, more chaotic information environment.
>
> Too many librarians still consider themselves the only true
> experts both in bibliographic metadata creation and in service to
> information seekers, behaving condescendingly to others newer to
> the information enterprise. But users have spoken with their
> keyboards, overwhelmingly preferring non-traditional and
> non-library sources of information and methods of information
> discovery.
>
> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/coyle/01coyle.html
>
> In short, maybe cataloging rules need to be radically altered not
> incrementally tweaked, and the rules may need to take into greater
> consideration the almost completely changed information environment
> in which we live and work.
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> University Libraries of Notre Dame
>
> (574) 631-8604
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Received on Tue Jan 16 2007 - 11:16:08 EST