> I suppose "IEEE Conference 1998 Georgia Tech" might get one closer,
> but I honestly don't think exposing our vanilla OPACs are going to be
> the path to much joy. There needs to be a different approach to this
> problem because merely opening our catalogs up to Google reeks of
> polishing the turd.
>
> -Ross.
I was just about to make similar points (though perhaps without that
interesting vanilla/turd oxymoron), specifically that, first, there aren't
117,467 copies of In Cold Blood in Google (to use the number of libraries in
the United States, let alone the world), and if there were, that wouldn't
necessarily be a good thing; but beyond that, there are additional concerns
with all these mini-me catalogs, primarily the high cost of installing,
maintaining, upgrading local software, and the high cost of creating and
maintaining local metadata... "cost" in both cases meaning both what is
literally expended in terms of library resources (money, and people, though
of course people are money) and in terms of a loss of balance in where we
focus our efforts.
In other words, if we all shared one OPAC for book-like things (the way we
do for Amazon, or for that matter, LibraryThing), maybe we'd spend less time
twiddling with every live-long field in a record or upgrading our local
installation of Innosirsi Voylibris, and focus more on pushing print into
digital, making discovery easier, building nicer facilities, and procuring
more content for people to use.
Karen G. Schneider
kgs_at_bluehighways.com
Received on Mon Apr 23 2007 - 16:07:04 EDT