There's a little part of me that's saying "why is it that we seem
to have to choose between either taking care of the niggly little
bits (meaning standard castaloguing) OR designing a way friendly
OPAC?" Don't the niggly little bits contribute to the content
that is being mined by the way friendly OPAC? I thought we had
agreed that these two things can co-exist, and that our niggly
little bits can mash up with other people's niggly little bits in
a good way. I keep detecting traces of "don't bother with good
rich cataloguing anymore, it's unnecessary and a waste of effort
and resources." If we stop what we do well (meaning cataloguing),
then we leave finding and ranking to the algorithms based on
whatever people thought worthy of linking
to/citing/tagging/whatever. Maybe that's the evolutionary process
in the world of information objects - no-one wants to know about
you, you can disappear now. I know about the long tail, but
things in the long tail have to be spotted by someone.
However, there's another part of me that says "Oh give it up.
Look at the systems which rely on well-formed MARC records to do
filtering based on the fixed fields--we all know those haven't
been filled in completely or accurately over the years, so don't
give me your talk about the quality of cataloguing. You know how
much doing all of that costs--do you really think it's worth the
effort? So what if it's not always 'the right book', as long as
it's 'a book close to the right book, and you won't know the
difference anyway'". Think of the cool filtering that could be in
place if we had all bothered with the 043 and the 045 for
geographic and chronological subject. But we didn't. So should we
stop now? Should some agency carry on doing cataloguing, at the
taxpayer's expense?
Aaargh!
Candy
Received on Wed Apr 25 2007 - 06:05:49 EDT