>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 cataloguing) 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
Don't bother with good cataloging? Quelle horreur! I wonder if the
traces you're seeing are a 2.0-style frustration with the restrictions
of structured subject headings? On the reference desk, I see tags and
more flexible metadata as the LC-to-English translation service. Just as
I wouldn't hand a patron a bib number to find a book (though I have had
them handed to me), I don't expect them to be able to use subject
headings on their own.
Of course, we're the only ones that care about this stuff. What's that
saying? Librarians like searching, everyone else likes finding. We can
barely convince taxpayers to pay for their local libraries, how can we
swing a national cataloging service? As usual, Candy has the answer-
tell them that if they want to find the right book and not just the
close enough book, they'll need more than tags alone. Assuming that's
true. Maybe it's not.
Aargh, indeed!
kate
---------------------------------
Kate Sheehan
Coordinator of Library Automation
Danbury Library
170 Main St.
Danbury, CT 06810
203.796.1607
ksheehan_at_danburylibrary.org
http://www.danburylibrary.org
http://www.myspace.com/danburylibrary
Received on Wed Apr 25 2007 - 08:26:15 EDT