Karen wrote:
>> We've built the ultimate control-freak system from controlled,
human-created and -applied metadata sitting in MARC silos
>>(remember, only we use MARC) held within proprietary and outdated
software.
The MARC issue seems a lot more relevant than the issue of 'proprietary
and outdated' software? Our ILS uses an Oracle db to store the
information, and can provide an xml interface to the data - surely it's
the data formats that are the issue here. Although the data is 'held' in
the system - to a large extent the system does a lot of work to extract
the relevant information from the MARC records (which we've insisted on)
Owen
Owen Stephens
E-Strategy Co-ordinator
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham
Surrey
UK
TW20 0EX
Email: owen.stephens_at_rhul.ac.uk
MSN: owen.stephens_at_rhul.ac.uk
Tel: 01784 443331
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of K.G. Schneider
Sent: 10 May 2007 12:53
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Yes but
> > The result is that a user who didn't know the LCSH before starting a
> > search learns it quickly.
> >
> > That is, sophisticated tools can make complex research easy.
Casey's point here brings us back to the original thesis. Sophisticated
tools aren't (too) hard to use, and sophisticated tools help *teach*
people how to use them better and more expertly. As Donald Norman wrote,
"Information is in the world."
Now, that doesn't mean I am convinced that faceted/bagged LCSH is the
answer. We need more evidence, and part of the problem if we even
produce evidence is that we don't have anything to compare it with
inside our industry because we have such a hammerlock on what metadata
about the book in question is available to the user. We've built the
ultimate control-freak system from controlled, human-created and
-applied metadata sitting in MARC silos (remember, only we use MARC)
held within proprietary and outdated software. We're in the same
position as Dewey staring at the alphabetical book catalogs, except that
Dewey was focused on the problem and the user and had no interest in
retaining legacy methods.
K.G. Schneider
kgs_at_bluehighways.com
http://freerangelibrarian.com
Received on Thu May 10 2007 - 07:06:00 EDT