(Note: I took up the issue of "standards" in my forthcoming LTR on
open source, and now I'm trying to figure out new language to use so
I blog about it and such without violating the licensing terms on my
own writing.)
I asked Matt Mullenweg, the driving force behind WordPress, about
standards, and his response was "name one successful standard that
emerged from a committee." It was brash, perhaps naive, and most of
us should be able to poke holes in it. But...
OpenSearch creator DeWitt Clinton spoke of it along these lines:
standards bodies are good at formalizing what's become standard
practice. (Paraphrasing) "If people don't already agree on what the
standard is, then no committee will solve that...it shouldn't even go
to committee."
I like HTML as an example. No committee created HTML, it was Tim
Berners Lee, then Marc Andreessen (who added the <IMG... tag).
Sometime later TBL founded the W3C to help keep it sane.
The case with bibliographic data is somewhat different. We have some
great efforts at innovation, but not enough implementations (blame
our systems, blame inertia, ...). And maybe worst of all, even among
the experimenters we have an appeal to authority.
Remixing means not asking permission first. (Hoists the skull and
crossbones, puts on eyepatch.) Let's remix.
Karen and Karen wrote:
>> We definitely have multiple standards...we also have
>> multiple standards creation points - JSC, LoC, NISO.
>> ...there isn't a clear division of responsibilities between them.
>
> Well, that is a very intriguing problem. In the absence of a
> decision-making
> authority, is it possible for concerned librarians to come up with a
> guidance model and promote it? What do you think the solution is?
Casey Bisson
__________________________________________
Information Architect
Plymouth State University
Plymouth, New Hampshire
http://maisonbisson.com/blog/
ph: 603-535-2256
Received on Fri May 11 2007 - 07:02:50 EDT