> intervene in, in some way. If it's "tagging" or "folksonomies" of some
> sort that are not put on the MARC record, are just part of some user's
> "my catalog,"
No, the point of tagging and folksonomies (something that "mylibrary"-style
applications of the 1990s weren't quite savvy about) is that they are part
of the collective zeitgeist. The "aboutness" of a bibliographic resource
swirls out much farther than the fields we work with. This is why the
LibraryThing recommendations for Danbury Library's catalog are so profound:
they are a dynamic "aboutness" related to what people think about a
resource.
> standards. Those standards exist partly to keep costs down...
How we do things may add significant value-though we need to improve our
tools, and by that I mean not software but our intellectual framework for
metadata-but it's not cost-saving.
My first take, a quick one, suggested that LibraryThing's added value for
Danbury lies in social information-something our library data is poor at (if
you like A, you will like B, C, and D). Where LT did poorly (editions) was
on the kind of predictive information we do well at (resource A has a
relationship to B, C, and D). This is just a coarse layman's take.
K.G. Schneider
kgs_at_bluehighways.com
http://freerangelibrarian.com
Received on Wed May 16 2007 - 09:41:43 EDT