Re: "Third Order"--was Libraries & the Web

Allen,
You've brought up a legitimate question. It's appropriate to challenge
someone when he appears to attribute something to "base motives." But as
I said before, when I read the Calhoun Report, money always seems to be
the "elephant in the room," even when it's not mentioned. And concern
about money is not necessarily "base," as I will explain below.

Here's my view of the situation. When people talk about adding things we
don't do now (such as the "tagging" several people spoke of), it's not
about money. But when they talk about eliminating things we do now (like
controlled subject vocabulary, as advocated in the Calhoun report), then
I think it is about money. FAST is basically about money, and to some
extent that's legitimate. It could be that in certain situations,
perhaps where you have to digitize a tremendous number of things and
don't have the staffing to do all of that with precoordinate LCSH, you
have to find a cheaper way of cataloging them, and FAST may be helpful
for that, since it doesn't require extensive training.  Here's a place
where they did that:

http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda/index.html

That's the Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive. It's helpful to
compare it with the University of Southern Mississippi's regular online
catalog, which has regular precoordinate LCSH:

http://anna.lib.usm.edu

As a person from the University pointed out at ALA several years ago,
one difficulty is that you can't move the FAST metadata into their
regular catalog, because it wouldn't index correctly with the
precoordinate headings. But I assume the use of FAST was helpful for
this digitization project.

Of course there is another point: if you're going to add something, then
you do often have to eliminate something else, unless you have abundant
funding, which most libraries don't have. So the question is, what are
your priorities? Calhoun and others want us to believe that the coming
of computers, the Web, and full text means we don't need controlled
vocabulary any more. (Maybe that's a pretty broad statement, but it's
close.) Digitizing is a higher priority than providing controlled
vocabulary. For the reasons I gave before, I question that.

I realize "Calhoun and others" isn't much as documentation, but this is
the best I know how to do now.
        --Ted Gemberling

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of MULLEN Allen
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2007 6:05 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] "Third Order"--was Libraries & the Web

Ted P Gemberling writes:

>But what worries me about that is that "letting go" is, at
>bottom, mainly about money, not about serving people.

An assertion that the sum of the visions, prototypes, full
implementations, and discussions about next generation library
information systems that comprise what we are discussing on this forum
are about money deserves to be substantiated, Ted.  Could you please
help me understand by citing anywhere in this forum, or in the writings,
addresses, or conversations of advocates for the development of next
generation library systems that substantiate this statement, especially
that this is "mainly about money, not about serving people?"

What I find exciting about this forum is that it is made up of people
who do care about serving people well through bibliographic information
systems.

Allen Mullen
Eugene Public Library



>-----Original Message-----
>From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
>[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Ted P Gemberling
>Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2007 3:36 PM
>To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
>Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] "Third Order"--was Libraries & the Web
>
>Karen wrote:
>
>"The hard part is letting go... which is also about turf,
>egos, and force of habit."
>
>
>
>But what worries me about that is that "letting go" is, at
>bottom, mainly about money, not about serving people. I
>realize money is a legitimate concern, but I think we should
>at least face the fact that this is what we're talking about
>when we speak of "letting go." I realize you may already have
>done that at some point, Karen, but I just felt I needed to
>emphasize it.