This coincided with me reading the many posts from this week's XTech 2007 Conference in Paris. One particular quote, from Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation (captured by Paul Miller in one of his postings from the event - http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2007/05/xtech_day_3_rufus_pollock_and.php), struck a cord with regard to getting the data structures 'right':
"The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else"
Much of this debate has been about how librarians can get the data structures right for librarians to get the best out of it for themselves and the users of their library services. In this ever increasingly interconnected world where users will be consuming our data through systems which are not library catalogues (of whatever Age/Order) it is well to remember there will be a high proportion of non-librarians who will be concerned about the data and the structures we are discussing here. If they don't understand our data, or find it difficult to consume, they will go elsewhere and we could find ourselves debated in to irrelevance.
Maybe an extreme view, but technology history is littered with examples of the 'excellent' being kicked in to extinction by the 'good enough, that became popular' - hands up who has a Betamax!
Richard Wallis
Technology Evangelist, Talis
>
> I don't think you are suggesting this, but I think it is dangerous to
put
> everything on hold, and not to encourage other approaches, while we
get
> the underlying data structures and standards "right", even assuming we
> could agree on what "right" is.
This has been an issue where it's hard to say what the right bird's-eye
view of things is. Developments are occurring at different rates, and
many of the new developments have made exciting contributions to the
processes involved in information services. Full-text searching could
ultimately means all text is part of one common text--a single
entity--and it's exciting to think what that means in terms of
information retrieval.
I do notice a lot of hand-wringing and concern about the rate of
development of AACR/RDA, and how that development (slow as it is) fits
into the larger scheme of other standards that are driving developments
on the web and in information retrieval. As great as all these other
developments are maybe a partial explanation of what is going on is that
these other developments are moving to fill in the gaps caused by the
slow development and what is still to some extent an isolated silo of
AACR/MARC-based information.
I do think there are some important examples to highlight that help in
making some distinctions to further the discussion.
When I look at IMDb.com and see that a result set on a keyword search is
divided into something like FRBR entities (person, title of work,
company, etc.) rather than brief summaries of some resources (which is
the library catalogue default) that a user then has to sift through by
applying sorts, limits, or facet filters, I have to point that out and
say, hey, that's what the original 1997 FRBR paper was talking about.
People DO search by thinking of entities first (a person or concept is
not an RDA resource-- and information about that person or concept
provided in the catalogue may be all that a user is interested in).
There are some tantalizing navigation and discovery possibilities with
displaying those entities as the primary focus of a subsequent display
window with attributes and relationships all in their place on one
screen. So when a person or a concept gets its own page in some service
like IMDb.com or LibraryThing, and is the focus for other activities, I
have to say, hey, that's what the 1997 FRBR paper was talking about.
That's seems to be a good example of what the next gen catalogue should
look like, and it seems consistent with what the library world has been
dwelling on (maybe more dwelling than doing) for the last several years.
So this is more of a matter of poking things along rather than saying
everything else should be held up until these debates about metadata
structures are sorted out.
Thomas Brenndorfer, B.A, M.L.I.S.
Guelph Public Library
100 Norfolk St.
Guelph, ON
N1H 4J6
(519) 824-6220 ext. 276
tbrenndorfer_at_library.guelph.on.ca
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Received on Sat May 19 2007 - 04:18:35 EDT