> 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.
Calhoun's report is about appropriate resource allocation and about
smartening-up cataloging as a discipline-which are also my interests. Ted
wrote that I need to "face the fact" that my primary interest is money. I
find that offensive, even a slur, but not too surprising. Most of the
comments in this thread are depressingly short on evidence but long on
assumptions, allegations, and FUD.
I was going to paste in Calhoun's action plan, but people can read her
report for themselves, and I think they should. The only sustained critique
of Calhoun came from a union-sponsored report by Mann designed to keep
things "the way we always done it." That's really sad, because there was a
time when the real innovations in librarianship came from practicing
catalogers (or at least people working on the principles of organizing
information, such as Dewey, who is hard to pigeonhole in one specialty). You
can't innovate unless you are willing to start over from scratch. Grudging
incrementalism won't get us anywhere.
Calhoun's report is here:
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf
It's easy to hone in on some of her more radical suggestions in her
"blueprint," but I suggest that readers spread their focus more broadly and
pay attention to a theme that emerges in everything else I discuss here: the
idea that the single perfect record is just not enough... that we need to
focus on discovery as a discipline.
Here is a much underread report from UC:
http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/BSTF/Final.pdf
Within the context of UC, it is a very radical suggestion that UC adopt a
single ILS for its entire system. That is definitely not how They Always
Done It. People can rationalize the old ways with anecdotal evidence until
they are hoarse, but BSTF is saying, as are Calhoun and Markey, that in the
end both our users and our profession will be better served if we rethink
how we are doing things and focus on providing the best aggregate user
experience versus the most perfect single record.
Reading BSTF farther-which I have actually done, more than once for that
matter, from the first page to the last, a miracle of "sustained reading of
complex texts"-guess what? BSTF suggests doing away with LCSH, as well (p
23ff). I suspect within UC the idea of a single ILS was so heart-stopping
that any suggestion after that was mere prattle, but BSTF is really out
there. BSTF has been easier to ignore because Calhoun's report was done for
LOC, not one system, and because a lone voice is an easier target (BSTF was
a *committee* report!), but it is consonant with the other documents out
there.
Markey's report is also important to read:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/markey/01markey.html
Among other things, she says we should embrace subject cataloging, the
importance of which is substantiated with a single citation from Marcia
Bates... but that is not her fault, because for the most part, in our
profession we assume cataloging is important but do not study it. It's
definitely not the sexy discipline. I'll take her argument to mean that
controlled vocabulary rocks, and I would agree with her. But she does not
mean make subject cataloging more complex; she means add tools that leverage
it far better (e.g. adding better discovery tools).
Coyle and Hillman tackle a different issue here:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/coyle/01coyle.html
This critique has been part of the roadmap toward a rather amazing agreement
between RDA and DC-which is not about dumbing down cataloging, as some fear;
we can continue to make our records as luxuriously complex as we want to-but
about making our rules more explicit, our data more open, our rich, rich
record legacy available to others, and taking us out of the silo we're in.
It's disappointing, and a disturbing suggestion of the state of
librarianship, that there has been so little discussion about this.
Finally, regarding the Third Order, I'm not convinced Weinberger is fully
correct, or that the proponents of the Semantic Web are right either, but
these are definitely interesting times. (Reading the actual book is again
one of those tricks up my sleeve I recommend to others.) I think the movie
in my head called "When Third Order Met RDF" has blockbuster potential. But
to get there we as librarians have to step up to the plate, and that
includes letting go-not of precious greenbacks-but of old practices, old
ways, and old fears and prejudices, including the idea that people talking
about change and innovation are merely money-grasping bureaucrats.
K.G. Schneider
kgs_at_bluehighways.com
Received on Sat May 19 2007 - 06:25:54 EDT