Irony of irony with regard to the issue of getting the underlying
structure and standards right, I came across this article today in the
newspaper
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070518.winternet051
9/BNStory/Technology/, which is about redesigning the Internet from
scratch partly because of the security, bandwidth and reliability
problems resulting from "40 year old technology".
Here's a quote from the related Clean Slate web site
http://cleanslate.stanford.edu/: "With what we know today, if we were to
start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global
communications infrastructure?"
Some quotes from the article:
"'We're not going to get there by trying harder, but by trying
different.'"
"'If air-traffic control were run over the public Internet,' Prof.
McKeown says of the current system, 'then I wouldn't fly.'"
"Advocates don't believe it will replace the current Web entirely.
Perhaps a new network will simply create a parallel system that can run
in tandem with what we have now."
"'No one could have predicted that the Web would come along,' Prof.
McKeown says. 'And the same type of unforeseeable thing could happen.
Those of us who have been on the Internet for a long time believe that
we know the right things, but we could be wrong.'"
***
Interestingly, the comments from readers on the web version of the
newspaper article all refer to the virtues of the chaotic, unregulated
messiness of the current Internet.
I suppose this is all part of the problem of getting a bird's eye view
of the next gen catalogue issue, especially with regards to Second Order
vs Third Order worlds or having the older controlled standards running
in parallel to open free-form conventions. There's always another layer
to the problem.
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
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Richard Wallis
> Sent: May 19, 2007 6:25 AM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] services against collections
>
> 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.
ph
> p), 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
>
Received on Sat May 19 2007 - 10:38:02 EDT