KGS says...
>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.
Calling names and casting aspersions is certainly Not Cool (though sometimes unintentional). I think what gets some people's back up is the sense that a good part of the cataloging reform debate *does* seem driven mostly by the cost-cutting concerns of managers. To cite Calhoun's own introduction:
"At a seminar held at the American Library Association 2005 Midwinter Conference,
Deanna Marcum, LC's Associate Librarian for Library Services, asked, in light of the
high cost of cataloging and swift changes in information seeking behavior and tools,
"just how much do we need to continue to spend on carefully constructed catalogs?"
When you hear the question posed in that way, you do kinda suspect that someone already knows the answer they want to hear.
>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."
Um, please see the above note about casting aspersions. While Mann's is *rather* single-minded in his devotion to the potential utility of LCSH, it hardly makes sense to imply that the author of "A Guide to Library Research Methods" is some kind of head-in-the-sand union shill.
I would agree that it is unfortunate that his is the only sustained critique that's surfaced online. I vaguely remember a lot of hub-bub attending the report's release, and a fair amount of "Yeah! Stick it to the Man!" talk from the Kool Kids of LibBloging, but *very little* detailed dicussion of any of the particulars. Personally, on re-reading, I think the report is a bit all over the map -- mixing together some solid sugestions with a bunch of un-moored business jargon and a fair bit of discussion about matters that don't have much at all to do with the Catalog per se. I imagine that has a lot to with the way the report was constructed, being in some part the distillation of interviews with a wide array of library folk.
It's interesting to note that while killing LCSH is the thing everybody remembers about the report, it gets only a quick, almost cursory mention under item 4.2 -- "Support Browsing and Collocation". It remains to be seen how *reducing* analytical metadata is going to assist us with collocation, but I suppose anything is possible. Mann's rhetoric ( http://www.guild2910.org/AFSCMECalhounReviewREV.pdf ) may be a bit hot in places, but his arguments are based on...well, logical argument. I'm sorry, but a lot of the "dump LCSH" advocacy (most especially the stuff referenced in Appendix C of the Calhoun report) comes across as hand-waving by comparison. Sure, it would be nice if we had software that could automagically assign 10 or 15 meaningful headings to a book-length text. It would also be nice if we all had Ponies. (Maybe we could get the Ponies to assign the headings..)
Ed Sperr
Received on Tue May 22 2007 - 14:01:07 EDT