Tim poses a question that cuts to the heart of many of the debates over
providing subject access though LCSH:
"What *sort* of money are we talking about?". To begin to answer that,
we need to unpack the question of costs into at least two parts: 1) The
cost of assigning LCSH headings to individual records, and 2) The cost
of maintaining the entire LCSH ontology.
The cost of adding and editing individual headings seems to be one of
the main arguments advanced for dumping (Calhoun) or de-emphasizing
(UC's BSTF) LCSH. There is no doubt that it's relatively expensive for
a person to analyze an item and then have to apply the proper heading.
However, it is also expensive to do all the *other* things involved in
acquiring and describing an item. Folks start off with "There's a of
waste and inefficiency in traditional cataloging" and move straight on
into "Burn the Red Books!" without really touching on any of the steps
in-between. What *actual* part of the total cost is the
subject-analysis-and-description-part? Big decisions need to be driven
by data instead of by anecdote (or the giddy thrill of saying something
Really Subversive).
It's certainly possible that a good portion of these costs could be
lessened with better tools. Indeed, Dorothea Salo recently
(http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/archives/2007/04/24/irgrunt/) described
looking in her catalog and finding that no two copies of Eugene Onegin
had the same headings:
"This isn't a cataloguer problem. It's a tools-and-processes
problem. Cataloguing
tools should have heuristics for recognizing a new translation
of Eugene Onegin and
pulling up the other records for such translations. Subject
assignment at that point should
be point-and-click, accept what's already in the catalogue
(with, of course, an option to add
new subjects if truly necessary-which I can't imagine it is
terribly often!)."
Again, this stuff isn't rocket science -- just missed opportunities. It
is to be hoped that as more librarians start building their own tools
(just as with catalog discovery layers) that we'll see some progress on
this front.
As for the second question, I really have no idea. We're currently in
a situation (as much by historical accident as anything else) where LC
is not merely the library for a very special constituency, but the
de-facto national library as well. I imagine that riding herd over LCSH
*is* expensive, and that to least some folks over there it looks like
something of an unfunded mandate. Maybe we *do* need to start planning
for a future where they just don't want to (or feel they can afford to)
do it anymore.
The problem for an LCSH sans LC is that controlled vocabularies have to
be *controlled* somehow. Theoretical rigor with regards to
broader/narrower/related headings would be nice as well, but at
*minimum* there needs to be a set of agreed upon terms. Otherwise the
whole notion of collocation falls apart.
Do we invest The Power in a new authority (OCLC?, LibraryThing?) or do
we attempt to decentralize? What would a radically decentralized
Controlled Vocabulary look like in theoretical terms? (no, tag-clouds
don't count) Are there any current examples we could look at for ideas?
Ed Sperr
Digital Services Consultant
NELINET, Inc.
153 Cordaville Rd. Suite 200 Southborough, MA
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Received on Thu May 24 2007 - 07:50:18 EDT