Jason Griffey wrote:
|I'm imagining this sort of workflow:
|*****
|Library A buys new book, and goes to put it into circulation
|Entering into their circ system (a whole other conversation what that
|should look like), their system says "How should I LCSH/tag/classify
|this?" and then browses other systems chosen by the library...could be
|3 or 4 other libraries of similar size, one really huge academic
|library, LibraryThing and Random Database #4...the systems themselves
|don't really matter, and can be swapped around at whim.
|The local system builds a classification using the above query, along
|with de-duping rules and such.
|*****
|Or perhaps I'm missing something. :-) Which is often possible when I'm
|out of my depth.
As I see it, that "game" only works if one or more libraries *don't*
play the "game". The assumption is that at least one library assigns
LCSH/tags/etc. that other libraries can suck up into their own catalogs
and/or systems.
That game is actually played right now--I call it the "OCLC Waiting
Game". When a library gets something new, they check OCLC. If it's not
in OCLC yet, rather than do original cataloging, they *wait*, say, 2
weeks and then search again to see if anyone else has done it yet. If
it's still not there, they wait some more, and so on, and so on.
Hearsay has it that some libraries wait up to 6 months or more before
finally "biting the bullet" and undertaking to do original cataloging.
I'm sure that most, if not virtually all, OCLC libraries do this to some
extent for cost saving--after all, that's the benefit of cooperative
cataloging. In any case, the temptation in any cooperative effort is to
"let the other guy do it".
Similar to John Galt's attitude in "Atlas shrugged", what happens if
"the other guy" decided to stop doing it and just went along with the
"game" instead? I'm seeing lots of wonderful dreaming of cooperative
ventures in recent posts, but human nature always has its darker side.
What are the *different* incentives (I mean different from what
catalogers and such have now) that will keep any of these dreams from
dying a quick death? In other words, it's great for dreamers to dream,
but who's going to do the new grunt work, and why? Catalogers are being
outsourced and farmed out to pasture with little value given to new
entrants or to cataloging itself (as often evidenced in this list), so
that source of labor is questionable for the future. Without guidelines
and some sort of enforcing mechanism (formal or informal), "let everyone
do it" just isn't going to cut it if you want any kind of quality or
consistency. So how is the new game supposed to be played?
Harvey
--
===========================================
Harvey E. Hahn, Manager, Technical Services Department
Arlington Heights (Illinois) Memorial Library
847/506-2644 - FX: 847/506-2650 - Email: hhahn(at)ahml(dot)info
OML & Scripts web pages: http://www.ahml.info/oml/
Personal web pages: http://users.anet.com/~packrat
Received on Thu May 24 2007 - 14:50:48 EDT