Karen's suggestion sort of vaguely reminds me of the Librarians' Index to the Internet.
"K.G. Schneider" <kgs_at_bluehighways.com> wrote: > How expensive could it be? I mean, even Google's moon-shot scanning
> project is relatively cheap compared to all the library money out
> there. Adding LCSHs is surely a tiny fraction of that cost, and
> there's the added incentive that most of the sunk value in LCSH
> *vanishes* if the system stops growing or new books don't get LCSHs.
>
> Maybe LCSH is somehow sapping librarians' will. Killing it would spur
> innovation. Calhoun's report suggests as much with regard to automatic
> cataloging (a pipe dream if you ask me). But dollar-for-dollar, can
> LCSH *really* be a net loss?
Early on, once upon a Web, I naively proposed that if we pooled our efforts,
we librarians *could* catalog the Web. I asked, what would it take, 100
librarians working on it full-time? or even 300? Compared to the body
strength of the Googleplex, and I have been there, it would still be a lean
operation, and let's face it, as a labor force, librarians are a bargain.
I still don't think I'm half-off, but it would take organization,
commitment, and internal discipline... sort of a human cluster computing
effort... and possibly a commitment to a good product as opposed to a few
"perfect" records. Of that Team of 100, you couldn't have people whose
output was four records a day, or who wanted to spend a long, long time
deciding subject A was more important than subject B, or who spent half
their time in meetings about the appropriate application of some tertiary
division. These librarians would have to be humpin' their way through the
Web.
And they'd need to be friendly to the whole FRBR/RDF/DC/Semantic-Webby way
of looking at things, too... and be willing to take some direction from
people outside librarianship. There is a difference between assuming
controlled vocabulary is useful and committing to a subject heading
framework that was never designed for the Web or for that matter for
discovery.
If we didn't have so much wasted duplication and misdirection of effort and
feudalism in our profession, the Web would be ours.
K.G. Schneider
kgs_at_bluehighways.com
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Received on Thu May 24 2007 - 16:07:56 EDT