Jonathan,
Sorry for another delayed response. But I think no one else followed up
on this particular topic (or at least re line). I appreciate your
impassioned statement about middle ground in this debate: you believe
our metadata environment "is seriously and fundamentally broken in
several ways" while not arguing that we should "get rid of everything
we've got."
Would you give a quick overview for non-software people like me of which
ways you think it is "fundamentally broken"? I think that would help
some of us put these debates in perspective.
You wrote:
"But continuing to insist that everything is Just Fine and /not/ really
broken (and that anyone who disagrees must be malignant, idiotic, or
both), does not help. I think it's the surest path to the continued
decimation of cataloging."
That's an interesting comment. You may be right, but it strikes me that
this assumes that the library community is incapable of coming to a
recognition of the value of the systems we have now (as argued by T.
Mann), and that therefore, any decisions library managers (and by
extension, politicians) of the future make will be strictly based on
software/computer considerations. No one with any power over the matter
will be influenced by positions like Mann's. Why not?
To go back to my NASA analogy (in my Sunday posting), isn't that
something like saying, "continuing to insist that capsules work just
fine for manned space travel does not help. The space shuttle is the
wave of the future, and refusing to put our resources into it is the
surest path to the continued decimation of the space program."
Now, once again, I'm speaking as someone who is not a specialist in this
field: I'm not an astronautical engineer. I wouldn't want to claim that
the space shuttle was necessarily a mistake, although if we'd never
tried it, we would apparently have saved quite a few lives (the
Challenger disaster in '86 and that other one a few years ago). And I
realize that the space shuttle wasn't designed for interplanetary travel
anyway (a big disappointment to me when some more knowledgeable person
explained it back in the 80's). But the point is, when the space shuttle
came out, it was a lot "sexier" than the old-fashioned 1960's capsule. I
remember how excited I was by the first flight. It was especially
amazing that it was basically a "glider" that just "fell" back to earth
after its mission, and there were computers that could calculate exactly
which way it needed to "fall." What an awesome example of human
ingenuity! But of course now, as that Popular Mechanics piece shows,
NASA has given it up as too dangerous and is designing new capsules for
the moon and Mars. I bet there was someone in NASA in the 70's who, like
Mann, had doubts about its safety.
So the point is, could you be overestimating the importance of
technology? A lot of people on this list have probably seen this 1947
recruitment video for librarianship:
http://www.archive.org/stream/Libraria1947/Libraria1947_256kb.mp4
I've noticed that people I got it from generally either treated it as a
joke or were somewhat embarrassed by it. But I think it's still a pretty
decent picture of what librarianship is like today. It's nothing to be
ashamed of.
--Ted Gemberling
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2007 4:53 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [NGC4LIB] The Situation We're In (was Re: [NGC4LIB] Authority
maintenance )
My unsolicited manifesto...
I think our current metadata environment is seriously and fundamentally
broken in several ways.
I do NOT think the solution lies in getting rid of everything we've got,
or in nothing but machine-analysis of full text. I think the solution
requires continual engagement by metadata professionals, which will be
continually needed. We will always need catalogers---that is, metadata
professionals involved in the generation and maintenance of metadata.
Because that's what catalogers are and have always been.More...
For some reason, in much of the professional discussion of 'cataloging
modernization' certain 'traditionalists' seem unwilling to recognize the
possibility of such an honest position. They seem to believe that anyone
who thinks things are seriously broken /must /really be motivated by
those who think computers can do everything, those who, in recent words
spoken on one listserv, "don't want to spend money on doing cataloguing
properly and neophiliacs obsessed with Google, Amazon, etc. without
considering what the implications of abandoning controlled vocabularies,
complicated frameworks standards (MARC), and international standards
(ISBD, etc.) might be in the real world."
That group of people may exist. But that's not me, and that's not
everyone who thinks our current environment is fundamentally broken. I
think abandoning control in a mis-guided effort to save money would be
disastrous. And I'm not alone, I see many people in many professional
forums sharing my perspective. Our current environment is fundamentally
broken, and the solution lies only in professional attention to
metadata, to apply better, smarter control of metadata. Not to give up
controlled metadata.
Now, this defensiveness, this insistence that anyone who thinks things
right now are fundamentally broken must not be seriously concered with
meeting the needs of users for information access--or must be seriously
deluded about how that can be done--is, someone remarked to me,
recently, perhaps evidence of a "certain bunker metality due to the
serious trend of deprofessionalizing cataloging and reducing cataloging
staff."
This is a good point, and this is a tragedy. The deprofessionalization
of cataloging and decimation of cataloging staff is exactly the wrong
direction, /when we are facing serious problems that can only be solved
by a collective effort from a community of metadata professionals/. We
need to strengthen that community within the library world, not decimate
it. This is a tragedy /because/ our current environment is so broken.
But continuing to insist that everything is Just Fine and /not/ really
broken (and that anyone who disagrees must be malignant, idiotic, or
both), does not help, I think it's the surest path to the continued
decimation of cataloging. Because if THIS, what we have now, is the best
we can do for the money being spent on it--then indeed it is not an
efficient use of resources, and may not be justifiable. But it's not the
best we can do. Solutions to the serious problems we are facing will
take /serious change/, which can in fact /only/ come with the
strengthening of a professional cataloging and metadata community within
libraries.
When people read my comments as exhibiting "little value given to new
entrants [to the field of cataloging] or to cataloging itself", or "the
idea that computers and full texts will solve all the problems" I am
saddened, because it couldn't be further from the truth.
Received on Tue May 29 2007 - 17:35:25 EDT