Karen Coyle wrote:
>
> ... What is broken is that
> librarians today are not using the best tool for the job. Upgrading to
> the appropriate modern tool will serve to integrate libraries with the
> rest of modern information services and sources.
And what *is* the "best tool for the job"?
Sorry, Karen, but in all the rest of your posting you fail to tell us
that.
> Beyond that we also need to embrace incoming data and resources that
> differ from library standards so that we can be seen as a source of all
> information, not just "library" information.
>
That means there cannot be the one "best tool".
It is a sober fact that an enormous amount of software and thus a
lot of our business depends on MARC as it is. This can only change
at enormous cost.
Communication with the outside world does not require us to move
away from MARC or *them* to embrace it. We need to be able to
deliver data in XML and DC when and where there is a need, and accept
data thus coded. This is possible while sticking with MARC for
everything else. Although it certainly isn't the best conceivable tool
for much of what we are doing.
So, it isn't the tools we should be spending time on now but the content
of our data. Which is what RDA development is about, and the new
commitment to an alliance with the DC movement and toward international
interoperability may well be the only realistic chance at the moment to
get things going on the large scale.
Unless, of course, some sort of grass roots development like some
authority wiki should emerge and prove to be vastly better than what
we are used to. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, the OCLC-Google
alliance improve their coverage and functionality much further as well
as get the attention of a critical mass of end-users.
If any of this happens, it might render RDA/DC marginal! Not, however,
the necessity of our being able to communicate in XML and the protocols
of the Web.
B. Eversberg
Received on Wed May 30 2007 - 03:06:59 EDT