Erin S. Stalberg wrote:
> for the first time. Under the current OCLC Enhance Sharing paradigm,
> upgrading records in Enhance is double-the-work. If we could fix the
> record locally and push-button send it to OCLC, we'd shard our upgrades
> happily.
Exactly. This is the kind of technical infrastructure we need.
Precisely. If not from OCLC, than from someone else. And indeed, ideally
from lots of institutions and 'utilities' providing infrastructure at
once, in concert, that works cooperatively with each other.
Jonathan
> I want our edits to benefit the larger community, I'm all
> about the greater good, but I'm less willing (a lot less willing) to
> slow down our workflow to do double-the-work in OCLC. To me, that is an
> explicit cost. It's no longer about freely sharing our edits, it's now
> about adding cost into the process. If we continue to maintain local
> stores of records ('tis the question), we need a whole new model for
> cooperative enhancement.
>
> Diane Hillman wrote:
>> It is certainly very expensive if the only way you think about
>> "touch" is our old one-at-a-time way of doing things. However, there
>> are other ways to approach the problem. There are automated methods
>> to add or change or "enhance" information that we have not taken much
>> advantage of in the past. Some of these methods have been used by
>> OCLC and (formerly) RLG as they worked with the data, others are
>> being developed outside of the 'mainstream' distribution channels of
>> traditional libraries.
>
> There are a few assumptions built into your logic here that, in my
> opinion, need light. There was a bit of discussion at the FoBC the
> other day about these discussions not being about "reducing" costs, but
> rather about "shifting" costs. Get the publishers more involved at the
> beginning of the supply chain (shift cost to the publishers), get OCLC
> to pick up more slack, get authors (photographers, in the National
> Geographic Society example) to submit metadata, etc. While I actually
> very strongly agree that we need to push descriptive cataloging to the
> beginning of the supply chain and that we should enhance records over
> time, and while we at UVA have been a long proponent of "the perfect is
> the enemy of the good" in creating cataloging records, the kinds of
> tools that are needed to enhance records in an automated way over time
> COST MONEY. Either in software costs or, open-source, in development
> costs. And since most of our ILS systems don't provide adequate support
> in the environment we currently live in, for catalogers down in the
> trenches it is really hard to envision a time when our vendors will
> provide adequate support for mass data manipulation. Not that we don't
> want it, it's just hard to really see it happen in the economic
> marketplace in which we currently find ourselves. OCLC (as usual) is an
> interesting example here. They obviously have high-end sophisticated
> tools for data manipulation. They've never shared them with the rest of
> us. They have highly trained staff that do sophisticated processing of
> large quantities of data. Yes, we can rethink the Enhance model, but is
> it feasible that they would consider mass data manipulation to also be a
> "cooperative" task? If we had good tools, it would be much easier to
> imagine a time when we could dump in mass quantities of more
> minimal/inadequate/provisional (we do this all the time for acquisitions
> order records) and enhance/enrich/correct them later programmatically or
> manually as necessary. But, even in my smaller context, I want my
> cataloging staff to be able to enhance/enrich/correct data in mass (just
> on a UVA scale) and getting resources put towards tools that would
> facilitate that is very very difficult. It's not cheaper, it's just a
> way of shifting cost. I agree that this is where we need to go, but I
> think we do need to say out loud that this *also* will cost a chunk of
> change.
>
> Message too long, thanks for reading!
>
> Erin Stalberg
> Head, Cataloging Services
> Chair, Metadata Steering Group
> University of Virginia Library
> stalberg_at_virginia.edu
> (434) 982.2854
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Thu Jul 12 2007 - 10:10:20 EDT