"...we should accept that, as Madea writes, "some things can never be
made simple." We need to understand that our users will find some of our
resources complex, and there may not be much we can do to design that
complexity away. In such cases we may explore user education as a device
for helping the user to overcome complexity. Accepting the inherent
complexity of the research process and its associated resources may help
us to stop debating whether we should simplify and how to simplify.
Instead we should focus our efforts on the things we can do to design
some simplicity, and stop wasting time on that which will never be made
simple and instead focus our efforts on user education."
From http://tinyurl.com/3bx9js
How do you decide when this applies? Does it? When we speak of
catalogs, can you make something so simple its value is lost?
Nathan Rinne
Media Cataloging Technician
ISD 279 - Educational Service Center (ESC)
11200 93rd Ave. North
Maple Grove, MN. 55369
Work phone: 763-391-7183
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Rinne, Nathan (ESC)
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 10:46 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Hot (MARC) metadata!
Hello all,
I am amazed at the evident impasse here. I do not understand the
"either-or" mentality here. I personally do not understand how Eric can
say everything that he says and still think that librarianship, library
cataloging, library catalogues, can survive. In my mind, he
inadvertently empties out the content of the profession, more or less
making it irrelevant (please read: http://slc.bc.ca/response.htm)
I hope everyone is willing to suffer my getting philosophical again.
I posted the following on AUTOCAT the other day, and it sums up what I
think is the true value and contribution of librarianship (Yee: " human
intervention for the organization of information, commonly known as
cataloging")
"Everyone is so big on "conversation" these days: Conversation is
knowledge, etc. (I think "content", in some sense, too). Admittedly, I
think blogs for instance, are great, even as they admittedly can give us
just another way of avoiding the "on the ground", "face-to-face"
realities we physically encounter. And of course, I don't deny that in
all of this participating, dialoging, conversing, etc. there is "love"
and "community" to be found online (see Clay Shirkey here:
http://tinyurl.com/2em6zs ), in some sense, but it seems to me that love
is *especially willing* to engage in difficult and substantial
conversations surrounding practical, on the ground realities (not
displacing the need for theories!) - something I do not sense is
happening in the area of vocabulary control for instance (do some in the
library / library cataloging world think this is going to mysteriously
happen "on the fly", "as we go", etc.? [like Wikipedia] - are there more
concrete reasons [besides faith] for thinking these things will be
effectively taken care of that I am not aware of?)
Now - and I am getting to the point - it seems to me that it is not only
an act of love to pay close and careful attention (being like a
collector who finds things to be interesting and unique) to specific
items as well as the broader [again: unique and interesting] contexts
that we, as catalogers deal with. It is also love when librarians
*explicitly recognize the need* to call something out there in our
shared world *these words and not other words - this form and not other
forms* for the sake of common understanding (we may not totally agree
with everything, but...) - because we ultimately want to not only be
able to recognize others, but to be involved with them - and to
hopefully accomplish great work with them. This is what catalogers do
as they carefully and lovingly examine and describe items in their
larger contexts for the sake of making things findable through words
that the wider community can recognize and identify with (not always
their first picks, but we try to fix that to by working together). Clay
Shirkey may call what we do "imposing your words, classifications,
taxonomies on me" (i.e. power, domination, see his article "Ontology is
Overrated" for more) and look for love in other places, but I would
appeal to him to recognize that if that is indeed the case to some
extent, there is also great love mixed in here as well. Now - if we in
the larger library community don't see the importance of the hard work
of doing this among ourselves - and this is where the lack of emphasis
on cataloging in our profession comes in - how will we find good,
effective cooperation (hopefully for the common good) with the other
metadata communities?
Or does anyone think all of this can be taken care of by making all our
authority records web-pages (URIs), or something like that? I am
interested to hear more about how this might work, practically speaking?
Anyone want to tackle that (start new thread :) )? (end quote from
AUTOCAT)
Regards,
Nathan Rinne
Media Cataloging Technician
ISD 279 - Educational Service Center (ESC)
11200 93rd Ave. North
Maple Grove, MN. 55369
Work phone: 763-391-7183
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 10:16 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Hot (MARC) metadata!
On Jul 31, 2007, at 10:33 AM, Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
> We are not in direct competition with the "world at large", it is
> rather the stuff we have on offer that makes the biggest difference...
>
> Success, however, depends a lot on the search interface and what
> use it
> makes of the metadata, how consistent it is, and how well it is
> presented...
I don't necessarily agree. There is a lot of competition, and in
general the world thinks library searching is difficult and arcane.
Furthermore, the stuff we have to offer is minimal. True, libraries
have a lot of content, we license a lot of content as well, but this
content is not described very well in our indexes. The content is
meager. A title. A note that says, "Includes index." and a number of
controlled vocabulary terms that to not relate to people's way of
thinking. What is required is digitizing of content and full-text
indexing. Moreover, libraries are not about books. They are about
data, information, and knowledge. Books are just some of the
containers of such things. Even more, the problem is not about search
interfaces. The problems revolving around indexes and ways to search
them have been solved by the IR community for about a decade. The
problems now revolve around what we do with search results.
The ideas behind "next generation" library catalogs have little to do
with cataloging and more to do with services provided against content
in our collections.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
University Libraries of Notre Dame
(574) 631-8604
Received on Tue Jul 31 2007 - 12:43:36 EDT