On 8/1/07, Rinne, Nathan (ESC) <RinneN_at_district279.org> wrote:
> I personally do not understand how Eric can
> say everything that he says and still think that librarianship, library
> cataloging, library catalogues, can survive.
Ok, so as the devils advocate ; *why* should it [the library] survive?
With all these technologies and possibilities, what do the human
librarian add to the future of knowledge management?
> 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)
What if you are irrelevant? Seriously, what if all you learnt at
library school don't fit the following two future directions ; 1)
there's going to be *seriously* more information available, much more
than any human or human-maintained system can keep up with, and 2)
computers, software and algorithms are going to be increasingly clever
at finding, cataloging and deliver stuff.
The interesting part here is that I originally posted the "Hot
metadata" posting to see what in our metadata we can use in more
clever ways in so to create a better model for knowledge management
(well, knowledge representation, really). What is our killer metadata
which makes our stuff rock? Is it our millions of subject headings in
a somewhat coherent system that's best to analyze?
Here's what I'm doing ; I'm creating huge Topic Maps of generic
subject headings using frequently used subject headings (where
"frequent" is up to the analysis to determine) in conjunction with a)
the WikiPedia corpus (heavy extract of categories and analyzed "is_a"
relationships), b) a humongous thesaurus (Australian Picture) and c)
other library metadata. It's this c) part which interests me in this
discussion; what can be used to boost the already tested and tried
(http://ll01.nla.gov.au/) subject headings clustering?
In other words; what is our hot metadata which we feel really
describes our stuff? Because, frankly, I'm with Eric when he says that
there is a lot of competition out there, and I also agree with "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." Where is the beef? In the future we cannot rely on
librarians heads and physical presence when doing our thing (unless
you're a small library with only so many books available).
> I hope everyone is willing to suffer my getting philosophical again.
Some of us even love to suffer, so shoot. :)
> [...] 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.
Ah, you see, I came to work for the library for the love of these very
things; I wanted to create systems that brought our info corpus
closer, better, faster and more elegantly to our users and, perhaps
equally important, to myself. So, in essence, we're both in it for the
love. I think, in fact, most of us are.
> 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).
Um. Yes. So. What are those words, and where do you put them? Metadata
in records? Guides? Databases? Memory? Where do these carefully and
lovingly created words go? And, in what format are they? Are they
reusable? To whom? For what?
> 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.
Shirkey is not wrong, you know; we *are* imposing words,
classification and taxonomies on anyone who cares for them. And, the
clinch here might be that no one cares for them as much as we do. So,
for us they are great tools, but for normal sane people they can be a
huge constraint.
We know this already; we now try to build systems that *use* our tools
without needing knowledge of them to use those systems. This is my
quest as well. I don't think we and Shirkey are right or wrong or even
in opposition; we are all seeing the problem from different
perspectives.
> 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?
The library sector currently is on a path to doom simply because we
don't have good enough cataloging tools. Our backend systems are
extremely bad at all the things that works miracles in social
engineering and WikiPedia. And because we traditionally don't have any
means of fixing those tools (locked in to vendors who don't understand
the importance some of us think cataloging is), we try to fix the
problem in the front-end where we at least have some access and
open-source tools; the world is joint in the finding mission, but not
so in the cataloging one.
> 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 :) )?
We need more social engineering in our systems, both front and back,
where catalogers and librarians are given perhaps some special powers
to lift the collection value. it's fully doable, but of course not
with the current lineup of vendor tools.
Tools that help us catalog better ; that's what you need to attack,
not the progress of technology, the growth of human knowledge corpus,
nor those who recognize that human-maintained systems are on the path
to doom and destruction for the library profession.
regards,
Alex
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Received on Wed Aug 01 2007 - 01:52:49 EDT