Ross:
"Our landscape is shifting rapidly and our 'sophisticated research
tools' don't even have any capacity to compensate for new (or even
not-so-new) avenues of scholarly communication. In this context, how is
Mann's thesis about LCSH anything more than pedantic whistling past the
graveyard?" (end)
The big point that Mann makes is that cataloging should concentrate
primarily on "the book as a whole" since "we now have many alternative
ways to get down to table-of-contents and even more granular keyword
levels." He simply contends that the latter are no substitute for the
former, and insists that we need both. After all, "the simple scanning
of full texts (which provides the granular access) fails miserably in
enabling researchers to find whole books on their topics--the 'wholes'
get buried in retrievals that are much _too_ granular."
Mann also has contended that excellent web sites could - and should - be
cataloged using pre-coordinated strings and set in the context of
greater browse displays, which again, allow people to see "the whole
elephant". There is no reason this could not occur with excellent blogs
as well - again, this is not an either or: there is granular searching
and "scope match" searching.
Of course, given our cultural tendency to mercilessly (and
thoughtlessly?) to break up everything into particulars, separating it
from its greater contexts, such actions are hardly surprising.
But do people really think this is advisable?
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 Ross Singer
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2007 9:41 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Hot (MARC) metadata!
On 8/7/07, Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> The view on not only education but *how* people these days learn and
> use their education certainly has for me changed the way I develop
> systems. No more databases, search engines and browsing subject
> headings ; I want to tap into more human knowledge, and for that
> there's blogs, comments, podcasts and the *content* of books. So. What
> do we do next?
I was just thinking about this yesterday. The core dialog, criticism
and development of the scholarly record has shifted from letters to
the editor and counterpoint articles to blogs, wikis, mailing lists
and other arenas. What are libraries doing to position themselves to
capture these trails? Who is aggregating and preserving these
thoughts (besides, to a degree, the Internet Archive)?
Our landscape is shifting rapidly and our 'sophisticated research
tools' don't even have any capacity to compensate for new (or even
not-so-new) avenues of scholarly communication. In this context, how
is Mann's thesis about LCSH anything more than pedantic whistling past
the graveyard?
-Ross.
Received on Tue Aug 07 2007 - 08:51:25 EDT