Eric Lease Morgan said:
"The scope of the discussion needs to be widened."
I agree 110%. While all of the discussion about catalogs, cataloging, and catalogers is very interesting, the scope of discussion needs to be broadened. If we devote the bulk of our time to talking about improving access to books are we by default ceding the improvement of access to other types of materials to the Googles of the world?
Bernie Sloan
Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan_at_ND.EDU> wrote:
On Aug 7, 2007, at 10:40 AM, Ross Singer 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?
I concur with these ideas.
There is so much more content available than is manifested in books.
Our library "catalogs" (and I am beginning to regret called this a
"next generation 'catalog'" list) need to pointer to a greater degree
to things in addition to books and serials. There are blogs,
websites, data sets, images, sounds, discussion forums, computer
programs, podcasts. The time and effort that goes into describing
books and serials also need to go into the the description of other
content types. There is more to "catalogs" than the process of
cataloging. There is also to be discussed the content of catalogs and
the services, beyond search & discovery, that they provide.
The scope of the discussion needs to be widened.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
University Libraries of Notre Dame
(574) 631-8604
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Received on Tue Aug 07 2007 - 10:06:12 EDT