Weinheimer Jim wrote:
> When I see widely cited articles on the web about how bad catalogs are, many of them written by librarians, plus the decimation of traditional bibliographic agencies around the world, I think that the situation has reached the critical point. I certainly know the negative sides of a catalog, but people must begin to understand that the problems they find with the catalog are with the *catalog* as a whole, and not with the individual *records* themselves. Traditional library catalogs certainly are obsolete, but not the records within them.
I'm going to take mild exception to the above statement. I agree that we
have a lot of "good" data -- relatively uniform, based on known rules,
coded at a fair degree of granularity. But there are definitely some
problems with the data in our current environment. As an example, one
thing that we have all over others is our use of controlled vocabularies
and authoritative forms of names. But our authority data is designed to
aid the *creation* of authoritative forms, not the use of those forms in
a system. The LCSH authority records are virtually useless (ok, maybe I
exaggerate) because they are based on instructions for catalogers and
don't include the authoritative headings nor the proper references for
an online catalog. I think that if we were to re-design our data with
systems in mind, rather than basing our data on the cataloging rules,
then we could greatly improve the catalog itself.
In essence, we've broken one of the very basic rules of systems design:
you are supposed to decide first what you want your system to do and
what outputs you want *before* you design your input record. We had the
input record long before there were systems, and we're still trying to
hobble along with an inappropriate data structure.
OK, got *that* out of my system ;-)
kc
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Tue Aug 21 2007 - 16:55:39 EDT