On Aug 21, 2007, at 7:16 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
> 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.
Hear hear! Thank you Karen for saying what I've been crying about
ever since I volunteered to play with MARC data inside a search
engine*. The data I've seen is pretty rough to work with almost
across the board, with typos, duplication, inconsistencies, and
exceptions.
> OK, got *that* out of my system ;-)
:)
Erik
* http://blacklight.betech.virginia.edu
Received on Tue Aug 21 2007 - 18:05:37 EDT