David wrote:
And if Sirsi and whoever supplies LC's catalog cannot use the
information
contained in the records or the structure that links them, that is not a
problem with the data. It is a problem with the inability or
unwillingness
of the vendors to design adequate software.
It seems to me that every problem Karen Coyle and others point out in
the
data is not really a data problem. It is an implementation problem. For
everything that we expect a catalog to do, there is probably some
vendor's
product that can do it. But no vendor has bothered to figure out how to
do
it all. Solve that problem, and most of rest of the stuff we're talking
about goes away.
-------------
LC use Voyager, and I agree, there are better implementations out there.
However, I think we shouldn't be too quick to write off Karen's and
others concerns here. As I think her examples in the last email showed,
these problems have significant impact at a system level. These factors
make it more difficult (and expensive) to develop (good) library
systems.
Received on Wed Aug 22 2007 - 09:06:26 EDT