Karen Coyle wrote:
> Well, you seem to be in a minority. I would advise looking at the
> day-long meeting about this topic that I posted above. Plus cost came up
> at the other two FoBC meetings (although the webcast of the first one
> isn't available). There seem to be a lot of folks for whom the costs of
> cataloging are a big concern.
Thank you for the link to the latest FoBC meeting. I hadn't seen it. I don't agree with some of the figures, e.g. the $150--$200 dollars for a bibliographic record. I cataloged Slavic language materials for many years, and rarely did I spend over 1/2 hour on any bibliographic record. Perhaps I would for continuations, e.g. if I had a 25 volume bookset coming out in fascicles, but normally not. Creating the authority records often could take quite a bit of time, but I consider this a separate task since authority records do not relate only to a single bibliographic record.
I guess I didn't make my opinions clear before about the costs of cataloging, but yes, I am decidedly in a minority. Costs of cataloging are a concern, but should not be the over-arching concern. The way I look at it, if we can make the case for the need for high-quality, consistent metadata, then the money will be found. The problem then turns into how to create these high-quality metadata records in the most efficient and cost-saving way possible, which I think is an extremely interesting problem. On the other hand, if we can't make a case for the need for high-quality, consistent metadata, then cost-savings are more-or-less irrelevant because nobody will want our product at any price, and cataloging as we have known it will continue to wither away. This is the reality of the situation today, at least as I see it.
I do not believe we have made a case for the need of high-quality metadata, at least so that the decision-makers can understand, i.e. the people who make the decisions for funding normally are not librarians and are often surprised at the very idea, much less the need, of, e.g. authority control. I have also seen many highly-placed librarians who do not see the need to continue something they consider to be obsolete. Even the term "high-quality record" is exceedingly difficult for most to understand, since people's experience is that it is easy to find materials through Google searches, while a catalog is much more difficult to search and they get worse results. Therefore, how can librarians have to gall to claim that their records are "high-quality"? (Of course, this perception is wrong, but takes time to demonstrate) The library community, and especially the cataloging community, have dropped the ball on this and it will be very difficult to pick it up again.
Of course, I think there is a need for high-quality metadata, and if others agree, then we can look for ways to make metadata records more efficiently. In the macro-world of metadata (which we must always focus on now), there are many, many people creating all types of metadata records. With XML, this metadata can interoperate if people want it to--systems are no longer a problem. This is a revolutionary change.
So, we must ask: do we want all these metadata records to interoperate? For that to happen, current workflows and even institutional boundaries may change a lot. With electronic resources, everyone is looking quite literally "at the same item" and re-cataloging it in each institution makes no sense at all. Cooperative workflows begin to make sense.
How can I take a record made by, e.g. Bernhard in German, and place it most efficiently in my catalog, or at least let my users search for it easily and correctly? Do I have to pretend his record doesn't exist and re-do it from scratch? That's the way it was in the 19th century before any cooperation at all! What if the record is a non-ISBD record? How about other types of metadata, e.g. statistical and geographic? How could we interoperate with it efficiently? I think our users would love this. Again, the systems problems have been solved, but the intellectual problem of i
nformation retrieval has not: consistent forms of names, titles and subjects (whether these are textual forms or identifiers is beside the point here).
I think everyone in the macro-metadata community is facing the same problems, and therefore there may be a chance genuinely to cooperate. It would mean fundamental change for everyone, and a lot of people don't want that kind of change, but what we would create would reflect the world more correctly: as all sorts of materials become more and more easily available, the local collection becomes less important, but the virtually shared collection becomes more important.
But first we have to make the case that there is a need for high-quality metadata, and with current catalogs, which are really nothing more than upgraded card catalogs, inheriting many of their problems, it is unfortunately very difficult to demonstrate the power of our records.
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
Rome, Italy
Received on Mon Aug 27 2007 - 04:14:52 EDT