Jan Szczepanski wrote:
> If we will try to resolve the "fundamental purpose of the catalogue"
> it will take thousands of year. It's the same time of question as
> "what is the fundamental purpose of life, or God, or anything".
>
> In the meantime we should continue the search for the holy grail.
>
> We are living in new times, with Internet, Google, electronic
> resources, databases. The biggest changes since Gutenberg
> and we have to find a way to survive in cyberspace and not
> just the fundamental catalog but also as libraries.
Most of the people who looked for the Holy Grail did not come to a very good end. I'm all for experimenting in all kinds of ways, but these attempts will remain experiments that must be evaluated by others. Certainly the catalog will change and is changing as we speak, but at what point will it cease to be a catalog anymore? That is, a "A comprehensive list of the books, periodicals, maps, and other materials in a given collection, arranged in systematic order to facilitate retrieval (usually alphabetically by author, title, and/or subject)." From ODLIS (http://lu.com/odlis/odlis_c.cfm). Already this definition is dated, since it has long provided non-alphabetic access. And even leaving the alphabetical part out, search engines are not catalogs by this definition.
I think the question should be more specific, such as: should the catalog continue to provide traditional means of access and description while it provides new functionality, or are the traditional means now obsolete? This would probably show the fault lines rather clearly.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Fri Sep 07 2007 - 08:09:46 EDT