On Jan 6, 2008 1:56 AM, B.G. Sloan <bgsloan2_at_yahoo.com> > Curious
comment. You mean you can't possibly contribute to making better
systems unless you're actively writing code?
I think here Casey is referring to the fact that every time a
technologist scrutinize the meta data we've got she finds it almost
unusable, that that pillar of library technology we are promised are
so much better than everybody else's, really, when it comes down to
it, are less than ideal.
In fact, our trust in things like author, title, subject, the LCSH and
our many, many bits of meta data is so deceiving. So, unless you're a
technologist / developer that's tried to actually use this meta data
for more than author, title, subject, the trust in the meta data is
throwing bricks through the window of opportunity. Librarians tend to
think we can do so much with it easily, which is a huge mistake.
(In fact, I've hinted over the years that for us to have any success
in the future we need to collectively, on a global scale, clean up our
whole MARC meta data corpus, to make it somewhat normalized, free from
traditions (unless embedded in rules), fewer rules and fewer
guidelines, no visual markup, kill national exceptions (by embedding
things in a common ruleset), better typed data (especially for date
and date-ranges; one standard only), and a healthy dose of daring to
delete duplicates in a more FRBR fashion. But who's willing to take on
the single most important task the library world could ever do?
LibraryThing? :)
Alex
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
------------------------------------------ http://shelter.nu/blog/ --------
Received on Sat Jan 05 2008 - 15:08:23 EST