While I believe in understanding and cooperation, I agree with Karen when
she says we must stand up and declare something to be wrong. Again, I am
absolutely *not* pointing fingers at Perry or U Michigan, who I think have
done a fabulous job and they all deserve our thanks, but these other
agreements must be looked at with some skepticism.
Giving such abbreviated catalog records certainly does not help our users
much, and much less than it could, while it makes a mockery of our pleadings
to others to share, share, share your metadata. But from another point of
view, I believe this provides an excellent example of just how controversial
this "sharing" can be.
I think it's similar to the open-source movement. One side wants things to
be open and share, while the other side wants it controlled and protected. I
always thought libraries should be on the open side of the argument.
Also, as we all know, cataloging is under attack both with trying to justify
practices that many consider to be obsolete in the era of
Google/Yahoo/page/relevancy ranking, plus the much tighter budgets we are
all facing. I have always believed that with the innovations possible in
computer technology, library cataloging can be far more powerful and useful
to our users than it has ever been before. Searching materials with the
present full-text search tools in Google Books is demonstrably terrible and
I was really hoping that this would be one place to show to our users
exactly how powerful our tools can be if given the chance.
But we may not be given the chance. Unfortunate.
Again, let me emphasize that I am merely bemoaning the mercurial hand of
fate, and I am not blaming anyone or any institution.
Jim
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 327
fax-011 39 06 58330992
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan
> Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 3:06 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Mutilation of library data
>
> On May 28, 2008, at 8:53 AM, Willett, Perry wrote:
>
> > ...and that while the
> > records we currently share are certainly not optimal, libraries are at
> > least able to use them to link to records already in their local
> > catalogs, ie do something useful with them.
>
> Perry outlines something I advocate too. While the records are not
> robust, a library could:
>
> 1. Download the MBooks metadata
> 2. Loop through each record extracting a key, say an OCLC number
> 3. Look-up the key in your local catalog (via Z39.50)
> 4. If found, then download the local catalog record, update it
> with the 856 field of MBook record, and restore it.
> 5. Go to Step #2 until done.
> 6. Repeat on a regular basis
>
> --
> Eric "I Can Write That Script In 150 Lines" Morgan
Received on Wed May 28 2008 - 08:09:54 EDT