These links have always bugged me, too. Why doesn't LC just put this
information into the MARC records where it would be more useful,
searchable, etc. I suspect it has to do with lack of software tools to
help them move the data into a MARC record efficiently. Does anyone
know for sure? Not to rant, but it just drives me crazy when people
assert that catalogers don't want to re-use data/metadata. Many of us
do, we just lack the tools needed to make this happen, and most
work-a-day catalogers have neither the time nor the skills to develop
software. Some catalogers who used to have tools for developing macros
and such to support their work have seen these tools disappear as we
are forced into GUI interfaces ...
Shirley
Shirley Lincicum
Collection Management Librarian
Western Oregon University
Monmouth, OR 97361
lincics_at_wou.edu
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 8:12 AM, Frances Dean McNamara
<fdmcnama_at_uchicago.edu> wrote:
> There is one thing that might bear examination by this group. In it's reply to the report LC mentions the TOC, summary and other enhanced information that they put up on the web and link to via 856 fields in their MARC records. This must be costing them some effort to do. Yet we have found those fields to be problematic and nowhere near as useful as the Syndetics Enhanced content that we subscribe to. In fact, we now routinely delete those fields because they were causing problems.
>
> For instance:
>
> http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0803/2007043803-d.html
>
> How useful are these links, really? Don't get me wrong, I think LC does lots of great stuff for libraries but I wonder if the time and effort putting up these web pages is worth it. They also do some biographical info and some Table of Contents. But they seem so crude compared to Amazon, Google, other enhanced content, and they seem to duplicate information you can find in those other places. Or here's a table of contents:
>
> http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0730/2006047266-t.html
>
> Is this process whereby LC makes these web pages a manual duplication of other processes that pull this information and make it available?
Received on Wed Jun 11 2008 - 13:28:01 EDT