Jay Luker wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan_at_nd.edu> wrote:
>> To that end I wrote a blog piece for the LITA a couple of years ago, and I
>> think it is still relevant today. [1] In summary, the posting advocates
>> knowledge of:
>>
>> * XML - modern-day MARC
>> * relational databases - the organization of information
>> * indexing - the searching/finding of information
>> * Web serving - making the information available
>> * programming/scripting - binding all of the above together
>>
> I'm curious if anyone's ever taken a stab at the flipside of a list
> like this. In other words, what is the minimum a software engineer
> should know about librarianship to be effective in the current
> environment?
>
It certainly isn't enough to know just XML and not MARC because XML
as such is merely a punctuation standard whereas MARC is not only that
but also a grammar and AACR/RDA/ISBD a manual of style. In other words,
XML as such cannot replace MARC but only ISO2709.
Relational databases are good at saving and retrieving stuff but not
at searching. Good OPACs usually have additional software for their
search functions, like tools for alphabetic browsing and keyword
indexing. SOLR, for example, doesn't internally use SQL and neither
does, to my knowledge, Google. (The latter also makes little use of XML)
The term "indexing" is ambiguous. In fact it has more than two meanings:
-- allocate subject terms or classes to resources (intellectually)
-- specifying the way in which metadata is to be processed for the
index or indices of a database
-- actually processing the metadata to create or update the index files.
B.Eversberg
Received on Fri Sep 12 2008 - 05:14:33 EDT