> >If I may interject a few points here in defense of my colleagues, I must
> state that librarians have already been >overrun by an incredible number of
> novelties over a series of decades. Almost all of these novelties have meant
> >more work for less pay, fewer positions, less funding and finally, less
> prestige. Now come the biggest changes >of all, and this is after all of the
> pains with keeping up with overwhelming workloads, learning complex new
> >library systems that change constantly, and you hear everywhere that the
> changes haven't even begun yet. I am >not saying that this is the correct
> way to think, but a relatively hopeless attitude is very understandable if you
> have >lived through some of these changes.
>
> Please forgive me, but I reject such a beleaguered view of librarianship. We
> *must* embrace the role that is being thrust upon us. The small exchange here
> is not an attack upon the library profession. On the contrary, I read it as a
> sort of call to librarianship to continue to be what it has been to human
> civilization.
>
> Librarians' experience of technology has not been as a flurry of
> "novelties" thrust at them as they cower in their cubicles working to
> save our common heritage. Librarians, not technicians, created MARC. Libraries
> were among the first business entities to be automated. Long before computers,
> librarians devised ways for essentially all of human knowledge to be
> categorized and made accessible at a moment's notice. We want people be
> informed. We want people to get the knowledge and information they need. We
> know how to find stuff - good stuff. Not only do we know how to preserve stuff
> for a very long time - we actually care about doing so.
I guess I wasn't clear in my original post. I agree with what you are saying, but I still want to emphasize that librarians have already gone through incredible changes in the last 20 or 30 years. I am sure that there are still plenty of staff in almost every library who remember the huge changes with the introduction of AACR2 and MARC21. Then there were all of the changes in inputting methods when new library catalogs (acquisitions, circ, and cataloging were normally all separate), and when a new system came in, everything had to be relearned. I remember in one library I worked, the acquisitions staff had to learn 3 different systems in one year! Then came the big changes with the introduction of the ILMS, which brought all of the functions together, and this has brought tremendous organizational change and staff cuts, as acquisitions and cataloging began to merge. All of this has happened without the infusion of new staff but actual declines, no additional money, and very !
little in
the way of prestige.
We can also discuss retrospective conversion projects that are fabulously labor intensive and the opposite of glamorous. The conversions have gone from merging the various functions into the ILMS, or inputting the information on cataloging cards into computerized formats. Anybody who has survived even a single retrospective conversion project (and most libraries have many of them) will have numerous war stories of faulty decisions and outright errors all waiting to be cleaned up "someday." These errors occur through no one's fault, but tasks of this complexity cannot be achieved flawlessly,
Now with the internet and RDA, OAI-PMH, FRBR and a blizzard of alphabet soup coming at us where everything is going to change, along with zillions of items on the World Wide Web which has materials that can metamorphose every day, while almost everything we read mentions the obsolescence of the traditional catalog record and functions (including some things that I have written), finally I don't think anyone really believes that librarians are going to get more help in the future, then based on this I can certainly understand that someone who has lived through these events would have a rather hopeless attitude. Librarians are supposed to learn these new skill sets and keep up with developments, wh
ile still being swamped with our "traditional work."
I am not saying that this is how it should be, but I think this is how it is in many departments (at least in my experience). My own opinion is: we absolutely must have additional help if we are to have any chance at all to cope, but we cannot expect our administrations to hire anyone. Therefore, we must find help outside, where there are many different types of "metadata creators" busy making different kinds of "metadata records" around the world. Their records *can* be utilized now, but the standards (if there are any at all) are wildly variable. I see librarians as the people who can take these records (harvesting them) and ensuring some level of quality control of description and access. There could be many ways of doing this, most of them very poor, but I believe that we could devise some methods that may be acceptable. All of this would involve a new theoretical framework and go far beyond the limitations of FRBR, RDA, and MARC21 (in my opinion) and would demand some l!
evel of c
ooperation from all sides. I think this would be an exciting direction for almost everyone involved.
But it involves huge changes for everyone as well. I don't know if people are willing to change this much.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Mon Sep 22 2008 - 01:48:23 EDT