Alexander Johannesen wrote:
> Where are the experts in cloud computing, in clustering, in
> large-scale meta data management, in reducio indexing, in smart
> spidering? Where are the geeks who enjoy semantic data modelling
> across silos? Or the ones who knows all there is to know about digital
> identity management? Things that's actually damn, seriouslly
> you'll-all-go-down-in-flames-without-it technologies? Where is it?
> Where's the direction you need to make to get to it? Where's your
> passionate people who understands all this and wants to see it
> through?
While this is all very good, I would like to point out that it is still all experimental. We still don't know which way to go, and it may turn out that the solution will be some method discovered six months from now. There is nothing surprising about this since we are in a time of major changes and attempts must be made to decide what works and what does not work. Library administrators facing tight budgets can find it very difficult to justify experimentation which automatically means that there can be failure and resultant "waste" (at least in a strictly budgetary sense). I would also like to point out that individual libraries have normally left these affairs up to the vendors since open-source solutions are relatively new.
> I've said it before, and I'll say it again; you need to come up with
> something radically different here. You can't beat this with smart,
> long-term and slowly adapting techniques you've mastered so well. You
> need radical, and radical is *not* library thinking.
Well said. We need radical changes and I see very few radical proposals coming from libraries. One of the main things--and easiest to implement--would be for libraries to open up their catalog records for general experimentation. I'm still not sure exactly why libraries are so reluctant to do this.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Mon Sep 22 2008 - 03:07:43 EDT