> 1. Cloud computing is just a new "Web 2.0" name for what many in the
> industry have been doing for the last 10-15 years (and no, 10 years is
> not recently; that's *ancient* in Internet-time :),
I agree with what you say, but this shows a definite temporal shift in our respective "universes:" 10 to 15 years is ancient in internet time, but in library time, something that's been around for 15 years is still in diapers. So in the "library universe," these technologies are still working themselves out.
I'm not saying that this is the way it should be, and librarians have had their heads in the sand for too long concerning getting control of the new materials and formats (new in library terms, but they may have been around for 15+ years!). For example, has cloud computing and clustering proven themselves in library contexts? No, but that is because they haven't *really* been tried in libraries yet other than a few small projects. And why? Because there is this problem of experimentation that I mentioned before and so the entire affair becomes a reductio ad absurdum. I personally believe that opening up our data would be the beginning of a solution to multitudes of problems. Look at the attempts already with the LC Subject Headings. Bernhard Eversberg has already made something much better than the official LC version, and while I personally don't care for the version at the lcsh.info site (that's just my opinion), that is irrelevant. At least new attempts are being made. I'!
d like to
see an attempt with Grokker technology for clustering.
> this is you guys, which is why I'm so sad to see the library lag
> behind and leaving the meta data tasks of the future in the hands of
> big corporations.
This is the key point: if librarians don't try to solve these issues, somebody else will.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Mon Sep 22 2008 - 15:33:32 EDT