On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 21:09, Jacobs, Jane W
<Jane.W.Jacobs_at_queenslibrary.org> wrote:
> As a Cataloger who dabbles in programming I couldn't resist finally
> jumping with a couple of points:
Wohoo! I love catalogers!
> We should all know at least enough about programming/data formats to be
> able to reject or, at least, question, such highly dubious logic as
> anything XML-based is automatically superior to MARC. I'm not saying we
> shouldn't leave MARC behind, but we leave it for something BETTER, NOT
> something ELSE.
I think you're missing something vitally important here; the *rest* of
the world eats XML for breakfast, it's what gets them up in the
morning, and enables them to pull through. It's not about the
greatness of XML itself (which I also can write a book or two about
its virtues over *any* binary format; you just dare me!), but about
what tools are available to deal with it.
If our data was already in the realm of XML (as in real XML, not the
faux MARCXML nonsense) there is ripe opportunity everywhere to try out
our data. Chuck it in a native XML DB, for example, which I did with
eXist and was fantastic (but of course the project failed the litmus
test of having bad meta data that came out of MARC systems). I don't
know how many tools out there support some kind of XML import or
indexing, but suffice to say it outnumber the tools who can read MARC
by the thousands. And I don't think I need to prove this, right? :)
>>But there are always alternatives, both on how you approach the
> problem, and also on how you deal with your own specialness.
>
> And here we hit upon the crux of the problem not only with software vs
> libraries but software vendors and other industries as well. Everything
> DOESN'T "just work"!
Everything? Surely you jest. I deal with systems on a daily basis
which "just works." Oh, you mean it doesn't "just work" because I need
to replace all the "shelf" words with "stacks", or something more
complex like "the indexer must know MARC, and create relevance ranking
based on the order of the various title fields, with 245 taking
presedence, unless it's a children story" or somesuch?
If your data was in XML instead of MARC, and if the culture of MARC
hadn't botched the meta data within over time, then these tweaks would
be hours of work as opposed to months of work to get tweaked. Do you
know how many different XML indexers there are out there, vendors who
make a living in trying to be as flexible and fast as possible? Quite
a few. How many indexers do the same over MARC? Not so many, mostly
the usual suspects of ILS vendors.
> Lots departments in lots of industries get
> half-baked software foisted off on them, often at high prices. Remember
> "Beta" testing? These days software is so rushed to market it often
> doesn't seem to get an "Alpha" test. (What was that new search engine
> that was going to replace Google a couple of weeks ago?)
I'm sure we can point to stuff we read in the main press about botched
systems. In fact, there was a major incident here in Norway today
about the health authorities lost a full days worth of data.
But the systems we have delivered elsewhere to very happy large
customers you will never hear about, because, frankly, systems that
"just work" ain't covered much in the press.
> Many workers
> are stuck with workflows that accommodate software not software that
> "just works". The tail often wags the dog outside libraries as well as
> in.
I'm tempted to ask how much outside experience you have, and not in a
snarky evil way, but because I genuinely don't recognize what you say.
I too read the newspapers and the wire and laugh at the crazy
over-priced bad projects you sometimes read about, but I'm an insider
seeing a lot of good work as well. In fact, I'm one of those "evil"
consultants that you pay lots for, so I'm going to share a secret with
you all; we're priced this way because we find, tweak and implement
software that "just works" for our clients, saving the client lots of
money and frustration. Sure there's bad eggs, but they quickly
disappear from the industry. Where do they go? One can only speculate.
>>For every problem in the ILS you will find an outside alternative.
>
> Usually one that consists of a square peg being determinedly hammered
> into a round hole!
Any basis for that, or just opinion?
> As with MARC, I'm not saying that we don't need to change. I,
> personally, am lucky enough to work with GOOD IT people, but they still
> need librarians with enough knowledge to be able to articulate what they
> need and to be able to examine, critically what we need vs. what we've
> always done. Imagination is good but it has to be tempered with
> real-world experience.
No one says we don't need librarians, and I'm one of the first to hail
librarians (and especially catalogers) for their thinking and culture.
But when it comes down to IT, they really should recognize good advice
when it's given to them, and stop shunning it just because the advice
may go against the business plan of the library. Didn't anyone tell
you that the library business model is failing? Again, probably
because the library is such a special place, and we outside it "just
don't get it". Although I doubt it.
Kind regards,
Alex
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Received on Wed Sep 24 2008 - 14:00:20 EDT