Alexander Johannesen schrieb:
> Exactly. Not only is the library world missing out on perhaps one of
> the best ways to make themselves relevant in the future, but who here
> seriously think that the Google data won't improve? Not only improve,
> but improve in ways that the library world haven't got a competing
> edge to, such as social meta data and mining from the billions of
> other pages around the world Google have already indexed.
These are of course things the likes of which we cannot provide.
> Google is
> serious about books and tries to fix the meta data problem (as the
> library world doesn't seem to want to help),
Obviously, there's help from OCLC. They, however, are doing much less
than they conceivably could because they always fear for their income
which is from the selling of records to their members. It always boils
down to that. They do provide those citation formats, but only on a
per record basis and not useful for access by software, and what those
citation records reveal is always very much less than full content.
> while the library world
> looks like they've closed the doors.
It's more like OCLC and the vendors need to open some doors.
Most librarians would be perfectly willing to do that, I think.
The library partners in the Google scanning projects could reveal
a bit more, and there's now this Hathi Trust from which we might
expect a few things:
http://www.hathitrust.org/
> Is that what you want, to leave
> bibliographic meta data to others? I'm puzzled.
>
There is as of yet no accepted and widely known standard for
bibliographic metadata other than MARC. The world at large is
much more likely to follow Google than libraries when it comes
to standards. Look at systems that provide and exchange bibliographic
metadata: the only thing they have in common is that they are all
completely idiosyncratic. Except the MARC world. And this world can
very well go on using MARC internally, if only they provide services
that give users what they want - but currently there is not, as I said,
the one or predominant standard they would all want (and know how to
use).
B.Eversberg
Received on Mon Sep 29 2008 - 04:30:47 EDT