Alexander Johannesen wrote:
>
>> Most librarians would be perfectly willing to do that, I think.
>
> Hmm, I'm not convinced. There's certainly forces within those
> libraries who understand the importance and have the willingness to do
> so, but I'm not convinced the management at most bigger libraries
> would venture down this path, especially not as OCLC or LOC aren't
> doing it. "Surely, if they don't do it, it must be wrong." :(
>
For some countries, this may be truer than for others.
>
>> There is as of yet no accepted and widely known standard for
>> bibliographic metadata other than MARC.
>
> Hmm, that depends on what you mean by "bibliographic meta data",
> because as far as I know, DC is widely used (DC is though the biggest
> blunder ever, the biggest opportunity the library world has ever
> missed!), as well as a multitude of big and small formats that have
> bibliographic elements to it. Google's got one, Amazon's got one, I've
> got one, you can use Atom / RSS for it, microformats ... depends.
>
You confirm what I said. These "standards" are all mutually
indigestible. And DC is no content standard, it is a terminology or
concept standard for bibliographic metadata. (Leading to what Roy
Tennant wrote in "Metadata's bitter harvest").
> Oh, the Google API is what they want.
Sure everybody is much quicker to buy this one than anything we might
come across with, but how far they get with it, and thus how long they
will be happy with it, remains to be seen. (Considering Tim's remarks,
not everyone can possibly do with it all they might want to do.)
B.Eversberg
Received on Mon Sep 29 2008 - 06:33:04 EDT