On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Heinrich C. Kuhn
<hck_at_lrz.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:
>> I'm left wondering, does anybody out there (other than
>> catalogers) value anything that catalogers do?
>
> Well, have a look at the hits your catalogue gets and the uses
> people make of it: and you'll see that lots of people do use
> your catalogue as an instrument leading them to literature.
> So: it obviously works. And it does work because of the
> cataloguers' work.
Not stepping into the value proposition of catalogers (yes, I think
they have and provide enormous value, although I think too much of
their effort is misspent), but I just wanted to weigh in that this
particular metric of "proving" value is completely misleading.
What would need to be studied is whether or not the items are found
(or, rather, the percentage of items found) *as a result of* the
*particular* work catalogers did: after all, if the only elements
being used to identify and locate materials are: title, author,
genre, and format... and maybe an identifier or two (ISSN/ISBN), this
is not a particularly compelling defense.
After all, in my home town we have a very large used book store. It
has no publicly accessible inventory of their 'collection', and yet it
is always crowded with people that seem to have found what they want.
Somehow, people have a knack for finding things even in the crudest of
classification.
On the other hand, if the stats can show a number of people that
relied on subject headings, uniform title, series, etc. (i.e. the
sorts of data that catalogers have an expertise in that take the most
time and effort), then their value is being shown pretty concretely.
My point is that there are pretty objective measures that can be used
to figure out where catalogers' value can be seen, where it is less
useful and where more should be focused.
-Ross.
Received on Wed Feb 11 2009 - 09:43:35 EST