On 2/16/09 10:54 AM, "Weinheimer Jim" <j.weinheimer_at_AUR.EDU> wrote:
> When you put all of this together, it makes it much more difficult to build
> something that people will use or even pay attention to. This is one reason
> why, regretfully, I think we need to do away with words such as "catalogs,"
> "cataloging" and "catalog records" because so many think that they are passe.
> When you speak of "metadata," "ontologies" and the "Semantic Web" you get
> people's attention.
I concur.
Even here in our own venue the word "catalog" has so many connotations that
it makes it difficult for us to communicate. I was talking to David Lindahl
of the eXtensible Catalog (XC) a number of months ago, and he said, "I wish
I had not used the word 'catalog' to describe the project". I feel the same
way about the naming of this mailing list. I sincerely do not think the
functionality of the catalog itself needs to change. Rather, I think the
functionality of the tool(s) use to find stuff in the catalog, plus the
bibliographic indexes, plus the special collections, plus institutional
repositories, plus the archives, plus the digitized collections, plus
selected stuff from the Internet, plus RSS feeds, plus mailing lists,... all
needs to be improved to meet today's evolved environment.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
Received on Tue Feb 17 2009 - 06:35:26 EST