Hiya,
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 19:36, Weinheimer Jim <j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu> wrote:
> My own opinion: we need both. And I am sure that
> at least Kevin will agree with me (I'm not sure about
> you, Alex!)
My short answer is that we need one system that satisfy both, and
more. What we're really talking about is a collection of "stuff" (in
lack of a better word) and how we can work with this stuff to suit our
needs. As such, we have roles in the system. If you want to go by a
librarians recommendation, that's easy enough to choose. Perhaps you
want to see what a professor recommends. Or a fellow student,
especially the cute one on the corner which you're dying to strike up
a conversation with. Or maybe you're looking for something
controversy, something the teacher *don't want you to read ("waste of
time").
To me, there is nothing wrong with selection, as long as I have the
option to unselect. Just like Tim's argument, we need all data and
then have tools that help us sift through it. That tool in the past
*were* the librarian, but the amounts of information makes that
approach unmaintainable and undoable. Even small constrained domains
are overflowing with information these days, and who are the librarian
to decide what is the right kind of information for others?
> How can this "control zone" be created? I think that
> (apologies to Tim) the Semantic Web has the tools
> and methods to create it.
Both yes and no. There's tools out there and the data could be made
available, but the lack of consistency and the ambiguous levels of
ontologies on the web makes this approach currently very, very hard.
RDF, RDFs and OWL are severely lacking in good identity control,
something rather basic to anything academic, so consider me sceptical,
at least at this point.
Apart from that, I find Tim's response fascinating and rather smack
bang on. The thread we're talking about is the OPAC, and in this
context the OPAC as a tool for scholars, so finding an OPAC that's
actually suited to the *scholars* needs (and not the librarian) is
sought. Any takers?
Alex
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Received on Tue Mar 03 2009 - 17:16:04 EST