Exactly.
And in many conversations like this, one side says "Well, the STANDARDS
are there to make that POSSIBLE, so obviously there's no problem here,
it's just human error."
No, that's the wrong way of looking at it. SOMETHING is not working if
_nobody's_ doing it. That something might be that the standards are
unworkable, or that the software we use doesn't efficiently support
creation of the kind of data we need, or many other things. The general
'system' of humans and organizations and software needs to be examined
to see what's going wrong and how to fix it.
So OLE has a big role in that. You can't dismiss the neccesity of that
by whining that the standards are there if only people would USE them.
If nobody is, then something is wrong.
Jonathan
Stephens, Owen wrote:
>> But more than that, regardless of standards for passing the request, my
>> backend systems _do not maintain sufficient information to answer this
>> question_ for print holdings. I don't think my library is unique in
>> this, although it's also not universal.
>>
>>
> Exactly - I think you are understating the case in the last sentence - I would say very very few libraries maintain sufficient information.
>
> Owen
>
>
Received on Thu Mar 19 2009 - 12:15:51 EDT