We also need to look at the history of our data. Unlike some data
creators, we have data that is decades old, and that has been
transferred from paper systems to online systems to other online
systems. Some on this list may be too young to remember the old Kardex
systems for serials checkin, where each issue was written by hand on a
Kard ;-). When the data was transfered to online systems, no one had the
capacity to include the detail, so all that got transfered was a very
brief summary. I have seen systems that do have detailed information for
recent data, but it's almost worse when *some* of the data meets your
needs but not all of it.
We keep being held back by our legacy data. I don't know the solution,
but we have to find a way to move forward in spite of it.
kc
Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>
>
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Thu Mar 19 2009 - 21:25:42 EDT