Weinheimer Jim wrote:
> These conclusions certainly betray the researchers' own biases, repeating the old saw that "it's too labor-intensive" without providing any alternatives, such as, making tools to help catalogers become vastly more productive than they are now.
>
> [...] I wish somebody would research: what wouldn't be too labor intensive? What about subject headings made in 10 minutes? 5 minutes? 2 minutes?
>
> And of course when products of our work is shared widely, the labor savings is that much greater.
>
I agree that I wish there were more focus on figuring out how to make
key metadata generation/maintenance more efficient. That might be better
tools, that might be better sharing, that might be changing the metadata
produced to meet the demonstrated user needs with different "cheaper"
data elements. In general, we need a large research effort on figuring
out the most efficient metadata interventions (the sweet spot of
maximizing long-term utility and minimizing human staff time).
But who's going to do this? With the decimation and
de-professionalization of the cataloging profession; with the
abandonment of library metadata issues by our academic wing; with OCLC
being mostly focused on increasing their profit through keeping research
findings proprietary; with library administrators being uninterested in
funding research in this area. Who is left to do this?
We are kind of in trouble. I remain convinced that metadata generation
and maintenance is: a) vital to most of our services, b) one of the most
challenging and expensive things we do. So we absolutely need to figure
out how to maximize our metadata utility while minimizing our cost, and
this is not an obvious answer, it's something that will take research
and analysis and concerted collective cooperative effort -- and we seem
entirely incapable of undertaking those things.
Jonathan
>
Received on Wed Apr 22 2009 - 11:30:56 EDT