It's B. GBS has been hamstring from the beginning by both legal and
cultural issues. A some point, they realized, if libraries didn't want
to play, they weren't going to keep trying. They can do pretty well on
their own.
The whole thing demonstrates what I've come to believe. Libraries
could do a lot to remain important—and add significant value in a
changing world. But, by and large, signs are bad. Libraries are
dreadfully, perhaps unrecoverably, behind in the arena that will
define their future success—technology.
Libraries had a chance with the web, but bad technology, bad thinking
and discouragement from OCLC and others stymied engagement, and more
than a decade we almost NEVER get a library in a search result.
Libraries had a chance with the open data, social networking and
mashups, and they dropped the ball. No top 1,000 website uses library
data, except Google Books (sort of), and even in social cataloging, of
the five sites, only one (LT) uses library data—and that's been a
constant struggle.
Now we're moving past the web and metadata into the stuff itself—and
the Kindle may well be the coup de grace.
Sorry to be a pessimist.
Tim
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 3:32 PM, B.G. Sloan<bgsloan2_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure how this article would "warm the hearts of cataloguers" unless being able to say an ex post facto "I told you so" counts as a heartwarming experience.
>
> Yeah, if catalogers had been in charge, the Google Book Search metadata would be in better shape than they are now. But catalogers weren't in charge. And the librarians who were involved in Google Book Search kinda blew it by not insisting on the use of better metadata.
>
> This is one of those cases where the library community is sort of responsible for problems that the library community is complaining about. A lot of library groups are up in arms about a project that couldn't have happened without the cooperation of libraries and librarians. Librarians were involved in Google Book Search from day one.
>
> I'm not against Google Book Search, per se. On the whole I think it will be very useful and valuable. The devil is in the details. I wish the library partners had thought things through a little better.
>
> Bernie Sloan
>
>
> James Weinheimer wrote:
>> I wrote this on Autocat, and thought that readers of this list might be
>> interested as well. JW
>>
>> Now that I have read the entire article
>> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701 and the indepth response from
>> Google http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701#comment-41758, I must
>> say that I think (more probably, I *hope*) that this may be the beginning of
>> one of the most important discussions on cataloging and "metadata" today,
>> and perhaps of all time. The importance comes not so much from what they
>> say--which is rather elementary--but from the importance that the
>> non-library community places on these issues, and even more importantly,
>> this discussion is taking place not within the dusty pages of some forgotten
>> issue of a library journal or on a closed specialist listserv, but on an
>> open, important scholarly website (not a library website) and replied to by
>> the most important information company in the world. This could be a moment
>> for librarians, and especially catalogers (who are the experts in any case),
>> to take advantage of a soap box that may be temporary. But we can't be too
>> technical or overwhelming in our arguments.
>>
>> Some observations:
>> 1) it looks as if one of my predictions for the future is already outdated.
>> I had predicted that "all metadata" would be thrown together into a single
>> database somewhere resulting in a huge mess. According to the fellow from
>> Google, this has happened already since he mentions metadata they have taken
>> from Brazil, Armenia, Korea and a few other places. It is interesting that
>> no one anywhere discusses this in terms of "rules" or "standards" but as an
>> Armenian database, or a Brazilian database, instead of an "AACR2 database"
>> or "ISBD" or German or French or Italian rules, or whatever. Perhaps when
>> the discussion is being led by non-expert metadata creators, this should not
>> be surprising. (For the sake of clarification, in this discussion, there is
>> an expert metadata *user* (a professor) and an expert metadata *aggregator*
>> (the fellow from Google), but no expert metadata *creator*)
>>
>> 2) A lot of the errors that the Google fellow blamed on libraries make me
>> skeptical, to say the least. As one example, he mentions, "Geoff identifies
>> a topology text (I assume this is Curvature and Betti Numbers) as belonging
>> to Didactic Poetry; this beaut comes to us from an aggregator of library
>> catalogs. Perhaps the subject heading "Differential Geometry" was next to it
>> in an alphabetic list, and a cataloger chose wrong."
>>
>> Sorry, but I can't buy that one. While catalogers certainly make lots of
>> mistakes, they make certain types of mistakes, and these types are quite
>> different from mistakes made by a computer. Unless this subject was assigned
>> by a human with no understanding of the English language (perhaps a
>> secretary in Korea who does not understand English), then this is, without a
>> doubt, a computer mistake.
>>
>> 3) The fellow from Google points out some other human mistakes that are
>> highly interesting and that we should consider at length. All of the
>> problems pointed out are rather elementary, but we know there are problems
>> in cataloging that are truly difficult. How are corporate bodies handled?
>> Uniform titles? Anonymous works? Pseudonyms?
>>
>> 4) Taken as a whole, it appears that the general public considers that
>> "metadata quality" is important, which is absolutely great and something
>> that we must capitalize upon. But the comments make it imperative that we
>> see the problems with metadata today not only in terms of our own
>> collections or our own communities, but how to make bibliographic metadata
>> in general interoperable and coherent among all metadata creators in all
>> communities on a world-wide scale. Google is forcing the issue.
>>
>> How will "human expert-created" metadata work in an environment similar to
>> Google Books? I still think people will want to search one database (just
>> like they do Google) and this initial search will almost always be a
>> full-text keyword search on a corpus of text. The metadata we make will
>> allow for clickable limits, similar to how it works in Koha and WorldCat now
>> (of course, they don't work with full-text and only the catalog records).
>> See, e.g. in the Athens County Public Library how the headings are extracted
>> from the records retrieved in the multiple display so that users can narrow
>> their results:
>> http://acpl.kohalibrary.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?q=roman+archaeology.
>> In a new system including full-text, this method could be expanded
>> indefinitely to add automatically extracted keywords, Web2.0-type results
>> (ratings, suggestions by others) and other limits.
>>
>> Therefore, I don't think people will be browsing subjects or name headings
>> in their initial searches. In the "limits" there may be some browsing
>> performed. Therefore, how could these types of browsing be made the most
>> useful with multiple rules, forms of names, and the problems mentioned in
>> the Language Log post?
>>
>> This is the environment we are entering. It we expect everybody to follow
>> AACR2 and/or RDA we are simply being unrealistic. Instead of creating new
>> rules that 1/10 of one percent of the world will use, we should be focusing
>> our energies on making what we have now more useful and coherent. From the
>> message and comments on Language Log, it seems as if our public wants this,
>> and even Google itself seems to be taking these things seriously.
>>
>> This new world is largely unknown and we must feel our way along, especially
>> in this difficult economic climate. ISBD was a great beginning that we can
>> and should build upon, but today we must look beyond the library community
>> to everyone in the same field. This is happening whether we like it or not.
>> Google is forcing our hand by throwing everything in together.
>>
>> James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
>> Director of Library and Information Services
>> The American University of Rome
>> Rome, Italy
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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Received on Tue Sep 08 2009 - 16:45:54 EDT