Jacobs, Jane W wrote:
>
> Although several people have agreed with this statement I'm still not
> buying it! First of all we weren't talking about data that wasn't
> there. We started with specific examples of SOUND metadata from
> libraries working with Google that Google apparently didn't use.
>
All I can say is that I and every other programmer in libraries that I
know that has tried to work with AACR2/MARC metadata has found that it
is not nearly as simple as you say to identify data elements of
interest. Despite our familiarity with the relevant standards, such as
they are.
I suppose you can choose to buy it or not!
Google may have much more resources than any one of our libraries do,
but they still choose to expend them or not based on cost benefit. I
still suspect Google's estimate of the 'cost' is higher than you think
it is, AND that their estimate of the 'benefit' of using library data is
lower than you think it is. But who knows what Google thinks. All I can
say is the only people I know that think "it should be easy to get
whatever data you want out of library MARC" are people who aren't
programmers who have tried.
Jonathan
Received on Mon Sep 21 2009 - 11:09:58 EDT