Bernie Sloan wrote:
>
> Jim Weinheimer asks:
>
> "How can we take advantage of some of that metadata that is generated
> automatically, or
> the metadata created by other bibliographic communities, so that we can improve
> the final products of all of our work and give our patrons tools they really
> want and need?"
>
> Of course this begs another question: Do we really KNOW what our patrons really
> want and need?
Absolutely true, and this is one of the main theoretical problems I have with RDA. It is based on the FRBR user tasks, figured out sometime in the early 1990s. Things have changed so much since the 1990s that there was more in common with the 19th century than today. Full-text searching was in its infancy; almost nobody was thinking about Web2.0 tools; email was the hottest thing around, and gophers were the hot things to talk about, along with Archie and Veronica searches. Websites were just beginning to be built.
The people who worked on FRBR certainly tried their best, but things changed too much too fast and the views expressed in the user tasks are divorced from the information user today. What are the real user tasks today?
I don't know. I don't know if anybody knows, but there is a lot of research being done on it, called Scholarly Communication. Some institutions have departments devoted to it. I think that all we know is that we are in a state of incredible transition right now. New tools are being created every day. Perhaps in 5 years, matters may have worked themselves out a bit. The Google Book deal will have been worked out. The future of a "book Ipod" will be clearer then.
All I am sure of is that the basic needs of my users are *not* to "find, identify, select, and obtain" "works,expressions, manifestations, and items" and I don't know if it ever really was. I am truly interested in making and keeping libraries important in today's society, so if we are going to expend labor and resources on something, it needs to be something that will make a difference to our users.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Thu Oct 15 2009 - 11:03:28 EDT