On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:57:53 -0400, Diane I. Hillmann <dih1_at_CORNELL.EDU> wrote:
>Jim:
>
>I'm not sure exactly why we're not getting through to folks that what
>you're asking for below is exactly what we're doing with the RDA
>elements and vocabularies. The way we've proceeded is designed to make
>the elements and vocabularies usable by library applications as well as
>semantic web applications. I've posted about this to the point that
>I've started to feel like a broken record.
>
>The eXtensible Catalog project has been working on services to transform
>MARC records to RDA/FRBR records, and they've written about that too.
>
>But yet we're not getting through. I wish someone could explain to me
>why this is, other than that the group handling this (the DCMI/RDA Task
>Group), isn't either LC or OCLC.
Diane,
Some of the efforts of RDA and other areas of the library community are well
directed and I applaud them. For example, LC making the subjects available
is a great first step, if a very late one. Still, I ask: does RDA provide
what our users want? For instance, format becomes of almost no importance as
Berners-Lee discussed. He mentioned how everybody reformats the data they
find on the web into who knows what, and that really surprised me, but in
retrospect, it shouldn't have because that's what I do myself! (Doh!) That's
why he said to just put your data on the web in a semi-usable form for
people to take, but not in a pdf file that can't be manipulated. Everybody
is going to reformat it anyway, but they need the data first.
I confess that RDA may be exactly what people want, but that remains to be
demonstrated, especially in the face of all of these studies of how people
use the web. The fact that it is based on FRBR only makes me more
suspicious, not less.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue Oct 20 2009 - 08:59:08 EDT