Yeah, this is a whole nother discussion about the evolution of
cooperative cataloging, and how it is to work. There's a balance between
local control and efficiency. Right now a number of people (including
me) think this balance is WAY too far on the end of local control.
Let's say I use WorldCat. First of all, only a select elite actually
has the ability to enhance most fields in WorldCat, so they might not
get enhanced as much as they could -- but the trade-off is that we trust
those who can are doing it 'right'. OCLC is already experimenting with
opening up this ability to many more people.
(http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/quality/expert/default.htm)
But second, even if a change HAS been made in WorldCat, most of our
ILS's don't have any way to automatically let us know if there are
changes, or pull them in. So it's a very expensive process to pull them
in, in terms of human time as well as OCLC fees. Even if the system
could notify you, if you insisted on manually reviewing all of those
changes, it would still be very expensive.
So in some people's opinion, we don't end up getting nearly as good
records as if we opened up editing to more people and automatically
merged their edits in. But most scenarios one can think of for that
would result in less human review of changes made by others, if it's
going to be affordable. There are various ways it could be done, each
with various pros and cons -- we'll see if ANY of them are done, or if
we all just stick with the known issues of business as usual.
I think how cooperative cataloging is going to work going forward is
indeed a large and interesting issue. But it's really a SEPARATE issue
-- the formal domain model we use should not constrain _any_ scenarios
as far as cooperative cataloging, manual review, automated processes,
etc. It should support any scenario you and your cooperative cataloging
community or communities choose to use. And indeed I don't see any way
FRBR model adds constraints here. It's useful to run through thought
experiments to make sure it doesn't constrain any hypothetical
cooperative cataloging scenario -- including business as usual.
Although business as usual seems to me clearly unsustainable, I'm not in
charge. But one thing is that the current environment makes continual
cooperative enhancement of records way too costly and kludgey (why that
is has to do with not only with record structures, and in my opinion
with lack of a formal domain model, but also with our local systems,
with bibliogrpahic utility systems,and with bibliographic utility
business models/fees)
Jonathan
Dobbs, Aaron wrote:
> Wednesday, October 21, 2009 3:44 PM Jonathan Rochkind said:
>
>
>> ... BUT once someone HAS established a work for The Conquest of
>> Bread and filled in it's subjects, I shouldn't _have_ to go
>> assigning subjects every time I make a new manifestation record,
>> should I? I should be able to inherit from that work, such
>> that when the work subjects are changed (someoen does a better
>> job), my manifestation knows that too.
>>
>
> As long as the domain tree is additive at each level, I hope this comes to pass -- however, the option to recursively remove your (or other, prior) assigned subjects, and thereby affect other folks' records, should make people uncomfortable.
>
> -Aaron
> :-)'
>
> Aaron Dobbs
> Systems & Electronic Resources Librarian
> Shippensburg Univeristy of Pennsylvania
>
>
Received on Wed Oct 21 2009 - 16:46:42 EDT