Miksa, Shawne wrote:
>
> What is the problem with separation? What is the problem with a
> diversity of resources? You want one big interconnected catalog
> for the world? I seem to recall similar thinking and attempts
> in our history. None successful.
> ...
> The reader have always had to go from one catalog or index to
> another....so you want one-stop shopping?
It would be, IMHO, a disservice to readers if we suggested that
"one-stop shopping" for knowledge resources might be possible,
might even be round the corner or almost within easy reach.
That's what Google is doing with their mission statement of
"making the world's information universally accessible and
useful". That's utter hubris, however valuable their service
may be in many an instance. Readers who want to become scholars
or researchers still need to realize that the world isn't as easy
as that and cannot be made that easy within the foreseeable future.
And we can help them to get there. (Yes, I know they don't want to know,
and they won't listen but go their own ways, for they rate themselves
experts, but that can't make the world any easier for them than it is.)
Catalogs and catalogers will have to go on providing services that
make the collections of libraries universally accessible and useful,
no less and if possible more. New technology and new methods may make
everything more effective and efficient, but there's no way around
collections and catalogs to describe them and enable improved access to
them. But we cannot easily overcome the constraints and inadequacies of
our legacy data.
> I don't understand the need to remove the parameters between
> a library catalog and a journal index, or between a library
> catalog and a search engine. They are all different from each other...
As to the latter, some of the differences have been detailed a
while ago in this paper (the second half of it):
http://www.allegro-c.de/formate/tlcse.htm
All this theorizing is not going to help much, I'm afraid. What might
help is an in-depth study of a sizable number of use cases, actual
questions pursued by actual users of various types. This would be
a major project, a time-comsuming one, but it might make things
clearer. What resources have they used, what others might have helped,
what difficulties did they encounter, and so on. We just don't know
enough there. For all I know, maybe it turns out much of what we are
doing is obsolete or beside the point.
B.Eversberg
Received on Wed Oct 28 2009 - 11:24:56 EDT