Jim said:
"Is "one who helps create a catalog" all that impressive today when fewer and fewer people use catalogs or even understand how they differ from the non-catalogs that they use all the time, such as Google and Yahoo?"
There you go again with that generalizing about catalog use. ;-)
Perhaps people are using search engines like Google and Yahoo in addition to catalogs? By the way, the study "Surveying the digital future" mentioned in a posting last month (I think) is quite expensive ($5000). There is a 9-page highlights report available at http://www.digitalcenter.org/pdf/2009_Digital_Future_Project_Release_Highlights.pdf but it makes no mention of libraries or library catalogs.
When we no longer use the phrase "library catalog" to describe the object into which we put the records then perhaps we might change the name from "cataloger" to something else.
In looking over the questions in the survey entitled Directors' views on the future of cataloguing in Australia/New Zealand, 2007: a survey / Jenny Warren.
( http://www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/documents/Warren2007.doc ) I found question 11 to be interesting: "Do you believe the traditional skill-set of your cataloguers to be transferable to metadata creation and analysis? ("Metadata creation and analysis" is used to mean the describing of electronic resources/objects (in repositories, etc.) using different schemas, such as MARC XML, Dublin Core)." Are the surveyors attempting to find out if their respondents believed cataloging is completely different from metadata creation and analysis? The definition of metadata creation and analysis is limited, by the researchers, to describing electronic resources/objects (in repositories). Why do they limit it to one type of resource and in one type of database? The responses show a range of expectations and I find it interesting that there is no clear distinction between descriptive cataloging and subject cataloging.
Overall, this report has some very interesting data but it is poorly written and analyzed (needs more correlation of answers). I would like to know how many people were contacted in relation to the number of responses (68) they received; i.e., what percentage is 68 respondents? Are these 68 responders a representative sample of the whole?
Another interesting point---the researchers emphasized up front that "Some directors in the survey express firm beliefs that the future is with keyword searching rather then controlled vocabularies, but the NLA’s experiments are showing that perhaps the best answer lies in clever combinations of the two." (pg. 3) but then didn't put that together in the same paragraph with the finding that 80% of respondents felt that "subject cataloguing is needed for clustering related content, and that subject analysis is better than relying on keyword alone." (pg. 12).
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Shawne D. Miksa, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Library and Information Sciences
College of Information
University of North Texas
email: Shawne.Miksa_at_unt.edu
http://courses.unt.edu/smiksa/index.htm
office 940-565-3560 fax 940-565-3101
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Received on Mon Dec 07 2009 - 09:36:29 EST