Hiya,
I've ranted on this subject before, and since you all love me for it,
I'll tempt it once again. :)
First of all, we *must* assess this whole notion of what the heck
we're supposed to even catalog. Currently we catalog books (and a few
similar, physical items) that we've got on stacks, some CD's, tape
recordings of olden days, scraps of paper, a few curiosa objects.
These will all stop being deployed to libraries.
Now, I'm not actually being as hyperbolic as I used to be on this
topic; you can go and see for yourselves what's going on in the land
of information and knowledge management, that pesky human enterprise
of managing information in such a way that knowledge is easy to get
to. The foremost reason for the demise of books, is of course that is
a hopelessly stupid format! Once you print it, that's it; the
representation is solidified and can only be changed through a barrage
of processes, money and human follow-up, even the stupidest speling
msstake comes under these amazingly expensive and cumbersome
processes. Books suck, CDs suck, papers suck, even if they all smell
great and look fantastic. They suck, and will be replaced with better
and cheaper things now that the technology can take steps to do so.
The book and its bibliographic brethren don't hold a chance in hell
against the digital future. If you think otherwise, well, I'm sure
you're retiring soon and don't probably care enough.
However, I care a lot. I care to the point of calling the libraries
out on their nonsense. Librarians talk about findability, about
authorship, about all these fine things found in the otherwise arcane
FRBR world, or the dead-on-arrival RDA, or they might venture to say
something about their collection and collection management,
procurement, or maybe they have a soft-spot for Q&A and desk
questions. But it's all nonsense when we talk about the catalog and
the future of the library.
The only reason you still have a job is because there's still a ton of
paper-based information out there. And that's fine, that'll keep you
and the library busy for another, what, 30 years or so (giving you a
lot of leeway there). Then what? What the heck are you going to do
when the biggest producers of those paper things you love stop making
them? You know it's there, you know that day is coming, you see it
already happening ; the whole academic field is almost already
converted to the digital world with new structures for peer-review and
publishing, encyclopedias are online or dead, maps aren't printed
anymore (including historical maps being converted into the digital
pulp) and now they're ripping through the popular literature field
where the worlds largest book seller saw it fit to make their bloody
own eReader device, because, you know, they obviously don't know
anything about the future of books and information.
What you're going to be stuck with is a world clearly divided in two ;
* Bibliobjects : Books, pamphlets, physical objects, the traditional
library materials : For this stuff you've developed, over years and
years, a rigid set of processes, programs, people and software that
deal with these collections. You kick ass in this area.
* Digital information : For this you haven't got *anything* worth
talking about. In this area you suck.
Yeah, yeah, slight hyperbole; there's the odd project that does
something in the realm of the latter, but you are *not* experts in
this field, you don't employ any experts in these fields, there are no
librarians in this field. The former, sure, you're kings! But the
latter you suck at. The latest years of standarizing, scrutinizing and
say, coming up with FRBR and RDA, what does that give you? A digital
version of bibliobjects! It doesn't actually provide you more than
what you already can hack together with the old tools. Going from,
say, a catalog in the traditional MARC / AARC2 to FRBR isn't going to
dramatically prepare you for the future of digital objects, it will
only give you a false sense of having cleaned up one part of a large
mess. And FRBR is still not even part of the librarian daily talk!
It's taken 20 years of FRBR yelling to get to this non-existent place
where the bibliographic ideals are still hailed as the way forward.
Why aren't you cataloging blog entries? Because, a) it would be
time-consuming, b) you don't have the resources, but perhaps mostly
inane c) there is no *point* in doing so as software systems already
are doing a far better job of it than any librarian ever could. And
here is the problem ;
You don't sit on the tooling nor service side of the digital future.
You're not servicing others with your expertise. You're not making
meta data plugins for WordPress. You're not making auto-authoring
robots for WikiPedia. You don't come up with cool search algorithms.
You don't suggest solutions to the growing identity management
problem. You don't create AI functionality for information extraction.
You're not inventing a faster, more efficient, non-destroying book
scanner. You're not coming up with a better citing engine, or a way of
dealing with trust or source verification. You're not creating a
harvester that can deal with arbitrary and fuzzy notions of logic to
build up a repository of chains of knowledge. You're not creating
anything that is valuable to the humans of the digital future.
Sure, you might be "collaborating" with someone about some of these
things, but where does that intellectual properties stay? Where does
the money go? You are outsourcing your smarts so that others gets
smarter and richer, and you're stuck with, well, the equivalence of
MARC / AARC2 ILS's even librarians know so darn well is the wrong
thing to do.
You used to be at the top of this game, though. In the physical realm
of bibliobjects you were innovative, fast, you were thinkers, you held
a philosophical line, you made a darn lot of sense, funky ideas, and
great services, great solutions to bigger problems. And for that you
are sure to be thanked and well remembered. But the digital world you
seem to have missed completely.
So when we're talking about the next "next gen" catalog, what the hell
is it supposed to be cataloging? You already have catalogs for the old
stuff, so when the books stop coming in, then what?
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Mon Mar 29 2010 - 20:45:39 EDT