>>> Can you envision catalogers talking MODS to the same effect and
>>> efficiency they are now talking MARC? Efficiency matters.
>> There's the problem: cataloguers are *forced* to learn how to "talk MARC" and thus become superhuman. MODS, in contrast, is readable by "mere" humans. Why do we require cataloguers who aren't doing under-the-hood system maintenance to understand MARC?
> No, to learn MARC does not consist of learning all the numbers and
> codes, that's rather trivial.
Maybe for you! It's overwhelmingly imposing for me, which is why I do to great lengths to avoid it.
> You have to learn the precise meanings and
> the concept, and that's the same with verbal tags. You only *think* you
> understand something when reading verbal tags, but without the
> understanding of the precise semantics you are prone to producing a hell
> of a mess.
Of course; and this is where having defined semantics for the "metadata elements" (I'm not sure what else to call them) is critical — Dublin Core did a good job of making these vague enough so as to guarantee messy data, but I would contend it was the lack of consistent cataloguing rules (or at least, lack of application) that was the larger contributor.
I agree that simply being able to read MODS as verbal text isn't sufficient for good-quality data; but verbal cues are much easier to mentally map to the semantic definitions than numeric ones — if it's all the same to computers, don't we want to make it easier for mere humans to work with our records?
MJ
Received on Tue Apr 20 2010 - 10:05:17 EDT