On 4/21/10, Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Of course a community of specialists can get together and form a
> marvelous foundation upon which the future can carry on. It's happened
> many times, and it will happen again. Heck, even an individual can
> sometimes break down walls and change the future for the better.
>
> Get crackin'!
Agree 110%
I will add that bringing in views from outside the community of specialists
is a good thing. They offer something fresh. The present ugly kludge that
is MARC is a product of inbred thinking and cruft accumulated over decades.
Such finely grained definitions of what a title is looks a little ridiculous
in the real world. I see little of value in the byzantine complexity.
I would also add that a small group of specialists or an individual are best
suited to putting a real dent in the Universe. They are more likely to
shake things up with new solutions that are elegant and hang together. If
an idea is too complicted to wrap your mind around it, something is wrong.
Libraryland on the other hand seems to revel on committees, collectivist
thinking and complexity. They talk and they talk, rehashing minutae and
picking nits while little gets done. And what usually results is a
complicated ugly kludge that satisfies no one.
MARC and other tools seem to me to be designed by librarians for librarians,
and so they isolate themselves in an inward looking culture that reinforces
its own views. Does MARC make it easier and simpler for the end layperson
to locate resources in today's world? I don't think so. Libraryland needs
to break out of this MARC mind-prison. The longer it stays the further
behind it will be relative to the rest of the world.
And let's face it: It's all made up stuff anyway. We're not dealing with
stone tablets here in any of this.
Peter Schlumpf
www.avantilibrarysystems.com
Received on Wed Apr 21 2010 - 08:36:03 EDT