Cory
Physical books will never go away completely, even though e-books are catching on more and more. Also, you do need traditional classification schemes for e-books as well as physical books, don't you?
Julie Hankinson
Assistant Librarian/Cataloger
Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology
-----Original Message-----
From: Cory Rockliff <rockliff_at_BGC.BARD.EDU>
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Sent: Thu, Apr 22, 2010 6:07 pm
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] After MARC...MODS?
If we're talking about the descriptive drudgery that takes up far too much of catalogers' time today, I *hope* there's no future. Other skills in the cataloger's toolkit (classification, subject analysis, authority work) continue to be relevant, I think. "Universal" classification schemes such as LCC and Dewey may be approaching the end of their useful lives as the problem of ordering books on physical shelves becomes less important, but librarians could be well-placed to work on reconciling domain-specific vocabularies and weaving together disparate data sets. *Could* be.
Surely you have some of your own ideas about how catalogers could make themselves useful, though?
On 4/22/2010 5:36 PM, Alexander Johannesen wrote:
> Guys,
>
> I'm not impressed. My rant isn't designed to tick people off, nor to
> say that you are all worthless and are going to die. Why haven't
> anyone picked up the challenges and explained to me in no uncertain
> terms why we need catalogers in the future? It's such a simple
> question, you shouldn't be avoiding it, and there should be plenty of
> easy answers.
>
> Now, Julie's example of bad meta data in Google Books is a better one,
> but it only takes us so far ; it exemplifies meta data that's easy for
> folks and spot, and easy for Google to fix, just slap a report button
> on there, and they'll fix it. This is 245$a stuff, the most used field
> and subfield in meta data history.
>
> This is trivial stuff. You don't need a cataloger and definitely not a
> cataloging specialists for this sort of stuff. The question is why we
> need those meta data / cataloging specialists? What part of the future
> do they fit into?
>
> (Btw, just because Google wants to hire one librarian does not mean
> they're hiring en mass, which was my assertion)
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Alex
>
-- Cory Rockliff
Technical Services Librarian
Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture
18 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
T: (212) 501-3037
rockliff_at_bgc.bard.edu
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Received on Fri Apr 23 2010 - 12:10:37 EDT