Hiola,
Weinheimer Jim <j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu> wrote:
> This is an important point that separates certain world-views that I must insist is both understood and accepted: "better" and "reliable" are not synonyms at all
I fear you're missing the point. We, the experts, know they are not.
They, the users, don't care. You can tell them, but they still won't
care. Besides, sometimes being reliable is - indeed! - better, so you
can't make blanket statements like that.
...
> [...] it seems as if your suggestion is that we abandon these roads that
> we have been creating and maintaining over the generations in favor
> of these "wonderful and new" tools that are being created today.
From your reading of my writing, am I really suggesting this? I can
tell you straight away that, no, I'm not, I'm doing the opposite; I'm
asking you to think more clearly about how this knowledge fits into
the modern changing world. Old knowledge and methodologies and models
are all fine and well as long as they fit into the now and the future.
You yourself admit that these arcane arts are at times counter to
helping the users find information and certainly don't fit into modern
computer systems, so all I'm trying to do is to push you guys into
answering some perhaps difficult questions that should be - I would
hope - not too hard to figure out, though baby steps if necessary. If
they are indeed so hard to figure out, you've got *really* big
problems, because the real world is not going to wait around for you
to figure this out. You need to figure it out and integrate it *now*,
or even better, yesterday.
I hold the library legacy in high regards, and I would love to
preserve and still use quite a lot of it. It is not that I don't
understand the rigid structure and why it is there, I don't really
need a lecture on that (although I always appreciate your efforts in
clarifying the history and peculiarities within) as much as I need
answers to what is worth preserving in light of modern computer
systems (because I don't think there's any doubt catalogs with
millions of records can't be handled properly through manual labor).
But this also requires a deeper knowledge if said computer systems.
> I, and many of my colleagues, say that the new methods cannot
> replicate what the old methods can do
Ok, to this my answers are 1. doubtful (I was first gonna go with
"hogwash" :), and 2. irrelevant. More details ;
1. I doubt many of you have deep knowledge of what is possible these
days through various forms of AI, clustered facets, semantic models
and various degrees of formal logic over reasonably fuzzy structures
of knowledge management. Of course it's easy to counter this by saying
"well, show me, I haven't seen it." Well of course you haven't ; no
librarian specialist has joined up with a systems expert to create it
yet (or, at least, I haven't seen it :). I mentioned Topic Maps a few
posts back for a reason ; they mimic (as in, their models match) very
closely that of librarian specialists systems, but of course in a more
modern suit and identity management to boot. And I go on about these
things because of all the people that one would hope would understand
this match would be librarians in general and cataloger specifically.
I have, however, in this respect failed miserably at doing so.
2. The gist of my last post was basically that it doesn't matter if
your expert systems finds the results because there's too many
parameters that work both ways (you might find what Google misses, you
will miss what Google finds, and is closer to complimentary at this
point), but also that any system that requires a specialist is a
doomed system. It hence doesn't matter how good you are when you're
not going to be around to do it. The only way to make this matter is
to a) scrutinize it and make it relevant, and b) integrate it into
society to make no mistake about the value you add.
...
> <snip>
> ... because it's a straw man. I can do the same to you; if you searched for Mark Twain you will miss out all of that which was written by Samuel Clemens or Josh or Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.
> </snip>
>
> There's a lot more than that.
Sure. And you don't have any better solutions here than any other.
Except. Well. I've talked about identity management before in Topic
Maps, where entities are bound by identifiers that are also resolvers.
it not only solves this problem, but solves all the hassle that FRBR
brings to the table. But I digress.
...
> There are also other forms being brought together in the VIAF:
> http://viaf.org/viaf/50566653#Twain,%20Mark,%201835-1910
>
> Welcome to my world! This is what bibliographic control is all about and it is not simple.
Well, is that because of the tools and methods chosen, or because it's
an actual difficult area? The reason I'm asking here is for example
the dreaded way of having birth and death years (sometimes, or too
often optional, or wrong) as part of the name as an identifier for
entities which you have to match and merge in order to make sense out
of (and most of the time get wrong). In the past these identifiers
were the best one could come up with because there were no computers,
no decentralized means of resolving them, no authority control across
different bodies. However, now we do. See where this is going?
> I personally disagree with 22.2B and the entire idea of separate
> bibliographic identities, but it doesn't matter what I think. I must follow
> the rules, and that means that anybody who uses the library tools
> must follow them as well. No single person can know all of it.
With better tools and better methods at least these things shouldn't
get in the way of making both librarian and patron life easier. It
astounds me to no end how shortsighted it is not to pursue and change
these fundamentals when you've got the chance. But then, that really
is the key; tool-makers and system librarians nor library management
don't see how it can be done in such a way as being backwards
compatible with both mindset and existing systems. Sad, really, but
this is one of those things that are hard to do but must be done in
order to stay afloat.
> So, considering that example I gave in one of my messages of searching "Dostoyevsky" and the typical Google response "Did you mean: Dostoevsky" seems rather facile in comparison.
Well, not really; normal people require nothing more. Even specialists
don't always require more. And even they can get to alternative
spellings and search for those, it's not like the world can't deal
with not being rigid either.
> I think these constructions are far too important to be discarded and it has yet to be shown that the new and wonderful tools, as promising as they may be, can provide even a hint of this control.
Even a hint? Seriously?
regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Wed Apr 28 2010 - 06:11:06 EDT