Quoting Dan Matei <dan_at_CIMEC.RO>:
>
> All subfields are useful enough to justify the effort to delimit them ?
>
> I thought we are looking for reducing the cost of cataloguing. Or not ?
I don't think we know what "subfielding" costs us. Is it more than
adding notes like "Includes bibliographic references" even though
there is also a coded element for that in the fixed fields? (Which is
up there with the idiocy of the 020 field, frustration that I share
with Andrew.) And even if something costs, don't we also have to look
at the value? Adding subject headings is very costly, from what I
hear, as is doing authority control. I suspect that those cost much
more than adding in subfielding. But what are they worth?
I've been sitting in on a group that will send a report this ALA (I
believe) to bigheads on ROI for cataloging -- not a study, but ideas
on what needs to be studied. It's a very difficult task. We don't know
what elements of our data lead to "user success" (however that is
defined). Without that information, it's darned hard to know what you
can and cannot eliminate from the cataloging task.
kc
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
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Received on Fri Jun 04 2010 - 10:56:33 EDT