On Mon, 28 Jun 2010, Stephen Paling wrote:
> ... the compact notation that was necessary on catalog cards may
> now be a hindrance.
Has anyone surveyed the smaller libraries lately to see whether they
might accept some sort of technology transfer from we elitists at the
opposite end of the innovation spectrum with complete elimination of
standards based upon their present "physical" catalogs in mind?
> ... let's build our systems ...
Ah, there's the rub. In a profit-minded society bent on eliminating
public funding altogether, such systems are inevitably commercial
products, and you all know what the ramifications of that can be ...
> Conduct Basic Research.
See above.
> I am amazed by the number of people who advocate the use of new
> standards such as RDA and FRBR without even a nod toward any evidence
> that either standard is actually what users want or need.
Could it be (gasp!) that some individuals in our society are simply
conditioned to respect the concept of "standards" designed by
"authorities" itself, regardless of content? OTOH, *concrete* "standards"
are quite effective for stimulating commercial product design (and
preventing critical thinking and innovation).
> Much of the organization of information will need to be done by machines
> in an automated fashion. Instead of fighting this, let's ask ourselves
> how we can be involved in producing ontologies.
God forbid that [e.g.] legal case data (transcripts and decisions in
particular) should ever be digitized and made publicly available for data
mining in the instant-- why, that might eliminate the core principles of
litigation (manipulation, profit and self-interest) altogether!
I'm not even going to go into corporate proprietariness in depth. Can
you imagine the socioeconomic impacts of sharing (shudder!) information
about things like oil drilling technologies and OPAC programming? Egad!
Cheers!
jgm
John G. Marr
Cataloger
CDS, UL
Univ. of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131
jmarr_at_unm.edu
jmarr_at_flash.net
Received on Mon Jun 28 2010 - 18:07:07 EDT