john g marr wrote:
>
> Any such project (we are talking about OPAC design, etc.) involves
> built-in flexibility to immediately adapt to changes in the "rules". Who
> better to design such projects that the gatekeepers as the people who
> write the rules, or who better to participate in revising the rules that
> the designers of projects like OPACs, matching one to the other?
>
Completely agreed. A virtuous circle of metadata experts participating
in software development and software engineering experts participating
in metadata standards and practices development. So why isn't this
happening? You suggested:
> > If (enough?) catalogers aren't involved in these projects, why not?
>
> Good question. What is budgeted locally (e.g. catalogers' time) stays
> local (i.e., in the local library, rather than throughout the library
> community)?
I think you're right that's a large part of it.
Recently, local institutions have started, just a bit, to allocate
software engineering time to cooperative software development, via open
source. To even get to this start, took a LOT of effort by librarians
and library technologists educating and advocating to their administrators.
So what can we do to get adminstrators to see similar benefit to
providing metadata management expertise to cooperative projects? I mean,
via cooperative cataloging the cataloging community is in theory awfully
cooperative already. So why not here?
Perhaps the de-professionalization of the cataloging occupation over the
past 20 years have left very few catalogers to do this. But there aren't
that many library software developers either, not nearly enough, but
we're still valiantly trying.
One difference is that one or a handful or institutions _can_ take the
metadata we have, and _try_ to do our best with it with software
development. But institutions aren't able (or don't feel able?) to
innovate in metadata control practices without doing it in lock-step
with _everyone_ else. But innovation can't happen that way. We need
some kind of cultural shift.
> ... whether you are aware of it or not ...
>> Was that meant as an expletive?
Sorry if it was taken the wrong way, some of us get defensive when you
suggest that the work we're busting our humps doing isn't happening. It
seemed more charitable to suggest you weren't aware of it than to take
YOUR assertion as an insult to our work.
Perhaps there's a whole lot of metadata innovation going on too in the
library world, that _I'm_ not aware of. (But please don't say RDA, it's
not working).
So, yeah, what we need is a whole bunch of cataloging and metadata
experts and a whole bunch of software developers working together to
move things forward, incrementally and with a feedback circle between
software development and metadata management practice/standard development.
I do not think that is happening. I am not sure how to make it happen.
Are you meaning to suggest that if we just put everything into the hands
of OCLC, they'll just figure it out for us and do right? I am not
optimistic, to me that sounds a lot like the whole bunch of us who, as
you say, are "spending a whole lot of energy just listening to sales
pitches." Many vendors like to tell us that if we just pay them enough
money they'll solve all our problems for us, and we wont' have to do
much thinking. And we're often only too happy to have someone tell us
this, because the problems are so hard we aren't sure how to tackle
them, great if some vendor can just solve em for us. But it ain't so.
Whether the vendor is ostensibly non-profit or not.
Oh, and since you asked, between Evergreen, OCLC-vended proprietary
software, and III, I'd judge them approximately in the order listed in
that sentance, in the software's ability to support innovative
approaches to metadata. Although in terms of supporting innovative
_metadata management workflows_, OCLC may well have it harder than III,
OCLC is locked into supporting a _gigantic_ legacy structure of
software, social systems, organizations, etc., which makes it awfully
hard to innovate there.
Jonathan
Received on Tue Aug 03 2010 - 19:01:41 EDT