HI All,
Jim Weinheimer wrote in part:
> One of the most important customers of WorldCat are catalogers and order
> staff, ...
> This is why I think standards and quality take on even more importance in this new
> world, so that a publisher could upload into a system their metadata and provide truly valuable information that everyone can accept without each
> library (or even a single library) redoing everything over and over again. Publishers should not be expected to provide an entire, finished record, but
> certain parts of it would be more of less guaranteed, e.g. certain parts of the description or specific ISBD areas. Different entities could add their
> parts and the record could gain through some form of accretion. ...
There's a problem with this, which is that line in the middle about not having every library (or even a single one) redo everything over and over again. We hear about this a lot in cataloging, yet don't see it in practice; that is, we don't redo everything over and over. It's just not the general practice and it'd be nice for the myth to drop from popularity because the call for different entities to add to, to enhance, records is vitally important and, I believe. Yet it seems to contradict the idea of not redoing everything, and is probably the source of that myth. Inadequate catalog records have been around for a long time and have been updated locally for just as long. The ability to share these enhancements, capture them and pass them along in the form of upgraded records, has been around a fairly short while. It's a great piece of infrastructure support for a needed part of cooperative efforts. I imagine this must have some parallel in creation and maintenance of!
open source programs as well as collaborative intellectual efforts such as Wikipedia and the like.
> But if everyone is engaged in a furious race of fixing everyone else's mistakes, we will be like a dog chasing its own tail.
I disagree. If we fix mistakes, we make the data more usable, predictable and retrievable. (I include as mistakes omissions of data that should be in a record.) Something mis-coded is similar to something mislabeled and then filed or shelved - - it's more or less lost. Something poorly described and poorly analyzed is less often found and viewed for possible selection by users. So, let's obsessively and furiously fix those errors!
Daniel
--
Daniel CannCasciato
Head of Cataloging
Central Washington University Brooks Library
400 E. University Way
Ellensburg, WA 98926-7548
dcc_at_cwu.edu
Received on Sat Aug 07 2010 - 10:05:28 EDT