Jim Weinheimer wrote in part:
> At the risk of being too blunt and making myself the object of general derision, I think that at the level these people will be discussing, perhaps
> it would be best that if technical services people attend, they should only
> be there as observers ... what is needed now is *imagination* and this imagination should
> not be limited by what the technicians immediately consider to be impracticable.
> . . .
> After all, when the Ferrari Formula 1 racing team is figuring out what they need to do to win races, they do not want the mechanics saying, "Well, that
> just can't be done."
I sincerely doubt both those premises. Cataloging doesn't make one unimaginative, just as being a mechanic doesn't. (And I bet engineers do want to know what works in the field and what doesn't, especially in a time-constrained environment such as racing.) Actually, I'd think systems folks are more akin to the mechanics in this analogy while catalogers are more akin to engineers, but either way I'm against a blanket elitist exclusion of thousands of practitioners by using them as scapegoats for others failures. In the case of the catalog service, it has been failed by leadership in librarianship -- collectively we've let our software under-utilize and under-serve our patrons. Whatever we need, I doubt that fewer informed ideas is the answer for success.
Daniel
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Daniel CannCasciato
Head of Cataloging
Central Washington University Brooks Library
The library: Your guide to blogs through the ages.
Received on Tue Sep 21 2010 - 10:39:18 EDT