Re: Whiny and demanding; rude and arrogant; clueless and uninformed

From: William Denton <wtd_at_nyob>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2010 01:31:28 -0400
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
On 20 September 2010, Janet Hill wrote:

> You'd better include technical services folks (catalogers, metadata 
> specialists, whatever you want to call them) in your collaborative 
> group, since they are the ones who are most intimately acquainted with 
> the content ..

"Cataloguers are overlooked and ignored."

It's a fair cop, guv.  One of the cataloguers I work with reminded me of 
how involved her department had been in the launching of our VuFind 
catalogue [1].  They were a crucial part of it.

But in the talk I'm doing we're not talking about implementing a discovery 
layer in general, we're focusing on how to use them and build them to 
improve information literacy, specifcally ACRL's Information Literacy 
Competencies for Higher Education:

http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/informationliteracycompetency.cfm#stan

Granted that of course everyone working together should have the same 
overall goals and serve, as best they can in their particular role, the 
purposes of the university (in my case) in teaching, learning, and 
research.  And granted that people working together will talk to each 
other, share what they know, collaborate, and shoot the breeze over lunch.

Granted those things, can anyone give me concrete examples of cataloguers 
affecting the information literacy program of a library through the 
workings of a next-generation catalogue?

This is a genuine question.  I would like to hear cases.

Bill

[1] http://www.library.yorku.ca/find/
-- 
William Denton, Toronto : miskatonic.org www.frbr.org openfrbr.org
Received on Wed Sep 22 2010 - 01:32:13 EDT