On Mon, 27 Jun 2011 09:20:47 -0400, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
<snip>
Last Thursday (June 23) the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of ALA
hosted a seminar on "next-generation" library catalogs, and there were
three of us presenters:
3. myself (Notre Dame) where I asked the question "Are we there yet?"
http://bit.ly/mcF27t and I answered "No, not IMHO."
</snip>
Thanks for this excellent report, but I do have one point of difference:
mentioning that Koha and Evergreen are "free" as in a "free kitten,"
where you discover that in reality, you have taken responsibility for
this kitten, which means to feed it, teach it not to tear up your
furniture, spend money for the vet, etc. Freeware and open source
software are not "free" in this sense either, since anybody who has
undertaken such a project quickly finds out that there is maintenance of
the system, you have to do lots of server maintenance, you need to
defend against attacks, and so on and on.
But this is not what freeware and open source software is. Richard
Stallman, the father of free software, titled his story: "Free as in
Freedom". (You can read it for free at
http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/).
In my experience, this is very difficult for catalogers to really
understand. Much of their training is: this is how you do this; I have
done it this way for several years; now we have a new system and you no
longer do it this way, you do it that way. Much of cataloging
unfortunately has an "automaton" aspect to it and the advantage of
freeware/open source software is that it can emancipate you from this
way of thinking and working, so that you *can* say: I don't want to do
it that way, I have a better way of doing it. With open source, if you
have the knowledge, you can just change things yourself, right then,
without asking permission from the "owners". If you want a link from one
page to another, it only takes a minute. If you have an idea to actually
have your database interoperate with another database, something more
complicated, you don't have to beg the developer to *please, please,
please!* implement this, wait for him to get around to it and then pay
through the nose; you can just do it yourself, or hire somebody else if
you don't have the knowledge.
Still, it is difficult to free yourself from the traditional need to
adjust yourself to the system as opposed to the new need to adjust the
system to yourself. Both demand some responsibilities on the part of the
user base. But getting catalogers to think in these ways is difficult.
They certainly can--and have done so--but for them, it is a step outside
what they normally do. This is why I say that imagination is what is
needed now: catalogers (and not only catalogers) need to speak out about
what they don't like in their systems, and suggest better ways, but this
is much easier said than done.
An example from my own career: we had cataloged in RLIN and inserting
diacritics demanded something like three key strokes; we switched to
NOTIS and I needed (I think) four key strokes; we switched to Voyager
and it needed something like six or eight key strokes! I remember
thinking: "Man, this is going the wrong way!" and I began to experiment
with MacroExpress. I remember getting it down to the same number of
keystrokes as in NOTIS, and I thought: "Why not go back to RLIN?" So I
did. But then I thought, "You know, I never did like doing it that way
anyway. What more can I do?" I remember getting the keystrokes down to
less than in RLIN, and in fact, I was even able to make a little
keyboard with Russian characters that allowed students who knew Russian
to input correct transliteration with no training!
I think there are lots of improvements out there just waiting for
someone to give them a voice!
--
James Weinheimer weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com
First Thus: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
Cooperative Cataloging Rules: http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
Received on Tue Jun 28 2011 - 07:58:59 EDT