Hiya,
Yes, this is that old canard of carrier vs. content. The library world
are kings of the carriers, but are most often terrible at content. But
didn't you know? Content is king. :)
I have to say, though, that there's something amiss in this whole
"content vs. carrier" debate, and that is the fact that we humans - us
happy users of said carriers and content - never really think of these
things as so distinct and separated as we discuss it here. It's really
the same thing; content and carrier is the *same* thing, different
aspects of the thing and I don't think it's awfully healthy to make
this distinction sharper or clearer, no matter how much library
culture and process that has been built up over the last 300 years.
FRBR - in many ways the pinnacle of library world business modeling -
tries in a clumsy way to make a modelling distinction where we normal
folks would just say "the original Dune" rather than any sequel,
prequel, or derivative work, where we treat the 1968 edition on par
with the 1998 reprint in most cases, and would use the former as a
conceptual identifier more than any arbitrary one. People apart from
librarians and hardcore researchers don't care all that much about the
expression of the carrier, only that "Dune by Frank Herbert" is the
same as when other people talk about "Dune by Frank Herbert". Often
the complex tool of the librarian gets in the way of the simplest
thing; "Dune by Frank Herbert" is really only one thing, no matter how
many editions and covers and colors and media it has come through, and
1965 is a far more important date than 1998. OCLC identities and
similar notions are on the right track, but that model of persistent
and numerous but binding identifiers that are heavily shared (LOC and
OCLC numbers preferred over ISBN, anyone?) and curated needs to get
acceptance into all ILS and OPACs as soon as possible, because this is
what you hang your content and meta data on to.
Date ranges are interesting, and one would assume that any future meta
data repository would create date ranges that actually makes sense to
those who seek out its content or references, not just rehash what
AACR/RDA tells us to mark up. Also, one would hope that dates could be
relative to other works, and not just be text properties hanging off
some expression. ("All novels with stories in both 17th century
England and 20th century Latin-America" should be a good test case)
Poking further; the closest the library world is to content is TOC and
LCSH (and similar), a terribly watered down and flat effort to capture
what any thing "is about." However, it's what you've got since
full-text you seem to be mostly allergic too for some reason, although
after all these years I'm still not sure why. There's been talk of a
number of scanning projects to get at the content so libraries could
better deal with it, and the odd e-book project, but little to nothing
has come of it. You probably know how Google Scholar really should be
in the hands of librarians, alas.
Good night. I can tell I'm tired.
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Wed Jul 27 2011 - 06:58:58 EDT