On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 11:53 AM, Janet Hill <janet.hill_at_colorado.edu> wrote:
> As I write this, I can hear the voice of Ben Tucker (Principal Descriptive Cataloger at the Library of Congress when I worked there) in my mind, saying in his gentle Carolina accent ... "The catalog is not an encyclopedia, and it is not a dictionary. It's a catalog." It can lead you to the encyclopedia or the dictionary (or biographies, films, works of fantasy, maps, etc.), where you may find the answers to your questions, but it's not there to answer those all of life's questions itself.
>
This is an interesting point, but it raises two other questions:
* If a catalog doesn't do those things, but that's want our users
actually want or need, does the catalog make sense?
-and (and these are not necessarily related to each other)-
* If the catalog does a good job at linking to encylopedias,
dictionaries, biographies maps, etc. (which it doesn't -- at least not
in a machine-readable way) / why doesn't it just become a component in
a larger discovery system that *can* utilize these things?
> It's not an oracle.
>
Maybe that's a failure in our will and imagination, though.
-Ross.
Received on Thu Aug 11 2011 - 12:25:06 EDT