Bernhard,
This is all excellent stuff and food for thought. I've got only one
comment which really is something I'd like to make a bit clearer even
if it's intertwined into most of the stuff you list ;
* Persistent Identification Management
Yeah, boring sounding stuff, I know, I know, but this is the one area
which the commercial world suck at, it is desperately needed both now
and especially for the future, and I suspect one of the things
librarians would excel at, thrive at, and justify any other venture
librarians would like to do at pretty much any cost (ok, slight
exaggeration perhaps, but if you ever wanted to be relevant to the
future, this is *it*!).
Someone needs to make sure we have good identifiers for "stuff", to
make sure they are pruned, harvested and taken good care of, promote
them, make the useable and re-useable. You all know the drill for
authority records and the like, People Australia
(https://wiki.nla.gov.au/display/peau/Examples) or OCLC Identities
being good examples of the basics. Someone needs to be in charge of
all things (subjects, topics, categories, etc.) that are referenced in
the world, and the world of books are already referencing a
bucket-load of these things (in other words, a full revision of LCSH
is in order, as well, but boy would it be worth it!). Turn NLA, OCLC
or LOC numbers into aliases for persistent identifiers (or join them),
join forces globally to create a network of catalogers and librarians
who can actually do that one thing that everybody I suspect they want
you to do; knowledge management.
The Next Generation Catalog should be a global Knowledge Management
system with good persistent identification management to boot, not an
inventory with some links here and there. I think this re-naming is
vitally important.
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Wed Aug 17 2011 - 05:58:15 EDT