Just tweeted:
"Shirky: The only group that can catalog everything is everybody. #edu12"
That's Educause 2012. Being webcast but unfortunately, it's behind a
paywall.
kc
On 11/7/12 1:25 AM, James Weinheimer wrote:
> On 06/11/2012 19:15, Dave Caroline wrote:
> <snip>
>> Having participated in a crowd image identification project I can
>> endorse the idea.
>> We had a donation of a few thousand negatives from a newspaper archive where
>> only a percentage had any writing on the envelope, we printed some for public
>> display and had people who were at the events inform us to the image content.
>> We also mounted all the pictures in folders with an area for the
>> public to annotate, a lot of information was forth coming.
>>
>> A statement in this thread "enthusiastic public who are completely
>> untrained" shows me a the holier than thou attitude, try learning what
>> they know about the image subject rather than denigrate.
> </snip>
>
> Of course, this argument of "holier than thou" can be turned around and
> someone can say that the person who is trained is no better than the one
> who has no training at all. Strangely enough, in my experience it is
> precisely catalogers, and to a lesser degree librarians in general, who
> "get no respect". Nobody would ever say anything like that about IT
> people, about mechanics, about lawyers, about doctors, builders, or
> about almost any other field at all. It is beyond question that we all
> want only trained people to do those jobs. Very few understand what
> professional catalogers do; what it is that makes their records
> different (and supposedly higher quality) than the records made by
> "untrained people."
>
> To start down a path that claims untrained people are as good as trained
> catalogers will lead to the eventual extinction of the professional
> cataloger--of this I have no doubt. Especially in this economic climate.
> Catalogers must make very clear why the metadata they make is "better"
> than what anybody else makes. There is nothing at all wrong with
> defending your own profession and is not being "holier than thou". After
> all, doctors would not hesitate to argue such a case, or mechanics, or
> IT staff. We would expect them to do so. To do so with the cataloging
> profession would end up re-arguing the case that Antonio Panizzi made so
> long ago at the British Museum. Maybe it needs to be done for the 21st
> century.
>
> One of the problems with cataloging is that mistakes are not so obvious
> as the errors of others. The errors of an IT person are obvious when the
> database returns an SQL error, or when a lawyer loses a case through
> incompetence and you are sent to jail for a crime you didn't commit or
> are fined an outrageous amount of money for nothing, or when a doctor
> completely misdiagnoses your illness and you wind up in the hospital for
> emergency surgery. Do you want the person checking out your groceries
> and taking your money to not know anything about the job? Or do we want
> to find their mistakes only after they have shortchanged us, or when
> they count out their till at the end of the day and the business
> discovers they are $500 short? When a mistake is made with cataloging,
> it is not so clear: you *don't see anything*, just like I showed when
> you click on the tag "Brazil" and see only two items from the set of 15,
> when you should have seen nine. Simply to realize there is such an error
> is extremely difficult--far more difficult than when your car doesn't
> start. To proceed onward from there to understand why you do not see all
> nine records that are on Brazil is also anything but simple.
>
> So, when Joe Montibello mentioned that tagging should not replace the
> work of the trained cataloger, that was fine but I fear it will not end
> there. Since so few people understand what professional catalogers
> really do, it may turn out that if catalogers are not forthright in the
> need for their work, they will be thrown overboard for these kinds of
> services. In the Clay Shirkey talk, he mentions the Smithsonian project
> as an example of a "scholarly use" and I don't believe he understands
> the consequences.
>
> That is why it is up to the real experts, the catalogers, to point out
> these problems that we can see rather easily--not to dismiss them as
> unimportant or obsolete--and not to say that we are being "holier than
> thou." We are being experts in our field, doing our jobs.
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Wed Nov 07 2012 - 11:00:52 EST