Re: Authority in an Age of Open Access (an analysis)

Hiya,

Aaron wrote:
"There aren't enough catalogers available with specific domain knowledge to
be able to adequately catalog everything."

Yes, I agree completely. But.

There's something to be said about how any piece of work is started and
worked upon, and I'll give you a personal story as an example.

For a few years I was looking for information on Tania Maria, a Brazilian
jazz musician (song, keyboards) and expected WikiPedia to have some. But
there was nothing. Nothing at all, so you had to plough through the bits
you could scrape together out there. A couple of years went by. Still
nothing. So I thought, heck, I'll create the first entry with some info I
found online. First page got rejected (plagiarism, and rightly so), so I
re-wrote my entry, and it wasn't long at all. Little by little, people
added their stuff, too, and within a year the quality was quite good, far
better than what I could muster alone.

Search Google for her name, and that page is the first that comes up. And
it's much longer, more detailed and far better than my original entry, and
I was, well, a fan and a proverbial "cataloguer with domain knowledge" at
that time.

There's two points here ;

   1. Everyone is waiting for someone else to start things off
   2. Distributed open systems with humans at the helm tend to keep quality
at the right side of the bell-curve.


Cheers,

Alex


On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 8:33 AM, Dobbs, Aaron <AWDobbs_at_ship.edu> wrote:

> I see it more as a realistic assessment of where the world of information
> is right now:
> "Not every cataloger can catalog everything."
>
> Or, in other words:
> "There aren't enough catalogers available to be able to catalog
> everything."
> Or maybe:
> "There aren't enough catalogers available with specific domain knowledge
> to be able to adequately catalog everything."
>
> That's the problem with soundbytes: reductio ad absurdum.
>
> -Aaron
> :-)'
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:
> NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of James Weinheimer
> Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2012 4:24 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Authority in an Age of Open Access (an analysis)
>
> On 07/11/2012 16:58, Karen Coyle wrote:
> <snip>
> > 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.
> </snip>
>
> An ominous tweet! The direction of this kind of attitude must be changed.
> --
> *James Weinheimer* weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com
> *First Thus* http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
> *Cooperative Cataloging Rules*
> http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
> *Cataloging Matters Podcasts*
> http://blog.jweinheimer.net/p/cataloging-matters-podcasts.html
>



-- 
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