One last point of Karen's talk that I would like to raise is a very
important one, and perhaps the major question facing the cataloging
community today.
Karen mentions that the world doesn't need yet another copy of
bibliographic metadata, when the world is awash with it already, from
Amazon to ONIX to all kinds of other types of bibliographic metadata and
therefore all that libraries can contribute is their holdings data. This
really hits the nail on the head, in my opinion, and the question is: is
this correct or not? If it is correct, it would appear to mean that the
current information discovery mechanisms are considered to be adequate.
These mechanisms are based on various types of algorithms, almost always
of enormous complexity and often, proprietary and unavailable for review.
Someone who has brought these issues to the fore and made some
fascinating arguments is Ted Striphas and his ideas of "algorithmic
culture". He lays out very clearly several problems that have concerned
me but I have not been able to describe them as well as he has. In
short, he describes "algorithmic culture" in this way (from
http://www.thelateageofprint.org/2011/09/26/who-speaks-for-culture/):
"When I began writing about "algorithmic culture," I used the term
mainly to describe how the sorting, classifying, hierarchizing, and
curating of people, places, objects, and ideas was beginning to be given
over to machine-based information processing systems. The work of
culture, I argued, was becoming increasingly algorithmic, at least in
some domains of life."
Of course, these algorithms are dominated by engineers. This is from the
same post:
"As Siva Vaidhyanathan has pointed out in The Googlization of
Everything, engineers --- mostly computer scientists --- today hold
extraordinary sway over what does or doesn't end up on our cultural
radar. To put it differently, amid the din of our pubic conversations
about culture, their voices are the ones that increasingly get heard or
are perceived as authoritative."
Here is an interview he did with the CBC radio show "Spark"
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2011/10/full-interview-ted-striphas-on-algorithmic-culture/
(16 minutes)
It seems to me as if he is talking in many ways about libraries and
their traditional tools. Attached to this is the crowdsourcing example
of the Smithsonian Institution that I provided in the previous thread on
this list "Authority in an Age of Open Access (an analysis)" where it
was very easy to point out serious problems with access that would
otherwise remain hidden.
So, after all of this, my question is, is Karen correct about the world
not needing our metadata except for our holdings data? It seems to me
that either answer: yes or no, raises a raft of additional questions.
--
*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
Received on Fri Nov 16 2012 - 04:36:15 EST