On 17/11/2012 03:07, Karen Coyle wrote:
<snip>
> Rather than beginning with our bibliographic metadata (or any other
> metadata, really) I think we should be looking at services first, and
> then deciding what metadata fulfills those services. What do people
> need? I don't have data that would allow me to answer that question
> (and I would love to have such data!) but my own thinking is tending
> toward:
> - they probably need navigation that is based on concepts rather than
> words -- that allows them to go narrower and broader, or sideways. I
> recall studies when I was in library school that showed that people
> begin a search with a broader topic term than what actually fulfills
> their information need. In other words, the questions are less
> specific than the answer that turns out to be helpful. This makes a
> lot of sense, because the person asking the question probably knows
> less that what will be revealed as the answer. Keyword searching (aka
> "googling") isn't conceptual, and Google et al function more as yellow
> pages than as knowledge organization systems. Libraries do classify
> their works, but unfortunately we classify only to determine shelf
> order. I'd like to see experiments with classification as navigation.
> - they need to get to stuff that isn't open access on the web, but is
> available through a library. Thus: library holdings and licensed content.
> - they need recommendations and guidance when exploring new topics.
> Wikipedia sometimes helps people get started, but I'm finding the
> bibliographies in WP pages to be somewhat random. I'd like to see the
> art of bibliography revived.
> - they need all kinds of help digging through the mass of stuff that
> IS available, and I'd like to see a way to do "shared screen"
> reference, and for libraries to somehow find the means to give
> personalized help or even group help. The idea of "maker spaces"
> needn't be limited to 3-D printing
> - etc etc
>
> It goes on and on, and at some point you try to prioritize based on
> what you can do, physically and economically. What I don't think is
> going to be the answer to most of these questions is a careful,
> hand-crafted description of the physical characteristics of common,
> mass-produced items. For all that one can find a use case for knowing
> that the pagination of a best-seller is "xii, 356p." (or "xii, 356
> pages" in RDA), I sincerely doubt that this will turn out to be in the
> top ten of the metadata elements that provide services people need.
> And for all that it may be hard to give up some practices, it still
> makes no sense to be spending precious library staff time on anything
> that doesn't meet high priority needs.
>
> We still have the problem of determining what those needs are, and one
> of the recommendations in the "Future of Bibliographic Control" report
> was that we need to become a data-driven profession. It is rather
> ironic that we consider ourselves "information professionals" but in
> fact we have little information about the impact of our profession in
> meeting user needs. We really need to get serious about studying our
> users and our services so that we can make decisions based on reality
> not conjecture. Where we get both the $$ and the expertise for that I
> don't know, but the future of libraries depends on it.
</snip>
I agree with all of this completely. But this does show that you believe
there is a need for library bibliographic metadata to be on the web--at
least the access points, not the descriptive portions. The description
is almost always (I won't say always) aimed at the librarians and
collection managers, to ensure maximum efficiency in managing the
collection. While xii, 356 p. is mostly unnecessary to a patron, it is
*vital information* for the librarian whose job is to manage the
collection. I wrote about precisely this in "Realities of Standards in
the Twenty-First Century"
http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15838#.UKod9oZnZMo (Part of
"Conversations with Catalogers in the 21st Century").
Catalogs do not have to be declared dead, but the dictionary part needs
to be considered obsolete. Many parts of Cutter's "Rules for a
Dictionary Catalog" just don't make sense anymore, i.e. the dictionary
part. There are probably people alive today who have never looked up
anything in alphabetical order. In fact, I wonder how long it will be
before people cease to understand the "dictionary" part of what Cutter
wrote about--that in his day, everybody looked up everything in
alphabetical order and now, it is very rare. Online dictionaries are not
searched alphabetically; Wikipedia isn't. Of course, to experience it,
all anybody will have to do is get a printed dictionary (or download a
free one) and look something up but perhaps even all of that will become
lost.
The "conceptual groupings" that catalogers make, e.g. the set of all
resources with the subject "Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849--Knowledge--Book
industries and trade" are very useful, but the current methods to access
it are obsolete. Teasing something similar out of full-text searching is
difficult, and making that same access reliable is almost impossible to
imagine using full text or relying on "crowdsourcing".
--
*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 Mon Nov 19 2012 - 07:14:50 EST