Re: Video of "Think Different"

On 11/19/12 4:14 AM, James Weinheimer wrote:
>
> </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").

I honestly do not believe that precise physical description is necessary 
for ALL libraries. It depends greatly on the circumstances and the 
purposes of the library. Any library that does not consider its purpose 
to be either archiving or a "research library" can probably dispose of 
some of the physical description. If you are the kind of library that is 
going to have one and only one edition of the text of Moby Dick (and 
that might even been an electronic text from Project Gutenberg) then 
your needs are quite different from a large university library that 
needs to have one of each edition, with the different scholarly 
prefaces, etc.

For example, my local library buys paperback books that it doesn't even 
catalog -- it just adds a barcode and a sticker saying whether it is 
Mystery, SciFi or Romance. These books circulate until they fall apart 
and then they are dumped. It's inexpensive service, and one that patrons 
appear to appreciate given the number of circulations.

There is nothing "universal" about metadata -- what metadata you need is 
ALWAYS relative to what functions you are going to perform. I understand 
the issue of sharing of library metadata, but unfortunately we've 
settled on only one metadata model -- the maximal one -- and it's the 
one that requires the greatest expertise and the greatest expense. We 
need to rethink that.

kc

>
> 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".
>

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet