On 14/03/2013 00:14, john g marr wrote:
<snip>
> We should do NOTHING that does NOT progress toward fixing the broken
> society, especially suggesting that fixing it is either too difficult,
> must be done less energetically than taking it apart, or is not our
> responsibility. There is no higher goal, particularly when pushiness
> and self-obsession are becoming ascendant.
</snip>
Well, lots of people have been complaining about their "broken
societies" from the earliest days of writing and we have muddled
through. My own personal view is that our societies will get more broken
before anybody wants to really try and fix them, but that is a painful
topic.
I want to try to limit myself to trying to get catalogers just to
recognize that the tool they have spent their entire careers building is
broken. That includes me! It is not easy. It wasn't easy for me. Many
refuse to believe it and I understand, but brow-beating people just
makes them angry and even more resistant. Still, if catalogers do not
want to recognize how the public relates to their catalogs, it is very
difficult to find a way out of the morass. The pro-RDA people, I think,
are finally recognizing that RDA is no solution and have been very
reticent to go public with the changes, because the changes will be seen
as incredibly silly to the public and will make precisely zero
difference to people, other than banishing the New Testament and Old
Testament, which I can imagine would make some groups very angry if they
find out.
FRBR may be considered more useful, but only because people say that we
can enter "Linked Data" then. First, we don't need FRBR to get into
linked data, but more important, I think there has been very little
thought about the real people who we expect to discover all of this
wonderful new knowledge by manipulating the data from our catalog
records. How useful will it be for someone interested in the history of
Roman theater or how the free market is supposed to work, to manipulate
the paging, or the general notes, or any of it? Nobody wants to reply to
that. And of course, no research is being done to find out what impact
any of this will have on the public. I may be completely wrong and the
public is just chomping at the bit to begin manipulating the information
in our catalog records, but I doubt it. I think no research is being
done because nobody wants to know.
Take the Google Ngram project as an example. How could our catalog data
improve it? I think it could, but how? By limiting to certain conceptual
groups (subject areas), authors and perhaps titles would be good (that
is, our headings) but manipulating it by the paging, or notes or series?
Probably the most useful would be edition but that means too many things
to too many different communities; maybe the publication information,
but even that is a real stretch. Again, I shall grant that something
might be useful, but somebody should do at least some *little bit* of
research to find out if somebody wants it before just assuming that
people will want our information once it is "turned into" data. I don't
think that is the information people want from our catalogs. People want
something else.
They just want the catalogs to work again, even though most people don't
even understand what that means, or have completely forgotten.
--
*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 Thu Mar 14 2013 - 09:07:18 EDT