On 14/03/2013 18:20, john g marr wrote:
<snip>
<snip>
>> 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.
>
> You statement is logically invalid and glib in that is
> all-encompassing, absolute and not grounded is facts. I'll believe it
> when people who use the tool start complaining about it in droves and
> then I'll start fixing it in relation to the specific problems
> addressed by the complaints.
</snip>
And of course, all of your statements are none of those things! :-)
I was assuming that you had listened to my podcasts where I have gone to
great pains to demonstrate how the catalog--fact--does not work in the
way it was designed to do. To prove this is elementary. I have
demonstrated this over and over again but if people do not want to
accept that those are problems, I cannot force (browbeat) them. It seems
as if many catalogers prefer to keep going in the same well-trodden
paths and pretend that retyping all of those abbreviations and by
*decreasing* access to catalog records by introducing the rule of one
and introducing the relator codes, as RDA does, is going to bring people
back to the catalog for some unknown reasons. I agree it's easier to
believe than to question.
I'm not alone in my belief that the catalog is broken however. Many out
there believe that the catalog is simply inadequate for modern society
and want to do away with it.
http://www.libereurope.eu/blog/thinking-the-unthinkable-a-library-without-a-catalogue-reconsidering-the-future-of-discovery-to
Others just hate the catalog on general principles,
http://scholar.google.it/scholar?hl=en&q=why+opacs+suck
At least I think that the problem is that the catalog is *broken* and
therefore it can be fixed instead of just trashed. In fact, if it is
fixed--really fixed--to work as it should and even better, I think it
could serve in some small way to helping the world out there.
By the way, if you wait for people to complain before you decide that
people have problems with your product, you'll be waiting a long, long
time. It is wrong to believe that people complain when they are unhappy.
When you create something that no one wants and they can find something
they prefer someplace else, people don't complain--they just go away.
When I go to a lousy butcher or a lousy restaurant here in Rome (yes,
they exist) I don't complain. I just choose a better one. People are
doing that with our catalogs. In droves.
We have been watching this with our catalogs for years.
--
*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 - 15:07:56 EDT