I am forwarding this message because, for some reason, it came to me
as the administrator of the list. Hmmm...
Hi,
Longtime reader, firsttime submitter.
I am a cataloger who has been working with digitizing, PHP, MySQL and
trying to move the catalog out of the ILS. I think that this forum
is the
correct one for these discussions. To me CODE4LIB means that we are
working to develop real solutions for real problems that the
vendors will
not be able to do because of financial and contractual restraints.
I also believe that there are going to be multiple solutions that
work --
even multiple solutions at single institutions. I don't think that
there
is a real weakness with MARC, but there is with the ways that it
has been
used to date.
I really appreciate the "crappyblackboxie....thingy". Our real
problem is
not the rich information that has been created over the last 100
years,
but the fact that I can only get to it if I use a special tool.
Seeing as Dublin Core et al. have been based to a great extent on
MARC and
AACR, it is a shame (and as a cataloger, may I say embarassment)
that MARC
itself is so lacking in interoperability.
I believe that that is the key: interoperability. I believe that we
need
to work towards means of integrating the "catalog" with the rest of
the
information world. OpenWorldCat is a great step in this direction,
but now
we need to get our catalogers and other librarians and users adding
"metadata" (aka "cataloging," "tagging", "taxonomies", "reviews",
etc.) to
the rest of the materials.
We have the basic tools available to start doing this, especially
the open
source tools for converting MARC to MARCXML and Lucene, Z39.50,
etc. I am
really excited by the work that the CODE4LIB people have already been
doing.
I'll stop for now. Sorry I've been so longwinded,
Ross
Hi,
On 6/6/06, Eric Lease Morgan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On the other hand we are a bunch o' hackers, and there is more to
this thing (whatever it is called) than code. We need the
perspective
of catalogers, reference types, administrators, vendors, etc. Thus,
the idea for creating a new list.
Ok, that's fair enough, but will they come? My experiences with these
kind of things is that what we would like to see happen won't. Maybe
I'm overly pessimistic, but I think there is far too much politics in
the library world these days for real discussions to take place
outside of the hacking realm. Hmm. Maybe I should get soome coffee
and
come back and answer things in a more positive light. :)
Regards,
Alex
--
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you
know."
- Frank
Herbert
__ http://shelter.nu/
__________________________________________________
--
Ross Shanley-Roberts
Authority Control Librarian/
Special Projects Cataloger
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056
513 529-3376
--
Eric
