hecain
Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:47:10 -0700
Quoting Weinheimer Jim <j.weinhei...@aur.edu>:
It is my own opinion that whatever we produce cannot ever be "Enough" for what people want and need from information. (Thanks for putting it that way, June!) Those ways of thinking about the catalog are over, and I think, forever. While this may be sad and regrettable, I think it is part of growing up and it is just as well if those ideas are buried.
Nevertheless, most of us remain in the struggle to record what we are providing for our users.
It seems to me that it is all very well to explore ideas about future data structures and how they might support services that would meet our users' needs.
But my real-life difficulty in serving the users of the library I worked for (and still help out from time to time, now I'm retired) is to put records for new and old (unrecorded) resources into the catalogue, consistently with the resources already recorded there, so that people can find what we have, and using the facilities on the catalogue navigate from one to another to get the best match between what they're looking for and what we can provide. Our catalogue lacks bells and whistles, but it serves the purposes of both staff and end-users, not to mention the groups who are our proprietors, reasonably well. The changes RDA (if implemented!) will bring will make at least a superficial difference, but probably not much more than that. If we want to pursue FRBR-type clustering (beyond the linking fields and hyperlinked headings of our present cataloguing) then we can turn to Open Worldcat and/or to the National Library of Australia's Trove service (which piggypacks on the Libraries Australia database and clusters records by their distinctive characteristics).
Meanwhile the most vexing problem I encounter is not the structure of the data and how it's encoded, it's the endless duplicate records in the databases -- and in OCLC's case the non-AACR2 foreign records which often are the only ones for materials I'm dealing with -- and I can assure Jim, that those I've already entered are beginning to attract requests from users. We must be doing something right.
I confess to a bias: I tend to treat the tangible printed document as the norm; however I recognize that I belong to an age that's passing. However it affects my outlook on the purposes of libraries and the role of the catalogue as a key to resources presented to library users. As I see it, libraries are primarily about *documents*: things that can be described, summarized, organized, stored and retrieves -- and, most importantly, used and cited and put away and then called up again for people to verify what they tell us. Moreover, nobody else in the information universe is going to keep track of documents so that another person can retrieve what another author used as a resource in creating what she or he wrote. I don't yet see how linked data structures contribute to this endeavour, and it seems to me quite possible that they may undermine the recording of documents in terms of distinguishing characteristics, responsibility and associations, content, likeness and difference.
Libraries are of course in the information game. But unless they pay attention first to the documents that contain the information, there is nothing at all to distinguish them from any other kind of information agency and we might as will turn the whole enterprise over to the information scientists.
I wonder how documents figure in the economy of Jim's library? Not every information need can be met from documentary resources, but if the documents don't any longer matter then what's the purpose of the library to make it different from any other kind of instructional support?
Hal Cain Melbourne, Australia hec...@dml.vic.edu.au ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.