On 31/07/11 03:20, Karen Coyle wrote:
My main question is why we need a specific format for this, but I think
it is needed because there are particular sharing goals that would
involve ebook publishers, and it had to work in Atom. Personally I think
that we have plenty of bib metadata already, and it's pretty well
understood. Perhaps I am wrong about that. It does make me nervous when
I see formats that are designed only for books, with elements like
"author". Someone is going to want to use this for some other format,
for sure, and we'll end up with painters and composers and inventors all
coded as "author." It doesn't make sense to me to create
book-centric/exclusive metadata, but in this case that reflects the
industry that is directly involved, book publishing.
Which brings me to .... I've been involved in various groups that have
members who are championing a particular set of information resources
that they care deeply about -- often segments of academic publishing.
They create metadata schemas that work great for their area of interest
but they often think that it's just a matter of extending that metadata
to cover other interests. I don't think it works that way, or at least
that's not the best way to do things. I look at BIBO,[1] which has no
elements for sound or movie materials, and that lists "map" as a form of
illustration. This latter obviously would not reflect the view of
geography professionals who consider maps the meat of their work not a
mere illustration. The particular value that I see in library metadata
is the lack of self-interest and the attempt (achieved or not) of
treating all resources equally. The 'big picture' view of library
metadata is not understood, and I've heard folks complain that library
metadata doesn't reflect their viewpoint. I haven't yet figured out how
to explain this to them. Ed Summers mentioned a call for a manifesto for
linked data in his blog,[2] I'd like a manifesto for library cataloging
-- something very short that explains the basic philosophy, and that
doesn't use the term 'books' anywhere.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm waiting for RDA (see
http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/rda/ ) in the hope that it
solves all our representation problems. We may then have to map it to
our various encodings (XML, XMLMARC, BibTeX, BST, RDF, ...), of course.
cheers
stuart
--
Stuart Yeates
Library Technology Services http://www.victoria.ac.nz/library/
