> Pat Sayre McCoy: > [...} Why not catalogers?
Why not catalogers? I think the answer is in the news Today, see http://tinyurl.com/68eslta (Gov accountability Office report on duplications, overlap, fragmentation of services) and even if this report is related to US Gov it seems to me the problem is being tackled almost in the same way by other governments in OCSE countries. In the open web we are supposed to pursue interoperability and integration of data, not duplication. Therefore the institutions / organisations that can better provide a certain type of data are obviously the ones that have been dealing with that type of data for ages not only because of the legacy in terms of archives and repositories but because of the skills and expertise in managing them and see the pro and cons of new uses, reuses, contextual aspects etc etc. This is the advantage of having an expertise. Having said that, when there is a good reason why and a sensible cost (a value proposition, a business justification, a market demand for it, a sustainable way to manage it) any type of cataloguing project makes sense from my point of view. I cannot say anything about the best way to produce pieces of furniture but I can say a lot about the best way to catalogue them in order to make them findable! In the past, I have successfully designed and implemented new data collection using traditional librarians skills in a complete new way with the customer and other stakeholders not even being aware of that (because it was very costly for me alone to make them aware of that. That is where the professional associations and the great institutions employing librarians and cataloguers should be engaged). If I can add a bit of humour noir, beware that "why not" was (or is still I have not read italian newspapers for the last three years but occasionally) the name of an italian mafia /'ndrangheta investigation against duplication and waste of public money in which lot of people from the north of Italy (Lombardia, Veneto) mainly involved with catholic "Compagnia delle opere" and "Comunione and liberazione" movements organised faked exchanges of money with people from the south of Italy (Calabria, Campania) - and that was to some extent a truly international operation that touched also nord-americans (mostly canadians) as far as I can remember. "Why not" in a campaigning / advocacy initiative "pro cataloguers in linked data projects" could unfortunately recall those news through search engines and newspapers archives. Brunella Longo http://www.brunellalongo.info
