31.07.2013 00:04, James Weinheimer:
... The refusal to accept that 99% of people do not fit into these little pre-conceived FRBR user tasks is why I think that perhaps librarianship may be destined for extinction. We must free our minds from these pre-conceptions!
Visions of doom for libraries are nothing new, but their frequency seems to increase, and doomsaying for the catalog along with them. (And for MARC, not to forget.) Now that will most probably all be premature as long as physical resources of no small relevance continue to be produced in no small numbers, many of which can soon thereafter be obtained only in libraries and with a little help from their catalogs. Not, though, exclusively by using those catalogs, as it used to be. So, most resources, and most books among them, can now be found or serendipitously stumbled over in novel ways not imagined even 20 years ago. Books are therefore now perceived as items in the universe of accessible resources, among which you navigate with tools and methods that feel ever more as how things should be to many users, young and old. Among these tools and methods, library catalogs have lost a lot of their former significance. Need catalogs acquire new significance? And if yes, how can that be achieved? By perfectioning, electronically, a functional model that satisfied the needs of some people some of the time but could only ever respond to some specific types of user needs and in some very specific ways? Only subject access by controlled vocabularies, as has been mentioned many times, is where catalogs might regain significance in new ways. RDA, up until now, contributes nothing to this. Things RDA doesn't even touch on are already being done with pre-RDA data. And BIBFRAME cannot become better than the inconsistent input it gets. We might see two roads diverging from where we are, if indeed we gather up the resolve to escape extinction (for a while): A. Focus on the library as a place to be for work and talk and leisure. Reduce catalogs to their inventory function and only make sure that books found elsewhere, by ever improving search technologies the library community has no resources to develop or even keep up with, can be quickly located using their universal identifiers. (As happens now via GBS -> WorldCat -> Library) Libraries becoming mere storehouses for physical resources, but these storehouses will be needed for some while. B. A revolution. B.Eversberg
