I just submitted these at the Working Group site, and will follow Diane's lead in sending them in segments:
As the first questioner at LC noted in the webcast of the session that introduced these recommendations to LC staff, this report calls for a lot of expensive work to retool our cataloging practices (restructuring LCSH? converting MARC to XML?) and a lot of additional work on the part of catalogers (adding all broader, narrower, and related subject headings to bibliographic records?), yet it offers no guidance on how to pay for all of this. Janet Swan Hill hinted orally that the only possible source of funds might be Google or the like. Despite many excellent individual recommendations in this draft report, the overall effect is to say that we should all do more with less. Like the kid in the fairy tale about the emperor's new clothes, I feel I must ask: isn't this somewhat like recommending that straw be spun into gold? The fundamental underlying problem is that libraries have acquired more than they can process with their current resources. I'm surprised that there isn't a recommendation concerning ways either to increase funding or to demand better fiscal responsibility from library administrators. For example, are there budget formulae out there that link acquisition rates to processing budgets such that an increase in acquisition rate can take place only with a concomitant increase in the processing budget? If not, should we not recommend that they be developed and implemented? We might need different formulae for acquisitions of materials that are widely held by other libraries than for acquisitions of rare and unique materials, but there should be some way to address this issue. If a library is acquiring more materials than it can process, it is not being a responsible manager of its fiscal resources (nor of its collections). Also, it appears to me that persons and bodies that provide funding for libraries need to be better educated about the fact that a library cannot be created by simply establishing an acquisitions budget. From the beginning of their history, libraries have always had to struggle with significant processing costs in order to secure their collections and make them available to researchers. If materials are not processed, secured, and made accessible, it is pointless to acquire them. Processing requires trained staff who deserve to be paid at least a living wage for their labor. It does not bode well for technical services staff that, so far, the internet has been an economy of free labor. It is time for Americans to grow up and start paying their way in the world, to stop behaving, in the immortal words of our president, "like teenagers with their parents' credit cards." Free labor is a synonym for slavery. The education of persons and bodies that provide funding needs to be the work of library administrators. It is a hard job, calling for charm and diplomacy, but isn't that why administrators are paid "the big bucks"? The statement in the second sentence of the introduction that the realization of the future of bibliographic control "will occur in cooperation with the private sector" and the statement on p. 8 that "Many information resources formerly managed in the not-for-profit sector are now the objects of a significant profit economy" are ominous. I hope that we will be careful in future not to cross the fine line between making our records accessible to internet search engines and using our scarce tax dollars to provide corporate welfare. In my experience, very little of the time and energy of most catalogers is spent in "the redundant modification of records." Most of our time is spent establishing and maintaining authority control over thousands of different individual catalogs and managing the import, overlay, and export of the same bibliographic records into thousands of different individual catalogs. Here is where the internet offers the greatest promise for potential cost savings, it seems to me. Why couldn't the community that managed the cooperative development of the MARC record also manage the cooperative development of shared open source software to support a single virtual authority-controlled catalog with global updating capability and a FRBR-ized OPAC interface, such that any educated cataloger anywhere could update an authority record and have the change reflected everywhere in the world for all other catalogers and for all catalog users? (OCLC does not qualify--yet, anyway.) Why could we not also cooperatively develop software for local inventory control, circulation, acquisitions, and the like that linked upward to master records in the virtual catalog? It is actually the current shared cataloging environment (i.e., all of these records moving in and out of different databases) that has been the biggest barrier to the development of FRBR-ized record structures. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martha M. Yee Cataloging Supervisor UCLA Film & Television Archive 1015 N. Cahuenga Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90038-2616 323-462-4921 x27 323-469-9055 (fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Email at work) Campus mail: 302 E. Melnitz 132306 http://myee.bol.ucla.edu (Web page) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "You have a dollar. I have a dollar. We swap. Now you have my dollar and I have your dollar. We are not better off. You have an idea. I have an idea. We swap. Now you have two ideas and I have two ideas. Both are richer. When you gave, you have. What I got, you did not lose. Thats cooperation"Jimmy Durante quoted in Schnozzola, by Gene Fowler, 1951, p. 207-208.
