On Dec 5, 2007, at 4:40 PM, Martha Yee wrote:
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 ". 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.
Agreed 100%. While in general I found myself welcoming the Working Group's general analysis of what is _wrong_ with the current environment, I found myself a bit disappointed with their recommendations not going far enough or specific enough in providing actionable advice to do something about it. I'd like to see something recommended along the lines of what Martha recommends above. There is _no_ reason this couldn't be done. The technological environment is sufficient to support it. It needs some resources applied to it (if the vendors won't support it, we can figure out ways to hack it in anyway, we're used to hacking around our vendors; and the open source solutions quickly can support it), and it needs buy-in from the cataloging community---and a reccommendation from such a working group could ease buy-in. It also needs a way to share information that is _affordable_--- OCLC's price structure is in fact a barrier to this kind of sharing (I shouldn't have to pay every time someone corrects an authority record to get that micro-edit). As the report correctly identifies. I'd also note that this kind of automated sharing doesn't need to be limited to authority records. If a cataloger somewhere makes a correction or improvement to a bib record, and I have that same bib record (with the right identifiers so I know it's the same bib record) in my system--my system should immediately and automatically download and apply that change, with little or no human intervention. The lack of this is the a huge problem in our cooperative cataloging environment, seriously reducing efficiency. Perhaps I was just being charitable when I read the report, but what Martha accurately describes as "managing the import, overlay, and export of the same bibliographic records into thousands of different individual catalogs" is what I assumed the report _meant_ when it said "the redundant modification of records", and it had my shaking my head in agreement. Jonathan
