Jenn is correct that the notion of "cataloging quality" has been
confined to a fairly battered black box labelled "conformance to
cataloging rules," but some of us have been trying for some time to
change the parameters of that conversation.
At this risk of being accused of blowing my own horn (gawd forbid), I
will point out that a colleague and I wrote a fairly substantive
chapter about metadata quality in "Metadata in Practice."
That article is available from Cornell's eCommons institutional repository:
Title: The Continuum of Metadata Quality:
Defining, Expressing, Exploiting
Authors: Bruce, Thomas R. Hillmann, Diane I.
Keywords: metadata quality
Issue Date: 2004
Publisher: ALA Editions
Citation: In Metadata in Practice, D. Hillmann & E Westbrooks, eds.
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/7895
Diane
Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
Perfection is not an attainable goal. Which, indeed, should
not stop us from exersizing quality control and improvement.
But the way we do that is by being honest about the quality
of what we've got, that it's not perfect, that it will never
be perfect, but that we can try to make it better. As a
starting point, more studies on the _actual_ quality of our
cataloging records would be welcome (there are all sorts of
things you can measure, not neccesarily any one single
measure of 'quality'.
Any of those things being measured would be welcome).
The fairly substantial body of literature on cataloging quality
tends to define "quality" as "conforming to cataloging rules." I'd
like to see much more work in this area that defines quality as
something closer to "allows user x to do y, which has been shown in
z as a real-world need."
Jenn
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Jenn Riley
Metadata Librarian
Digital Library Program
Indiana University - Bloomington
Wells Library W501
(812) 856-5759
www.dlib.indiana.edu
Inquiring Librarian blog: www.inquiringlibrarian.blogspot.com
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Diane I. Hillmann
Research Librarian
Cornell University Library
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Voice: (607) 387-9207
Fax: (607) 793-9505
Skype: dihillmann
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