John Myers has done an excellent job of summarizing why we need to pay attention to developments beyond MARC and XML and why we need to worry about getting our records out for others to use. In the long run, this is a matter of survival. Karen Coyle refreshingly admits how far there is to go before we have something workable.
Like other participants in this list, I have been cataloging for 30 years or so. What I distinctly remember about the introduction of MARC and then OCLC is the cheerful optimism that everything would be digital and that we would no longer need catalogers. I went into the profession anyway. We are finally getting to something like the point that was foretold, and we will still need someone to create metadata (perhaps even catalogers) foreseeable future. The notion that everything will be online was warped out of recognition by the arrival of the web. The same has been true of the notions that all information will be easily accessible and that libraries as physical spaces will wither up and disappear. In fact, those of us attached to educational institutions (especially we humanists) will be stuck with paper for a long time and will need physical spaces to consult physical objects. What all of this adds up to is that 1) the future takes longer to get here than the prophets tell us it will and 2) when it does arrive, that future may resemble the prophecy only in the most general outline. This is what is most frustrating about the direction RDA (this is a list for RDA, is it not?) is taking. RDA seems intent on being something that will be hospitable to all sorts of development but which will provide adequate guidance to none of them. If RDA is published and adopted, it will not be radical enough to cope with new technologies and the web and not be specific enough to be usable by existing libraries without at least one volume of instructions. -- Laurence S. Creider Special Collections Librarian New Mexico State University Las Cruces, NM 88003 Work: 575-646-7227 Fax: 575-646-7477 [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Mon, November 10, 2008 5:38 pm, Myers, John F. wrote: > The issue is that we hide our catalog records in our catalogs. While the > public face of those catalogs is a WebOPAC, this is only an html based > interface to the catalog data, an interface that is inherently self > contained. The actual records are not searchable via a search originating > on the open web. That is, I can't google or yahoo "Gone with the Wind" > along with my locale to discover that my local library has a copy of the > book or the movie available. > > If I have understood anything that Diane Hillmann has said over the past > few years it's that this segregation of our catalog records from the > larger web is possibly the greatest threat to our relevance in the future. > We will be like that island in Dr. Doolittle that breaks off from the > mainland and floats, lost, unknown and locked in time, while the rest of > the world moves forward. Second to that is the insistence on creating > catalog records that, at their core, are still only visually parsable. > This needs to be rectified by the creation of cataloging standards and > data structures that offer the ability to use programming to machine > harvest data, then manipulate and insert it into well formed catalog > record shells. This is necessary, not only to address the productivity > issues surrounding the explosion of digital resources, but also to keep > cataloging current with evolving information management practices which > have grown more sophisticated than the essentially linear data structures > we inherited from the card catalog and that we use MARC to recreate. > > We made a huge stride when we went from reproducing a description for each > access point in a card catalog to using online systems to build indexes > that pointed to a single copy of that description, but where each > description holds copies of the access points. It is time to evolve to > the next level, where there is a single copy of each of the access points > and then the descriptions point to them (and probably more that I haven't > quite comprehended yet). > > Of course half the time I don't quite follow all the ins and outs and > another third of the time I'm afraid that my profession is going to morph > beyond recognition (and possibly my abilities). But the sixth of the time > that I really get it, I'm excited enough to hope. > > (With apologies if I've wandered somewhat from the initial premise or if > I've misrepresented Diane.) > > John Myers, Catalog Librarian > Schaffer Library, Union College > Schenectady NY 12308 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > 518-388-6623 > > ________________________________ > > From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access on > behalf of Miksa, Shawne > [snip] > This idea of "hoarding" and "hiding" is difficult to understand as it > makes it sound as if librarians, and especially those who catalog, are > cave dwellers who can't speak. > >
