Well, Kevin, I admit it *could* be used in a proscriptive way, but that wasn't really what I had in mind.
I was thinking more along the lines of: different institutions (and/or different users) have different bibliographic metadata needs, even if they are talking about the same item. A public library may want to present its users with a different set of searchable elements than, say a university or research library. One institution's "useful" record is another institutions "noisy" record, and vice versa. The way we currently handle that is to have a single record -- or more often it seems a set of overlapping/duplicate records -- stored in a central repository (OCLC), which are then copied by different institutions, and then tailored locally to their particular needs. Rarely do those decisions about what to keep and what to remove get communicated back to the central repository. (It also tends to mean we carry around a lot of legacy data in our records because we aren't sure whether it will someday be useful or not.) If we were able to share metadata at the "field" or "statement" level, and if we were able to encode and communicate information about the provenance of individual statements, we might end up in a place where that knowledge about what is appropriate metadata for a particular user-group could be usefully shared. So, instead of making decisions about whether to accept a change, addition, or deletion of a piece of data related to a given item on an institution-by-institution basis, perhaps it would be a matter of establishing different profiles, so that libraries that fit similar profiles can trade bibliographic data more effectively. Or even, letting users decide, based on their own information needs and wants, what their "profile" should be and providing them with the appropriate set of metadata. The implications for collective cataloging could be transformational. Imagine if, instead of the current paradigm of cataloging institutions sitting likes spokes around a central hub (OCLC, for example), they were connected to each other by a network such that any change made at one institution was communicated out to every other institution. Those statements could then be evaluated at each node on the network according a set of "house rules" that would determine whether the new statements were of interest and should be added to the local catalog, or not appropriate and should be ignored, or whether they should be looked at by a cataloger to make a more informed decision. The only thing that all of the institutions on the network would be required to agree upon would be a single, unique URI for each subject/predicate/object. --Ben ________________________________________ From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kevin M. Randall [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 05, 2010 3:57 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [RDA-L] Question about RDA relationships (App. J) Ben Abrahamse wrote: > For example, a library could decide to accept or ignore what MIT has to say > about this particular work; or what MIT has to say about access points; or > what MIT has to say at all, and their catalog could be configured to ignore > or accept that particular statement if it encountered it. Nor would > decisions such as these wouldn't have to be made on an institution-by- > institution basis: we could have another triple stored on the network: > > MIT -- participates in -- NACO > > And the decision could be to accept all "provide access point" predicates IF > the subject is "a NACO participant". Wow, a whole new way of implementing cataloging blacklists!!! Happy Friday, everyone... Kevin M. Randall Principal Serials Cataloger Bibliographic Services Dept. Northwestern University Library 1970 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208-2300 email: [email protected] phone: (847) 491-2939 fax: (847) 491-4345
