29.07.2013 13:51, James L Weinheimer
On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 10:58 AM, Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
<snip>
With catalogs and cataloging, the journey is not the
destination nor its own reward or half the fun, as Confucian
thinking may have it, but there's no desire for a journey, or no
interest in
a catalog as such, nor in its use.
</snip>
I hesitate to give up on catalogs so easily. Yes, I have spent a good
deal of my life with them, but it is not just a matter of nostalgia. I
honestly believe that catalogs could provide something vital for the
public that the Googles cannot and will not provide. The latest NSA
revelations should not be ignored in this regard.
Fully agreed, with all the rest you are saying about advertising!
We only have to see that not just the general public but members
of our profession are contemplating the catalog as being in a
contest with advertisers' tools, instead of realizing that catalogs
are meant and made to do different things for different reasons.
> The fact is, it is important to keep in mind that the Googles are
> *not* really finding/discovery tools similar to library catalogs and
> I think it is a mistake to look at them that way: the Googles are
> advertising agencies ...
Fully agreed.
To improve what catalogs are doing should be the motivation for new
rules. On top of which should be the aspect of "bringing together what
belongs together", and this in more ways than RDA has in mind.
Briefly: Augmeted and improved Access. Improved Description can be in
the service of this, of course, but only in secondary ways.
... That is, if it actually *worked* for people who used it. I just see no
real attempts to get the catalog to work in practical ways for the mass
of the public.
It does so in one rather indirect way though: to locate what users
want, routed via WorldCat after they find a reference to a book in G.
Booksearch. This may end up in the user's local library. The WorldCat
out of itself and on its own, for all its retrieval power, might not
have achieved that level of awareness and visibility in the public.
B.Eversberg
