On 04/12/2013 9.56, Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
<snip>
03.12.2013 21:58, Cindy Wolff:
This is what I have been thinking about for a
while as I read these discussions:
What if we gave a standard and nobody came, but some other powerful,
oblivious standard came for us?
What concerns us here is only a very small corollary of the big issue:
access to the knowledge of cataloging. That access used
to be easy: you bought an affordable book, or borrowed it from a
library, and then maybe a textbook explaining what it all meant.
These times are over. To get the whole story, you need to pay an
annual fee or buy a not very affordable stack of paper giving
less than the whole story and obsolescing rapidly. Certainly,
textbooks are in the making or have already appeared on the scene.
Partly, these may be collectiong knowledge that has been discussed and
openly contributed to this list or AUTOCAT. Laudable endeavors,
but by now, sooo 19th century, or not? And then, actually supporting a
monopoly that should not exist in the first place, and a standard
that hasn't proved to match a business case yet.
</snip>
In addition to this it needs to be said that other standards are out
there and developing. For instance, if you want your bibliographic
records to go into Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. it has already been
decided: you must use schema.org microdata. Those companies already
turned down OAI-PMH, and I honestly don't know if or why they would
change their minds when (if) Bibframe comes out. RDA and FRBR are
certainly not a part of their "information universes" in any way at all.
I am not sure whether schema.org is any real solution for libraries or
not, but it is certainly worth a try.
The main reason that it isn't enough is: after you get your records into
the Googles, those records *must* come up in the top 3 or at most 10
hits--otherwise, nobody will ever see them and the records may as well
not exist. That means getting into SEO (search engine optimization) and
libraries are absolute babes-in-the-wood when it comes to that
cut-throat business. That is a competition libraries can only lose.
Still, getting the records into the Googles can't actually hurt
libraries and something good may come out of it so long as we don't
expect too much.
But, if I had to make decisions for a *non-library* institution for what
to do with our institution's metadata, would I prefer RDA/FRBR, which is
semi-incoherent, expensive, difficult to implement and has yet to prove
any advantages, or would I rather choose schema.org, which is easier,
clearer and cheaper, so that I then could put my efforts into SEO?
So, non-library organizations have lots and lots of choices at their
disposal. It's only the libraries that seem to have none at all....
--
James Weinheimer weinheimer.ji...@gmail.com
First Thus http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
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