One medium size quibble: In advancing the simplistic Dublin Core as
librarianship's contribution
I don't think Dublin Core is what you think it is. Not currently, if it
ever was. I don't think it's simplistic. I do not understand it well
enough to explain it to others, but I understand it well enough to see
that most people in the library community seem to have a misperception of
it. It is NOT simply 8 metadata elements, the end.
On the other hand, it certainly still has unsolved problems of it's own too.
In general, I think discussions of DC and what we think we know about it
are characteristic of a general trend in failures to communicate when we
have 'debates' on cataloging.
Some people to think that the 'cataloging must change' crowd is identical
with the 'give up control, give up complexity, make everything simple,
freetext, let's just copy google' crowd.
This is not the case.
I read a blog post somewhere recently attributing this misperception to
the over-success of people arguing that by changing cataloging we could
save lots of money. So there are some people _in favor_ of drastically
changing cataloging who really do think that means abandoning most of what
cataloging does for lack of control freetext! And like it!
But they're wrong too.
Cataloging must change, but not to make it dumb, not to 'be just like
Google'. Google would LOVE to have the kind of carefully controlled data
we aspire to. I don't think any of us here are looking to give that up. We
are looking to make our systems and environments _smarter_ not _dumber_.
The problem is that the way things are done _inhibits_ the _full use_ of
that smart data in a digital environment. We are, in theory, capturing all
sorts of information that in practice it is very difficult to get systems
to use--because it's not being controlled appropriately. That's the
problem.
The DC folks are trying to do things _beyond_ what we've ever done
regarding interoperability in a digital environment that didn't exist when
we started doing what we were doing---we were the only ones 100 years ago,
but not any more.
It's not about giving up control, it's about controlling smarter.
Jonathan
to the larger metadata community, she
fails to advance ISBD/MARC as a selection and order of data elements,
and a way of encoding them in a language neutral manner.
I wonder if one of the problems with RDA is that it is trying to be
both an urber metadata standard (to cataloguing rules as ISBD(G) is to
other ISBDs), and at the same time a standard to meet the particular
needs of libraries. Perhaps that is why it is under attack from those
of us who wish to preserve our most successful international standard,
ISBD's choice and order of elements (including statement of
responsibility and place of publication), as well as from those who
would like it to be a metadata standard suitable for all information
communities.
Perhaps we need more than one standard: an urber standard, the
standard for libraries (AACR3), as well as standards for other specific
communities, e.g., museums.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__
