"Hiya,
I've ranted on this subject before, and since you all love
me for it, I'll
tempt it once again.
First of all, we *must* assess this whole notion of what the
heck we're
supposed to even catalog. Currently we catalog books (and a few
similar,
physical items) that we've got on stacks, some CD's, tape recordings of
olden
days, scraps of paper, a few curiosa objects. These will all stop being
deployed to libraries. Now, I'm not actually being as hyperbolic as I
used to
be on this topic; you can go and see for yourselves what's going on in
the land
of information and knowledge management, that pesky human enterprise of
managing information in such a way that knowledge is easy to get to.
The
foremost reason for the demise of books, is of course that is a
hopelessly
stupid format! Once you print it, that's it; the representation is
solidified
and can only be changed through a barrage of processes, money and human
follow-up, even the stupidest speling msstake comes under these
amazingly
expensive and cumbersome processes. Books
suck, CDs suck, papers suck, even if they all smell great and look
fantastic.
They suck, and will be replaced with better and cheaper things now that
the
technology can take steps to do so.
The book and its
bibliographic brethren don't hold a chance in hell against the digital
future.
If you think otherwise, well, I'm sure you're retiring soon and don't
probably
care enough. However, I care a lot. I care to the point of calling the
libraries out on their nonsense. Librarians talk about findability,
about
authorship, about all these fine things found in the otherwise arcane
FRBR
world, or the dead-on-arrival RDA, or they might venture to say
something about
their collection and collection management, procurement, or maybe they
have a
soft-spot for Q&A and desk questions. But it's all nonsense when we
talk
about the catalog and the future of the library.
The only reason
you still
have a job is because there's still a ton of paper-based information
out there.
And that's fine, that'll keep you and the library busy for another,
what, 30
years or so (giving you a lot of leeway there). Then what? What the
heck are
you going to do when the biggest producers of those paper things you
love stop
making them? You know it's there, you know that day is coming, you see
it already
happening ; the whole academic field is almost already converted to the
digital
world with new structures for peer-review and publishing, encyclopedias
are
online or dead, maps aren't printed anymore (including historical maps
being
converted into the digital pulp) and now they're ripping through the
popular
literature field where the worlds largest book seller saw it fit to
make their
bloody own eReader device, because, you know, they obviously don't know
anything
about the future of books and information.
What you're
going to be
stuck with is a world clearly divided in two ;
*
Bibliobjects : Books, pamphlets, physical
objects, the traditional library materials : For this stuff you've
developed,
over years and years, a rigid set of processes, programs, people and
software
that deal with these collections. You kick ass in this area.
*
Digital information : For this you haven't
got *anything* worth talking about. In this area you suck.
Yeah, yeah,
slight hyperbole;
there's the odd project that does something in the realm of the latter,
but you
are *not* experts in this field, you don't employ any experts in these
fields,
there are no librarians in this field. The former, sure, you're kings!
But the latter
you suck at. The latest years of standarizing, scrutinizing and say,
coming up
with FRBR and RDA, what does that give you? A digital version of
bibliobjects!
It doesn't actually provide you more than what you already can hack
together
with the old tools. Going from, say, a catalog in the traditional MARC
/ AARC2
to FRBR isn't going to dramatically prepare you for the future of
digital
objects, it will only give you a false sense of having cleaned up one
part of a
large mess. And FRBR is still not even part of the librarian daily talk!
It's taken 20
years of FRBR
yelling to get to this non-existent place where the bibliographic
ideals are
still hailed as the way forward. Why aren't you cataloging blog
entries?
Because, a) it would be time-consuming, b) you don't have the
resources, but
perhaps mostly inane c) there is no *point* in doing so as software
systems
already are doing a far better job of it than any librarian ever could.
And here
is the problem ; You don't sit on the tooling nor service side of the
digital
future. You're not servicing others with your expertise. You're not
making meta
data plugins for WordPress. You're not making auto-authoring robots for
WikiPedia. You don't come up with cool search algorithms. You don't
suggest
solutions to the growing identity management problem. You don't create
AI
functionality for information extraction. You're not inventing a
faster, more
efficient, non-destroying book scanner. You're not coming up with a
better
citing engine, or a way of dealing with trust or source verification.
You're
not creating a harvester that can deal with arbitrary and fuzzy notions
of
logic to build up a repository of chains of knowledge. You're not
creating anything
that is valuable to the humans of the digital future.
Sure, you might
be
"collaborating" with someone about some of these things, but where
does that intellectual properties stay? Where does the money go? You
are
outsourcing your smarts so that others gets smarter and richer, and
you're
stuck with, well, the equivalence of MARC / AARC2 ILS's even librarians
know so
darn well is the wrong thing to do.
You used to be
at the top of
this game, though. In the physical realm of bibliobjects you were
innovative,
fast, you were thinkers, you held a philosophical line, you made a darn
lot of
sense, funky ideas, and great services, great solutions to bigger
problems. And
for that you are sure to be thanked and well remembered. But the
digital world
you seem to have missed completely.
So when we're
talking about
the next "next gen" catalog, what the hell is it supposed to be
cataloging? You already have catalogs for the old stuff, so when the
books stop
coming in, then what?
Regards,
Alex"
-- Project
Wrangler, SOA,
Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps --- http://shelter.nu/blog/
http://www.google.com/profiles/alexander.johannesen
---