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Thank you to everyone who participated in the metadata and cataloging session! Please add your own notes, thoughts, and/or corrections below.

Here are some interesting resources to check out regarding "metadata and cataloging." Feel free to add any other blog postings, articles, etc.

"Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia." by Cory Doctorow

"Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy."
by Elaine Peterson, D-Lib Magazine, Volume 12, Number 11, November 2006

Everything is Miscellaneous, a blog about David Weinberger's 2007 book of the same name.

Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control convened by the Library of Congress to examine the future of bibliographic description in the 21st century.

My Metadata Mini-Manifesto by by Kevin Clarke


Key Points from our discussion:
1. Cataloging doesn't have to be perfect.
2. How does the dynamic external environment, i.e. Google, change things?
3. Balance constraints and opportunities.

  • moving away from a culture of perfect... if one ever existed
  • balance the librarian's "ideal" record against what makes the record most useful to users
  • ask who is going to use the record and what for
  • due to time and budget constraints, efficiency trumps perfection; this can be difficult for some to accept
  • management and staff must identify and understand trade-offs
  • put more cataloging effort into the unique/local collections that distinguish the library from others
  • do patrons want/expect different things from the catalog than they did in the past? how can we find out and address this?
  • patrons have become accustomed to slogging through hundreds of results on Google; they are less interested in accuracy
  • the library catalog is no longer working in a vacuum; users pre-search in Google or Wikipedia; should the catalog stand on its own?
  • the catalog is just another database among all of the options available
    • except users have to work to get information they identify through the catalog, should we add more content, like Amazon?
  • we don't have a way to capture data on why users accessed the catalog and whether they found what they were looking for; this data could help improve the catalog
  • what are the implications of participatory librarianship?
    • allowing user tagging in the catalog can help capture institutional memory/cultural heritage, such as the tags of all students who took a particular class over several semesters/years
    • librarians need to create the original record, but users can supplement and enrich records
    • programs to capture search/tag data could help enhance subject lists
    • options to check out include Aquabrowser and Library Thing
  • no product/interface is a perfect fit for all users or all uses, use several
  • ILS vendors are not responsive; libraries must force them to innovate; has a library ever sued an ILS vendor for breach of contract?
  • the industry model seems to be based on charging more for modules that do what was promised in the first place
  • too much consolidation in the ILS industry
  • open source options have potential, but they are not quite there yet
  • open source will be a real threat to the industry when a large university system adopts an open source platform
  • links are helpful, but you can't search data unless it's in the record; add summaries and TOCs to records when possible
  • according to "My Metadata Mini Manifesto"Mini-Manifesto" (link above), metadata and cataloging are the same thing; using a new term allows us to think about it in a new light
  • keep what is good in the existing model; don't change for the sake of change
  • many current assumptions are based on the way systems used to work, but many of these restrictions are no longer relevant
  • a lot of the data entered into the ILS is not used by the ILS
  • RDA
    • simplified, for example punctuation is optional
    • however, standardized punctuation was helpful in identifying parts of a record in a foreign language
    • simpler is better, but you lose some richness
    • some things are actually harder, have to count pages