Changing Nature of the Catalog: final
I linked to the draft version before, but now the final version is out: The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools (175 KB PDF) by Karen Calhoun of Cornell University Library, prepared for the Library of Congress.
As noted earlier, applying FRBR concepts to improve the user’s experience with catalogs was often mentioned by interviewees. Much is appearing in the library literature about deploying FRBR concepts [71, 72, 73, 74, 75]. There is excitement around the Research Library Group’s RedLightGreen [76] and OCLC’s work-based catalog investigations such as Curioser [77].
Feel the excitement!
It certainly would be exciting to ‘eliminate LCSH’ — about as exciting as throwing out the baby with the bathwater! Calhoun acknowledges that we have
to leverage all that legacy data of ours. I’m of the school that controlled
vocabularies will be more important to us, not less. When there is an
existing controlled vocabularly embedded as legacy data, which at the
same time serves as a useful cross-index to existing legacy classification
scheme (look to LC ClassificationWeb), isn’t that the best of both, or rather,
multiple worlds? If FRBR succeeds, it will be because we humans will
get better at clustering [legacy] data together with new, just-born
entities. To collocate ‘like items’ assumes there is a ‘like item’ to
collocate it with. That being said, would I like LCSH to morph into
a leaner, cleaner, and readily adaptive tool? Of course. Is there any
hope that it can do so? Probably not.
But I’m not ready to throw it out as Calhoun recommends, and I still
need a fair amount of convincing that its potential has been exhausted.
On the whole, very many of Calhoun’s points are well-taken, and she
is quite right to be pushing them to the fore.
Mia Massicotte
Comment by Mia Massicotte — 20 April 2006 @ 10:09 am