Reinventing the Library for Online Education by Stielow Frederick;

Author:Stielow, Frederick; [Stielow, Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN025010
ISBN: 1711155
Publisher: American Library Association
Published: 2013-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

CATALOGING

TOOL, REQUIRED/DEPRECATED

Cataloging proffers a particularly contentious and uncertain battleground. What is necessary for a web environment? The virtual library leans toward a minimalist perspective and simplicity wherever possible. With the possible exception of university archives, it has little to no need for original cataloging. Though some in-house expertise is required for communication with vendors, copy cataloging more than suffices—and that can be readily outsourced.

In keeping with utilitarian precepts, the virtual academic library continues to employ extant bibliographic records, but it also looks toward the present and future domination of search engines and full-text expectations. The Web adds a premium on user-based concerns for simplification and allied tools for study or research outputs. From such a perspective, the semantic web is interesting and external contributions gratefully accepted, but they are of questionable value given search engines and cost/benefit terms. Web-based success for students and faculty is not dependent on the bibliographic orientation of the past but on full-text retrieval.

Mixed sites and other dilemmas. The Web’s flexibility creates significant problems for taxonomic practices that date to the nineteenth century. Scholarly communications and the open-science movement are but two examples of complex, mixed genre sites that defy library conventions. What are the most appropriate measures for extracting or excluding journal and article titles from the combined resources within Columbia University’s CIAO or Praeger’s Security International collection?

Similarly, where should the virtual library turn for current attempts to update cataloging for websites themselves? The pending loss of MARC makes sense, but what about what follows? What RDA guidelines? Will RDA or another metadata schema prevail, or could all of the library automation edifice fall to seemingly more user-friendly commercial approaches? Indeed, will W3C’s devotion to semantic networks come to naught, or be significantly modified in response to the overwhelming amount of work in building ontologies?

The virtual library view must remain skeptical—“wait-and-see” with doses of paradigm-shift wariness and cost-consciousness in mind. What is the added value of the Dublin Core, library metadata, or other human-abstracted information versus hierarchical databases, Bayesian mathematics, and automated ingestion of full text—especially if the main search engines ignore the former categories? The repeated reality is that users are satisfied by commercial search engines and dissatisfied with library systems.

See also: chap. 5: Bibliographic Instruction, Card Catalog, MARC; chap. 6: Catalog Interface; chap. 7: Discovery Search, Metadata, RDA, Scholarly Communications, Scientific Social Networking/Open-Science Movement

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