the future ain’t what it used to be
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The Future ain’t what it used to be. CRCC Forum 2014 ALA Midwinter Meeting Philadelphia. Outline. An ideal catalog (1874) How we got here Where we are Where we seem to be going. An ideal catalog. It has happened only once in history. How did Cutter do it?. It was the 19 th Century - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
The Future ain’t what it used to beCRCC Forum2014 ALA Midwinter MeetingPhiladelphia
Outline An ideal catalog (1874) How we got here Where we are Where we seem to be going
An ideal catalog
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It has happened only once in history.
How did Cutter do it? It was the 19th Century
No cover-to-cover translations No microforms No non-book materials No online resources
No compromises (no cooperative cataloging)
The catalog as a whole
Exploiting the available technology
Exploiting the available technology Save space without sacrificing clarity
Abbreviate, use numerals Remove superfluous text Avoid unnecessary repetition No labels
Save the time of the reader Take advantage of the page layout
Dash entries [Same]
Use typography to emphasize or de-emphasize entries and elements
The full-page format and compressed entries supported rapid browsing, evaluation, and comparison
On the other hand Additions and corrections discovered
and added to each volume It was already out of date long before it
was published Of necessity, it was continued (1872+)
by a card catalog
How we got here
From then to now: the need to produce cards 1902: LC begins card distribution
1968: peak production (79 million cards) 1969: LC launches MARC Distribution
Service 1971: OCLC begins card distribution
1985: peak production (131 million cards) 1995: LC produces ca. 700,000 cards
1997: LC ends card production 2012/13: OCLC produces ca. 700,000 cards
Where we are
Browsing Our headings and authority records are still
based on a browsing model Surname, Forename Hierarchy
Today our catalogs often don’t even offer browsing as an option, except for ordering result sets (typically by title proper)
Yet still underpinning much of our cataloging practice is the question of how things will “file”
Facets
<creatorcontrib> Creator usually appears in 1XX but may
appear in 7XX (joint authors, etc.) Contributors usually appears in 7XX but
may appear in 1XX (defendant, etc.) Without the use of relationship
designators, there is no foolproof way to tell which is which
ISBD and FRBR / FRAD ISBD
Bibliographic description (FRBR agnostic) FRBR / FRAD
Conceptual models Entity-relationship Object-oriented
Out, damned ISBD! Well, not so fast:
We’ve always had punctuation of some sort
If you remove an ISBD element, there can be consequences (mainly because of the way we introduced ISBD into MARC long ago)
FRBR: First, the bad news
Not quite FRBR
Well, this is embarrassing…
Et tu, Bruté?
Hail Mary pass
TMI: The curse of cut-and-paste
The Good News: ISSN The only identifier used heavily in
relationships (Thank You, ISSN Network, for 760-787)
Can be manipulated to mimic a FRBR structure Online versions: share an ISSN Print/microform versions: share an ISSN Versions linked by ISSN-L
Has been assigned to resources both retroactively and willy-nilly!!!!
Beyond ISSN-L: Linked editions
P-N and differentiation CONSER’s provider-neutral record
convention outsources the differentiation of online manifestations (and frequently expressions) to third-party knowledgebases and OpenURL resolvers
These are in turn dependent on metadata provided by vendors
Outsourcing selecting: less is lessGraphics
Outsourcing selecting: more is more
Linked Open Data (LOD) Heavily dependent on wide buy-in of
identifiers (ISBN, ISSN, VIAF, ISNI) and their proper use
Difficult to move beyond a given vocabulary Same label / different scope Different label / same scope
Græcum est, non legitur BIBFRAME
Creative Works Instances Authorities Annotations
From serials to …
Where we seem to be going A catalog in uneasy tension with the Web A catalog that initially looks pretty much like today
due to the weight of the past. But in the long term… Descriptions of physical resources may be reduced to
identifiers for linking from the web to local item data (assuming the adoption of robust identifiers and their retrospective assignment)
Descriptions of online resources may be reduced to providing pathways to subscribed resources (or superseded by a browser plug-in that will detect access rights to a given resource)
