On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 2:40 PM, MJ Suhonos <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Yes, even to me as a librarian but not a cataloguer, many (most?) of these
> elements seem like overkill.  I have no doubt there is an edge-case for
> having this fine level of descriptive detail, but I wonder:
>
> a) what proportion of records have this level of description
> b) what kind of (or how much) user access justifies the effort in creating
> and preserving it
>

On many levels, I agree. Or I wish I could.

If you look at a business model like Amazon, for example, it's easy to
imagine that their overriding goal is, "Make the easy-to-find stuff
ridiculously easy to find." The revenue they get from someone finding an
edge-case book is exactly the same as the revenue they get from someone
buying Harry Potter. The ROI easy to think about.

But I work in an academic library. In a lot of ways, our *primary audience*
is some grad student 12 years from now who needs one trivial piece of crap
to make it all come together in her head. I know we have thousands of books
that have never been looked at, but computing the ROI on someone being able
to see them some day is difficult. Maybe it's zero. Maybe not. We just can't
tell.

Now, none of this is to say that MARC/AACR2 is necessarily the best (or even
a good) way to go about making these works findable. I'm just saying that
evaluating the "edge cases" in terms of user access are a complicated
business.

  -Bill-

-- 
Bill Dueber
Library Systems Programmer
University of Michigan Library