On 31/07/11 03:20, Karen Coyle wrote:
> My main question is why we need a specific format for this, but I think
> it is needed because there are particular sharing goals that would
> involve ebook publishers, and it had to work in Atom. Personally I think
> that we have plenty of bib metadata already, and it's pretty well
> understood. Perhaps I am wrong about that. It does make me nervous when
> I see formats that are designed only for books, with elements like
> "author". Someone is going to want to use this for some other format,
> for sure, and we'll end up with painters and composers and inventors all
> coded as "author." It doesn't make sense to me to create
> book-centric/exclusive metadata, but in this case that reflects the
> industry that is directly involved, book publishing.
>
> Which brings me to .... I've been involved in various groups that have
> members who are championing a particular set of information resources
> that they care deeply about -- often segments of academic publishing.
> They create metadata schemas that work great for their area of interest
> but they often think that it's just a matter of extending that metadata
> to cover other interests. I don't think it works that way, or at least
> that's not the best way to do things. I look at BIBO,[1] which has no
> elements for sound or movie materials, and that lists "map" as a form of
> illustration. This latter obviously would not reflect the view of
> geography professionals who consider maps the meat of their work not a
> mere illustration. The particular value that I see in library metadata
> is the lack of self-interest and the attempt (achieved or not) of
> treating all resources equally. The 'big picture' view of library
> metadata is not understood, and I've heard folks complain that library
> metadata doesn't reflect their viewpoint. I haven't yet figured out how
> to explain this to them. Ed Summers mentioned a call for a manifesto for
> linked data in his blog,[2] I'd like a manifesto for library cataloging
> -- something very short that explains the basic philosophy, and that
> doesn't use the term 'books' anywhere.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm waiting for RDA (see
http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/rda/ ) in the hope that it
solves all our representation problems. We may then have to map it to
our various encodings (XML, XMLMARC, BibTeX, BST, RDF, ...), of course.
cheers
stuart
--
Stuart Yeates
Library Technology Services http://www.victoria.ac.nz/library/
|
