Yes, thank you. The "we" has to include cataloguing experts and the catloguing community of course. A fair amount of those people are already part of the Cod4Lib community.

> On Apr 18, 2016, at 10:59 AM, Galen Charlton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 10:28 AM, Eric Hellman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> I also think that Code4Lib is potentially more powerful than congress
>> in this situation. LC says that "all of the revisions will appear on a
>> Tentative List and be approved no earlier than May 2016; the
>> revision of existing bibliographic records will commence shortly
>> thereafter." It seems unlikely that Congress can act before this
>> happens. We could then implement systems that effect this
>> subject heading deprecation without regard to Rep. Diane Black
>> and Congress. We can scrub the MARC records. We can alter the
>> cataloguing interfaces. We could tweak the cataloguing standard.
> 
> Or to put it another way, "we" could make a (hopefully friendly) fork
> of LCSH if it gets compromised via an act of law.
> 
> Such a fork could provide benefits going far beyond protesting
> Congressional interference in LCSH:
> 
> * If appropriate tools for collaboration are built, it could allow
> updates to be made faster than what the current SACO process permits,
> while still benefiting from the careful work of LC subject experts.
> * It could provide infrastructure for easily creating additional forks
> of the vocabulary, for cases where LCSH is a decent starting point but
> needs refinement for a particular collection of things to be
> described.
> 
> However, I put "we" in quotes because such an undertaking could not
> succeed simply by throwing code at the problem. There are many
> Code4Lib folks who could munge authority records, build tools for
> collaborative thesaurus maintenance, stand up SPARQL endpoints and
> feeds of headings changes and so forth — but unless that fork provides
> infrastructure that catalogers and metadataists /want/ to use and has
> some guarantee of sticking around, the end result would be nothing
> more than fodder for a C4L Journal article or two.
> 
>> What else would we need?
> 
> Involvement of folks who might use and contribute to such a fork from
> the get-go, and early thought to how such a fork can be sustained. I
> think we already have the technology, for the most part; the question
> is whether we have the people.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Galen
> --
> Galen Charlton
> Infrastructure and Added Services Manager
> Equinox Software, Inc. / Open Your Library
> email:  [log in to unmask]
> direct: +1 770-709-5581
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