Ten hours into it...
Well, we're two days and ten hours into this internship, and I'm in the middle of an intensive literature review, currently rereading chapters 1, 2, 5, 22, 25, and 26 of AACR2, with all of the LC Rule Interpretations. As I read these chapters, it all seems rather familiar, yet I've been away from it for five months now, and it has been a good refresher thus far. Ralph gave me a six-page bibliography from which I am to read and/or familiarize myself. I'm paying extra attention to AACR2 because they are the base on which all other information builds.
I have also been reading the MLA Listserv postings about the upcoming (starting 1 June) change at LC regarding series authority records. Today I read a letter by David Bade, a librarian at the University of Chicago, who sees this change as a symptom of some larger problems about the way people, and in particular, library administrators, view the creation of metadata for information resources. He believes that as information is no longer described in descriptive fields like author, title, series, publication information, etc., using controlled vocabulary and Standards (in favor of a Googlesque keyword search of full text that does not distinguish between these information types and the rest of a text), search recall will indeed increase, but at the expense of precision. For the serious researcher, spells bad news. I'm not sure I totally agree with everything he says, and I wonder how a library administrator would respond to his statement:
"Without that double aspect of bibliographic description and control no automatic error correction and no collocation software presently available or in the future will ever be possible. On these matters library administrators are almost universally technologically ignorant and have absolutely no idea how information technologies work and what are the minimum requirements for their successful implementation."
Just how ignorant are administrators? Do they really flee all mention of technology, or are administrators also thinking of other very real concerns such as budgets, patron demands for more convenient (re)search tools, etc.? I think one of the most important lessons I will learn from this internship will be just how important the benefits of the current level of description for music books and scores in relation to the costs of providing that level of desription to library patrons. I'm convinced that metadata is essential for access to information resources, but also willing to be open to discuss the appropriate levels of desciption needed to provide satisfactory access to them.
posted by Steven Nordstrom @ 11:44 PM
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