Library Cataloging
Last week at TLA Dr. Fran Miksa's presentation had a slide quoting Charles A. Cutter as saying in 1903, "The golden age of cataloging is over." I have a natural tendency to disbelieve anything about the "good old days". Memory is too selective, so I tend to disagree with Cutter's prediction. Miksa explained that Cutter meant no one would ever again create a catalog from scratch. Well, if that is the requirement for a golden age we are in the midst of one.Everywhere people are creating databases describing a Web site. What is that if not a catalog? There are discussions, in fields outside library science, on metadata, ontologies, thesauri, and classification. The discussion that has long divided the Dublin Core community, full complete accurate data vs. simple, good-enough data, is philosophical as well as practical. The foundation of our cataloging structure, AACR, is being reevaluated in the light of FRBR. There are some very interesting and important discussions being conducted now.Cutter would have loved to be alive today, the discussions taking place would have made him reconsider his statement a century ago. These are the good old days.
- Functional Requirements For Sharing Tag Data
TagCommons has the Functional Requirements for Sharing Tag Data. The TagCommons effort is operating something like a software project. The process is very lightweight, but has an important step that is often forgotten in discussions about ontologies and...
- Interesting Collocation
Cutter's functions for the catalog are something we all learned in Cataloging 101. The FRBR functions seem pretty familiar. However, if you let others loose on bibliographic data they come up with some interesting ways to collocate works, say by a...
- Tla Conference
Postings next week will be sporadic, at best, possibly non-existent. I'll be at TLA and though I will have the laptop I may not feel like posting at the end of long, very full days. I'll start the week off at the preconference on RDA. Last count...
- Cataloging
Core Concepts in Cataloging at the Fritz Library at the University of North Dakota are a nice succinct summary of Cutter, Ranganathan, and FRBR....
- The Cataloging Calculator
The Cataloging Calculator by Kyle Banerjee is a very useful tool. It allows searching and display of LC Cutter, Geog. Cutter, Geog. Area Codes, Country Codes, Language Codes, AACR2 Abbrevs., and MARC Var. Fields information. It does use 3 frames, so on...
Library Cataloging
The Good Old Days
Last week at TLA Dr. Fran Miksa's presentation had a slide quoting Charles A. Cutter as saying in 1903, "The golden age of cataloging is over." I have a natural tendency to disbelieve anything about the "good old days". Memory is too selective, so I tend to disagree with Cutter's prediction. Miksa explained that Cutter meant no one would ever again create a catalog from scratch. Well, if that is the requirement for a golden age we are in the midst of one.Everywhere people are creating databases describing a Web site. What is that if not a catalog? There are discussions, in fields outside library science, on metadata, ontologies, thesauri, and classification. The discussion that has long divided the Dublin Core community, full complete accurate data vs. simple, good-enough data, is philosophical as well as practical. The foundation of our cataloging structure, AACR, is being reevaluated in the light of FRBR. There are some very interesting and important discussions being conducted now.Cutter would have loved to be alive today, the discussions taking place would have made him reconsider his statement a century ago. These are the good old days.
- Functional Requirements For Sharing Tag Data
TagCommons has the Functional Requirements for Sharing Tag Data. The TagCommons effort is operating something like a software project. The process is very lightweight, but has an important step that is often forgotten in discussions about ontologies and...
- Interesting Collocation
Cutter's functions for the catalog are something we all learned in Cataloging 101. The FRBR functions seem pretty familiar. However, if you let others loose on bibliographic data they come up with some interesting ways to collocate works, say by a...
- Tla Conference
Postings next week will be sporadic, at best, possibly non-existent. I'll be at TLA and though I will have the laptop I may not feel like posting at the end of long, very full days. I'll start the week off at the preconference on RDA. Last count...
- Cataloging
Core Concepts in Cataloging at the Fritz Library at the University of North Dakota are a nice succinct summary of Cutter, Ranganathan, and FRBR....
- The Cataloging Calculator
The Cataloging Calculator by Kyle Banerjee is a very useful tool. It allows searching and display of LC Cutter, Geog. Cutter, Geog. Area Codes, Country Codes, Language Codes, AACR2 Abbrevs., and MARC Var. Fields information. It does use 3 frames, so on...