Does this Blackberry make my head look fat? May 7, 2010
Posted by purposefulbloggist in Uncategorized.add a comment
Oh dear. I was so determined to be nice in this blog, but the continuing drag of thinking is pulling me back. Thank God. My face was about to fall off from all the smiling.
thinking about my “issues” paper for cataloging, I jotted down something yesterday about social tagging and how it was crowd wisdom that condemned Socrates to death. I deleted it the next day for being too “snarky.” compared to the last paragraph of my draft of the cataloging paper, which I will have to severely edit, I have only begun to snark!
before I cut this whole section though, I decided that I owe it to myself and maybe to cataloging to take up my mantle of snarkiness, bust out the metaphors and tell it like it is – or ought to be. On the adoption of RDA as a means to make the library work like Google…
“This raises the issue of why libraries want to join the forces of Google and Amazon for world domination in the first place. Libraries serve a different purpose than the profit-driven giants of digital enterprise – at least one would hope that they do. It seems so obvious, but it bears repeating again and again: digital material requires digital reading devices. Not every library user has one. Not every library user wants one. Libraries advocating RDA as a means to make catalogs more like search engines seem to be ignoring that a great deal of library material is still in print book format and there are a great many library users who like it that way. For some, cluttering the library OPAC catalog with holdings from all other institutions makes it more confusing and difficult to use. Combining book records with journal article titles, dissertations, white papers, old comic books, maps, used grocery lists, and internet resources is extremely irritating when a person is looking for a book – one with pages that a person can check out and take with them to the park.
Assuming that all the world is going digital is not only speculative, it is elitist. There. I said it. Elitist, elitist, elitist. The biggest winner appears to be Apple with its growing array of electronics designed to fit all needs, especially those that come in all sizes, shapes, and colors.
Why would the library want to encourage this consumerist view of information? Furthermore, how does the library sustain such a temporal and transient philosophy? Are the people using Google today suddenly going to change to the library’s OPAC because we copied the original?
Perhaps the problem is not with AACR2, with RDA, with the catalog, or with the traditional library. The problem may well be in the assumption that catering to the whims of people who can afford an iPad will save the library. ”
yes, I have to edit it all away, but I just had to say it. That’s probably why I’ve been divorced twice.
