Jay Datema posted a good writeup of his notes from the third meeting of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control yesterday. I read it with interest because I wasn’t able to connect to the live webcast the day before. This morning, I read Mark Lindner’s (Off the Mark) reaction to the meeting (he was able to “attend” via webcast). Next time, Mark, tell us how you really feel 
I don’t feel quite as passionate about some of this as Mark and others do. Maybe I should and because I don’t, that reflects poorly on me. I don’t know.
Yet I do have a reaction to the meeting to share, and it is based solely on Jay’s writeup (i.e. second hand at best). My reaction to the whole deal is, why oh why are we still debating and tossing around the same observations and identifying the same issues over and over again, and presenting them as if they are something new and revelatory?! For instance, Rick Lugg of R2 Consulting (whom I know from his days at YBP) gave a presentation that outlined challenges facing those who work in or management bibliographic control (i.e. cataloging) operations. Jay wrote that Rick’s presentation ended with him making the following summary:
- How do we reduce our efforts and redirect our focus?
- How can we redirect our expertise to new metadata schemes?
- How can we open our systems and cultures to external support from authors, publishers, abstract and indexing (A&I) services, etc?
No offense meant to Rick, but none of this is new at all! This is something we’ve been talking about for well over 10 years.
Part of Jay’s writeup also included a summary of a presentation by Mechael Charbonneau of Indiana University in which (in Jay’s words) she “sees the need to optimize the allocation of staff in large research libraries and to free up catalogers to do new things, starting with user needs.” Hello? Why on earth are we not yet way past this stage?
Mark says he is mad; I’m just irked and discouraged by the lack of progress I see.
[tags]working group on the future of bibliographic control, rick lugg, l2 consulting, mark lindner, jay datema[/tags]
Thanks for your thoughtful reaction to my notes–large libraries change very slowly, and when they do, it causes massive changes.
In part, some libraries (Cornell is one) have radically reordered their cataloging operations, but the big question is–what next?
If the cataloging world isn’t MARC-centric, then what should people spend their time doing?
Many libraries have directors who advanced from cataloging positions. Is their hard-earned knowledge less relevant now?
And is this whole process becoming moot, with things like Zotero and Google Books interoperating in the sort of way the catalog and reference managers ought to do better?
Jay, wow. I had not heard of this latest Zotero functionality. Poor choice of words, but COOL, so cool. Your point about the possible “mootness” (made up word) of this stuff is well worth pondering.