Skip to content

Tag: Rant

2010-04-23 / Bill Dueber

Why RDA is doomed to failure

[Note: edited for clarity thanks to rsinger’s comment, below] Doomed, I say! DOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMED! My reasoning is simple: RDA will fail because it’s not “better enough.” Now, those of you who know me might be saying to yourselves, “Waitjustaminute. Bill doesn’t know anything at all about cataloging, or semantic representations, or the relative merits of various encapsulations of bibliographic metadata. I mean, sure, he knows a lot about…err….hmmm…well, in any case, he’s definitely talking out of his ass on this one.” First off, thanks for having such a long-winded internal monologue about me; it’s good to be thought of. And, of…

Continue readingWhy RDA is doomed to failure
Comments closed
2010-04-20 / Bill Dueber

Data structures and Serializations

Jonathan Rochkind, in response to a long (and, IMHO, mostly ridiculous) thread on NGC4Lib, has been exploring the boundaries between a data model and its expression/serialization ( see here, here, and here ) and I thought I’d jump in. What this post is not There’s a lot to be said about a good domain model for bibliographic data. I’m so not the guy to say it. I know there are arguments for and against various aspects of the AACR2 and RDA and FRBR, and I’m unable to go into them. What I am comfortable saying is this: Anyone advocating or…

Continue readingData structures and Serializations
Comments closed
2008-07-02 / Bill Dueber

Intuition-based librarianship?

Not long after I started working in the library, I heard someone talking about “Evidence Based Librarianship.” Like the good little kind-of-a-librarian I’d become, I looked it up and found this article which states that: EBL employs the best available evidence based upon library science research to arrive at sound decisions about solving practical problems in librarianship. My immediate response was, of course, What the $#!&% is everyone else doing? The sad truth, of course, is that in general folks working in libraries do not use the “best evidence” based on “library science research” because, like many of the practitioners…

Continue readingIntuition-based librarianship?
Comments closed
2008-05-12 / Bill Dueber

Psst. We’re not printing cards anymore

[From a series I’m calling, “Things About The Library I Think Are Stoooopid”, part one of about a zillion.] I’m going to wallow in a little bit of hyperbole here, but only a little. The problem Suppose, just for a moment, that you’re a computer programmer working anytime in the last twenty years, and someone wants you to set up a data structure to deal with a timeless issue — how to keep track of who’s on which committees in a library. If you’re a computer person Easy enough. First off, what’s a committee? Committee Committee name (string) Committee inception…

Continue readingPsst. We’re not printing cards anymore
Comments closed