LISNews: Librarian News

Always Helpful Brian from Librarism.com writes \" Knowledge Management magazine has an Article which discusses DDC as a paper filing system and makes suggestions for the indexing of e-docs. \"

They close with an interesting thought:

\"One lesson from the past, however, is still an important one. We should be reluctant to accept any sort of closed classification system in a world as full of change as ours is. We should use technology not as an excuse to create a single new system but as a way to gain access under as many systems as possible.\"

There attempts to catalog the net using the Dublin Core and the Warwick Framework. (References below). The catalogers worry that search engines that can’t possibly keep up with fast growing and chaotic web resources are indexing the net.. They seek semantic interoperability -tell me that\'s not an eight-bit concept!

They worry that on the web there is no controlled vocabulary such as one finds in cataloging rules. The word means one thing to an engineer, quite another thing to a orthodontist, still another to a card player. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet but a bridge by the same name should smell different to a proper search engine. Search engines will never catch the nuances without the help of catalogers for the web. Enter the Dublin Core, the OCLC CORC project and the Warwick framework, to try to catch, rather than reap, the whirlwind. -- Read More

Rob Brian sent this in from The Sydney Morning Herald The library of the NSW Parliament is getting rid of more than half of its old and rare book collection. They need to sell some, to pay for cataloging what they keep. Sales so far have brought in $110,000, enough to employ staff to continue cataloguing the remaining finds. The ex-parliamentary librarian Mr Russell Cope, had wanted the collection kept intact.

\"The fact that parts of [library] holdings are not \'used\' is advanced, especially by uninformed parliamentarians, as an argument for getting rid of \'unused\' items. If they happen to be valuable as well, the monetary attraction becomes hard to resist.\" -- Read More