A very well attended meeting yesterday at the British Library on the history of some of the collections' provenance, don't know how many lis-linkers were at it? At the end, I asked a question about how to catalogue, given the breadth of the discussion, there was complete silence, then everyone went out for a drink.
I was reminded of historic bibliography, perhaps why the Library Association for formed in the first place, why the FID was formed, and then the IIS.
It is a really interesting story that some drawings of Palladio are bound up in a volume of Polybius, and I am not being sarcastic.
However it is a different matter what the minimum data set should be for a universal bibliographic record?
It seems to me that everyone is an expert in something, and no one is an expert in everything. We now have social networking tools, and potentially e-very-thing. It also seems that subject and genre are tightly bound and subject is a deeply contested category. We need, it seems to me to return to a principle of a public access record, which is an international public good. Then there can be specialist collections to which additions are made, with as much interoperability as can be achieved through data type definitions?
And at a meeting at the British Library, there should not be silence on this matter.
This email has been scanned for all viruses by the MessageLabs Email
Security System.
|