You know, Giesle, when news of Hilary Clinton's imaginary discussions with
Elanor Roosevelt came to light, we had something of a political crisis here
in the U.S.
Nonetheless, I can't resist responding:
>A) You've got it backwards. The DCI is trying to create metadata
> records for human readers. Your feeble attempts to appropriate
> this great technology for your beastly Internet search engine
> is misguided and without hope of succeeding. Go away.
The DCI is, in fact, trying to improve resource discovery for people, and
across a wide array of applications. Since the focus is discovery of
networked resources, and we all use machines to access those resources, we'd
like to think that machine processing of metadata will help us with our
discovery needs, so it is worthwhile to give careful consideration to making
our metadata processable by machines as well as human understandable.
>B) Stay faithful to your original vision: Yes, the metadata record is
> for the machine's eye only. Don't listen to those who try to
> lead you astray.
Discussant B is woefully misguided, both in the assumption of an original
vision and in assuming that DC metadata was ever for machine eyes only. But
then, we all know B's propensity for overly theoretical... er...
machinations?
>C) How perceptive of you! These two usages are really incompatible
> and trying to accommodate both in the DC framework is just like
> trying to fit two feet into one shoe. And fitting two feet into
> one shoe will hamper your forwards movement -- even if the shoe
> is oversize.
The fortunate few of us that have hand knitted socks wear the same kinds of
shoes as the rest of us that buy our socks at Walmarts. The shoes don't
much care.
A subject heading derived automagically is just a string of characters
(chosen from the same controlled vocabulary) as the one that emerges from a
diligent cataloger. The number of bytes in a file doesn't change based on
whether a human types it in or a machine extracts it from a file listing.
Now, in each case there may be differences in accuracy of metadata across a
collection (huimans pick subject headings better, machines are generally
better at table look ups) but the accuracy of the metadata has nothing to do
with the semantics, syntax, or structure of the metadata. Its probably in
our interests, however, to know where our metadata comes from.
>D) You are utterly confused. There is no conflict. The DC is
> equally well suited for both application if applied correctly.
> You just have to learn how to apply it correctl
D is so right... except about you being confused, of course
stu, whose lumpy cheek might be tongue-filled, might be foot filled.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|