On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
>
> > Is it then not necessary to more clearly point out the limitations this
> > imposes on attainable results of DC projects? Esp. what it means for
> > interoperability.
>
> Interoperability? Throw that outdated notion out with the bathwater.
>
> 1:1 is "obviously" too hard for "normal" people to understand. So we
> shouldn't recommend that people follow the 1:1 rule. After all, it's
> only the intellectual elite amongst us that can understand the abstract
> concepts such as "who created this version?". Everyone else in the world
> is going to be concerned about the underlying work.
>
Ooooh, sarcasm. Smart-assery aside, Alex, it's not that "normal" people
can't understand it -- it's that *some* of them don't give a damn. All
I'm trying to get across is that 1) there is a tremendous amount of
metadata already in existence which hasn't been created according to your
rule, and 2) tremendous amounts of metadata will continue to be created in
environments in which DC is peripheral -- a by-product, if you will. Are
you saying that all this useful information should be barred from the DC
universe because they didn't (and don't) conceive resource discovery the
way you do?
> Like it or not, if you're going to be setting up a Metadata Repository,
> you're going to have to impose some rules about what goes where, and how
> to write it there.
Yes, and thanks, but DC is not the only game in town, and I've already
got other rules to follow. I can contribute this metadata to the
general good, but NOT if DC becomes too rigidly prescriptive, because
my organization will have other priorities. I had thought DC was meant
to be a bridge between respected and diverse conceptual spaces. I
believe that imposing -- not "allowing", but "imposing" -- 1:1 descriptive
practice impinges on that autonomy and will result in valuable metadata
being lost to the DC community because it is simply too much trouble to
comply.
> If we're hoping for DC to be a globally adopted "standard", then we're
> going to have to be really strict, at least until we have machines to do
> the metadata allocation for us (a task my company is working on).
Argh. Really strict about what? No DC metadata repository is going to
crash and burn because my record says Ansel Adams created this TIFF.
This kind of cataloger's judgement is not like a date format, where
either it parses or it doesn't. If, in my view, the intellectual content
of the resource I am delivering was created by Ansel Adams, only the
individuals using the record can judge whether or not they agree, and
whether the resource they retrieved meets their needs.
--Robin
Robin Wendler ........................ work (617) 495-3724
Office for Information Systems ....... fax (617) 495-0491
Harvard University Library ........... [log in to unmask]
Cambridge, MA, USA 02138 .............
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