What I write may sound like lecturing or pontificating, but this is
really not what I intend. This one is rather brief.
James Weinheimer writes
> Simplicity--for the sake of simplicity--only adds to
> complexity for users when they wish to search and understand the record.
Some misunderstandings arise from the fact that "simple" has two
very different meanings: "easy" and "plain".
(Stu Weibel, I remember, resolved a while ago that he will stop using
the term "DC simple" just because it suggests there are easy ways to
good resource discovery.)
With plain rules, you cannot expect to get sophisticated results.
It will always be consistency that suffers, but consistency is
what you most desperately need in a large database.
Given the complexity of todays body of knowledge, can one expect
to find easy ways of dealing with it? Web resources, as well as books,
are recorded human knowledge. From the experience of cataloging we can,
I think, safely say that to achieve easy resource discovery you need the
most complex machinery, i.e. complicated rules, and there's not likely
any way around it.
Plain rules may be easy to follow, but they don't make resource discovery
much easier - they can only yield plain (inconsistent) results.
As James Weinheimer indicated, we would really be very happy ourselves if
it were possible to make our rules so much easier - without making the
catalogs plainer!
Bernhard Eversberg
Universitaetsbibliothek, Postf. 3329,
D-38023 Braunschweig, Germany
Tel. +49 531 391-5026 , -5011 , FAX -5836
e-mail [log in to unmask]
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