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The Future ain’t what it used to be

The Future ain’t what it used to be. CRCC Forum 2014 ALA Midwinter Meeting Philadelphia. Outline. An ideal catalog (1874) How we got here Where we are Where we seem to be going. An ideal catalog. It has happened only once in history. How did Cutter do it?. It was the 19 th Century

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The Future ain’t what it used to be

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  1. The Future ain’t what it used to be CRCC Forum 2014 ALA Midwinter Meeting Philadelphia

  2. Outline • An ideal catalog (1874) • How we got here • Where we are • Where we seem to be going

  3. An ideal catalog It has happened only once in history.

  4. How did Cutter do it? • It was the 19th Century • No cover-to-cover translations • No microforms • No non-book materials • No online resources • No compromises (no cooperative cataloging) • The catalog as a whole

  5. Exploiting the available technology

  6. Exploiting the available technology • Save space without sacrificing clarity • Abbreviate, use numerals • Remove superfluous text • Avoid unnecessary repetition • No labels

  7. Save the time of the reader • Take advantage of the page layout • Dash entries • [Same] • Use typography to emphasize orde-emphasize entries and elements The full-page format and compressed entries supported rapid browsing, evaluation, and comparison

  8. On the other hand • Additions and corrections discovered and added to each volume • It was already out of date long before it was published • Of necessity, it was continued (1872+) by a card catalog

  9. How we got here

  10. From then to now: the need to produce cards • 1902: LC begins card distribution • 1968: peak production (79 million cards) • 1969: LC launches MARC Distribution Service • 1971: OCLC begins card distribution • 1985: peak production (131 million cards) • 1995: LC produces ca. 700,000 cards • 1997: LC ends card production • 2012/13: OCLC produces ca.700,000cards

  11. Where we are

  12. Browsing • Our headings and authority records are still based on a browsing model • Surname, Forename • Hierarchy • Today our catalogs often don’t even offer browsing as an option, except for ordering result sets (typically by title proper) • Yet still underpinning much of our cataloging practice is the question of how things will “file”

  13. Facets

  14. <creatorcontrib> • Creator usually appears in 1XX but may appear in 7XX (joint authors, etc.) • Contributors usually appears in 7XX but may appear in 1XX (defendant, etc.) • Without the use of relationship designators, there is no foolproof way to tell which is which

  15. ISBD and FRBR / FRAD • ISBD • Bibliographic description (FRBR agnostic) • FRBR / FRAD • Conceptual models • Entity-relationship • Object-oriented

  16. Out, damned ISBD! • Well, not so fast: • We’ve always had punctuation of some sort • If you remove an ISBD element, there can be consequences (mainly because of the way we introduced ISBD into MARC long ago)

  17. FRBR: First, the bad news

  18. Not quite FRBR

  19. Well, this is embarrassing…

  20. Et tu, Bruté?

  21. Hail Mary pass

  22. TMI: The curse of cut-and-paste

  23. The Good News: ISSN • The only identifier used heavily in relationships (Thank You, ISSN Network, for 760-787) • Can be manipulated to mimic a FRBR structure • Online versions: share an ISSN • Print/microform versions: share an ISSN • Versions linked by ISSN-L • Has been assigned to resources both retroactively and willy-nilly!!!!

  24. Beyond ISSN-L: Linked editions

  25. P-N and differentiation • CONSER’s provider-neutral record convention outsources the differentiation of online manifestations (and frequently expressions) to third-party knowledgebases and OpenURL resolvers • These are in turn dependent on metadata provided by vendors

  26. Outsourcing selecting: less is less Graphics

  27. Outsourcing selecting: more is more

  28. Linked Open Data (LOD) • Heavily dependent on wide buy-in of identifiers (ISBN, ISSN, VIAF, ISNI) and their proper use • Difficult to move beyond a given vocabulary • Same label / different scope • Different label / same scope

  29. Græcumest, non legitur • BIBFRAME • Creative Works • Instances • Authorities • Annotations

  30. From serials to …

  31. Where we seem to be going • A catalog in uneasy tension with the Web • A catalog that initially looks pretty much like today due to the weight of the past. But in the long term… • Descriptions of physical resources may be reduced to identifiers for linking from the web to local item data (assuming the adoption of robust identifiers and their retrospective assignment) • Descriptions of online resources may be reduced to providing pathways to subscribed resources (or superseded by a browser plug-in that will detect access rights to a given resource)

  32. Thank you Ed Jones National University, San Diego ejones@nu.edu

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