Sunday, April 25, 2010

"Collect the World"

I've been listening again lately to one of my favorite bands, Toad the Wet Sprocket. On their album Fear (1991) the track "Butterflies" [listen to sample on Pandora] includes a refrain that starts, "In time, I will collect the world..."

As I've been studying the intricacies of cataloging, and thinking about cataloging electronic resources in particular, like streaming media and Web sites, I keep hearing this song. Maybe we're not collecting the world so much as the pointers to the world, the abstract representations (in highly structured form) to objects like books or sheet music or maps or LCD projectors or digital artifacts.

In Catalog It! Kaplan and Riedling provide a handy flow chart for the structure of the 245 Tag (p. 104) and a list of General Material Designations (GMD) (p. 105). Here is where we do our Naming, providing the title of the work and the statement of responsibility, with twelve valid subfields to account for non-print-book materials, subtitles, authors, illustrators, and so on. I'm grateful that my library automation program doesn't require me to enter every detail for MAchine Readable Cataloging... it would take so much longer than it already does to add materials to the system. Still, it's been useful to learn to parse fields I hadn't had to pay much attention to before now.

What I'd like to learn well enough to explain is the way MARC21 or MARC generally can leverage Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web -- or how the "SemWeb" can leverage MARC. Allan Cho, a librarian at the University of British Columbia, wrote an article last June called How RDF Can Use MARC in the Semantic Web World: Using Existing Library Cataloguing Methods in Organizing the Web. To quote Wikipedia,
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax formats.
Talis is one noteworthy organization exploring the representation of MARC21 records as RDF for the semantic web. [pdf] The latest blog post of their "Library 2.0 Gang" talks about new models for bibliographic record supply. And ResourceShelf reports that at last week's British Columbia Library Association Congress presenters discussed working with e-book metadata and compared examples of cataloging using AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition) with RDA (Resource Description & Access), showing how records would be coded in MARC 21.

It's an exciting time to be serving as a librarian and studying librarianship. And it will be interesting to see how library catalogs and semantic webs emerge, like chrysalides becoming butterflies.

1 comment:

  1. This is fascinating stuff. The links are excellent. The whole idea of "cataloging the web" seems so impossible and yet...

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