Re: Dynamic vs. Fixed World Views was Re: MARCXML to Topic Maps? MODS to Topic Maps?

2010/7/18 Alexander Johannesen <[email protected]>

> Patrick!
>
> > From my perspective, formats, such as MARC are *representing* something
> that
> > exists whether it appears in MARC or MARCXML or in some other
> > *presentation.*
>
> Yes, I understand this part. However, with this ;
>
> <marc:subfield code="a">New York, N.Y. :</marc:subfield>
> <marc:subfield code="b">Atlantic,</marc:subfield>
> <marc:subfield code="c">[1957?]</marc:subfield>
>
> when you remove the presentation, you get this ;
>
> New York, N.Y. :
> Atlantic,
> [1957?]
>
> This is the actual meat, this is stripped of presentation. And still
> you got presentation artifacts in there, and this presentation is
> different from practice to practice, even country to country if you
> want to divert in to various versions of MARC. Sure, there is
> presentation, or wrapper if you like, but I'm not whining about the
> presentation / wrapper; I'm whining about the actual stuff in the
> middle, the actual meta data. And here we're talking strictly
> artifacts, but when we dig into a more prose-prone field, it gets a
> heckovalot worse, with abbreviations, markup and undocumented
> relationships to other fields, all sitting somewhere between
> cataloging best-practice and personal negligence.
>
>
So?  This is a problem with lots of data sets.  Some folks, say Cory
Doctorow, might say it's a problem with all of them. [1]  It seems unfair to
dismiss the utility of MARC for this reason.  People still manage to find a
way to make use of their metacrap despite all the very real problems with
it.  I might argue that librarians have known about these problems longer
than most and that historically they have done a better job than most
because they are at least following principles of description [2] that aim
to limit the impact of said problems, however inconsistently they may be
applied and however bizarrely they choose to do it.  Plus, I would think the
inconsistency of the contents are not the fault of MARC but rather the
inconsistent application of the byzantine cataloging rules.

But anyway.  Compare the contents of MARC records as a whole to the contents
any other large scale user-generated data effort.  Wikipedia.  Musicbrainz,
and the database that inspired it.  IMDB.  The TV Tropes wiki. Reference
citations. [3]  Or commercial datasets -- like Amazon's catalog (quick, go
search Amazon for Mark Twain, then do another search for Samuel Clemens, and
then compare and ponder the results).  I suspect you will find identity
issues and examples of all the problems Doctorow cites everywhere.  As such,
I hope you can forgive me for failing to see why this is a problem for MARC
in particular.  Unless you mean to imply that having an inconsistently
applied set of byzantine cataloging rules makes the problem somehow worse.
Does it?


-marijane

1. Doctorow, C.  *Metacrap*.
http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm<http://www.well.com/%7Edoctorow/metacrap.htm>.
2001.
2. Svenonius, E. *The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization*.
The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000. Chapter 5, *Principles of Description*.
3. A great example of metacrap in reference citations: Dubin, D.  *The Most
Influential Paper Gerard Salton Never Wrote*.  Library Trends, Spring 2004.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1387/is_4_52/ai_n7074022/.

(Apologies if the references seem pedantic.  I like to let people know where
I am coming from, and I wanted to point out to Patrick that Metacrap might
be an excellent candidate for the Topic Maps curriculum that he's raised for
discussion on his blog recently.)

_______________________________________________
topicmapmail mailing list
topicmapmail-Zo64W7twoUFWk0Htik3J/[email protected]
http://www.infoloom.com/mailman/listinfo/topicmapmail