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

Marijane,

Thanks for the references!

I first met Cory Doctorow during a standards body fight over a standard 
that involved content protection.

Wasn't aware of this particular work.

Thanks!

Patrick

On 7/18/2010 12:52 PM, marijane white wrote:
> 2010/7/18 Alexander Johannesen <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[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.)
>
>
>
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>    

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick-Q/[email protected]
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)

Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
Homepage: http://www.durusau.net
Twitter: patrickDurusau

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