Following on from my previous post, about the gap between the standards we apply when creating data and the ways in which we want to use it, I would like to give some thought to what lies in the middle - our OPACs.
We are all data creators - we all create data and edit data and hold it in databases - and we all follow some sort of rules (AACR, RDA, ONIX, DC or whatever) to structure that data.
Equally, we all have views on how we want to make the data usable, the ways in which we want to make it available, the things we want people to be able to do with it.
We don't necessarily agree about either the kind of data we want, or what we want to do with it. But the fact is that in the middle, for most of us, sits our OPAC - which dictates both the structure we use and what we can do with it.
I often curse our LMS supplier into heaps - why can't our OPAC do this, or that? Why does it take so long to persuade them that this (or that) really is important and something our users are waiting for?
Sometimes I feel sorry for our LMS suppliers - if we can't, as a cataloguing community, agree about our data and its purpose, how can they possibly develop the means to satisfy us?
But for most of the time we are all making our decisions - about what our data should be like and what it can do - on the basis of the product in front of us at that time. Should we ensure that our data is to the tippest of top standards because one day an OPAC will come which can actually use all that data to its fullest potential? Should we tailor our data to what our OPAC can actually do at the moment and tweak and twiddle and bodge the standards to get the result we want now, never mind what happens five years down the line? Or do we make our data according to what we think we and our users will want in the future, even if we don't, and can't, actually know what we or they will want then?
You see, I think that is what RDA is trying to do. I think RDA is looking into the future and predicting what we will all want and trying to make provisions for it. We (some of us, including me) criticise RDA because it neither sticks with the standards we've already got, nor offers anything our present OPACs can make use of in any kind of a helpful way. And prediction is a sticky business - look at the predictions made 20 years ago about how we'd all be living now and they are mostly wrong.
What do we want, really really want - something that used to work, something that works now or something that might work in the future?
Saturday 8 January 2011
Monday 3 January 2011
RDA and standards
I have thought for a long time that there are two sorts of behaviour displayed in people who do cataloguing, with most people doing some mixture of both.
The first is the organising temperament - liking to sort things out, make things clear, set things out neatly, resolve muddle. This is the mindset that likes rules and clarity and consistency, that enjoys data creation and input.
The second is the mindset that puzzles out what to do with data, how to get it out, how searches and indexes work or ought to work, who want to use the data to produce answers.
As I said, most cataloguers are a mixture of both, and both are important. If the data isn't good, then you can't use it effectively. Rubbish in, rubbish out. On the other hand, there's no point in having data if you don't, or can't, use it. But although most cataloguers are a mixture of both types of mindset, and use both in their work, most cataloguers incline to one more than the other and are either data creators by instinct, or data users.
The whole RDA argument seems to be between those two ways of thinking. Opponents of RDA often worry about what will happen when the rules change, what the effect will be on catalogues which contain both RDA and non-RDA data, whether it will be possible, let alone desirable, to maintain consistency and order. That is the voice of the data creator.
Supporters of RDA believe that it will enable us to make more of our catalogue data, spread it more widely, combine it more easily with other types of data. That is the data user speaking.
Most of us are both data creators and data users and therefore end up divided on RDA. Is some of the heat in the debate generated by the fact that we are all arguing with ourselves?
The first is the organising temperament - liking to sort things out, make things clear, set things out neatly, resolve muddle. This is the mindset that likes rules and clarity and consistency, that enjoys data creation and input.
The second is the mindset that puzzles out what to do with data, how to get it out, how searches and indexes work or ought to work, who want to use the data to produce answers.
As I said, most cataloguers are a mixture of both, and both are important. If the data isn't good, then you can't use it effectively. Rubbish in, rubbish out. On the other hand, there's no point in having data if you don't, or can't, use it. But although most cataloguers are a mixture of both types of mindset, and use both in their work, most cataloguers incline to one more than the other and are either data creators by instinct, or data users.
The whole RDA argument seems to be between those two ways of thinking. Opponents of RDA often worry about what will happen when the rules change, what the effect will be on catalogues which contain both RDA and non-RDA data, whether it will be possible, let alone desirable, to maintain consistency and order. That is the voice of the data creator.
Supporters of RDA believe that it will enable us to make more of our catalogue data, spread it more widely, combine it more easily with other types of data. That is the data user speaking.
Most of us are both data creators and data users and therefore end up divided on RDA. Is some of the heat in the debate generated by the fact that we are all arguing with ourselves?
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