Comment by Zoe

#1 9. February 2009, 7:17 am o'clock

Hi,

Thanks for sticking to your guns on this one.

I’m not a librarian, I work in online publishing. For us on the commercial end (especially in journals!) talk of MODS and METS gets one of two responses: a) laughter (from those who haven’t seen them before and can’t believe how wobbly they are) and b) fear (from those who have and do).

MARC was great for it’s time, but that time was fifty years ago. The LoC is not backing a winner in their constant tweaking of a dead technology.

So yes - train your librarians to assess for themselves, to spot trends, to ignore the LoC whenever they can. We commercial folk are trying to make metadata better for libraries, that’s who we sell to, and frankly we don’t want to give you MODS because you deserve better.

Comment by Diane Hillmann

#2 11. February 2009, 7:34 am o'clock

Thanks, Zoe–it’s nice to know that I’m not alone in thinking that looking beyond the usual suspects is essential at this point. The insight you provide is really important!

Comment by Chris

#3 11. February 2009, 11:24 am o'clock

Hi Zoe,

I think it’s unfair to attack MODS and METS without suggesting alternatives. For example, what are the problems you see with METS? For many digital libraries METS is the standard that we are counting on for the future. I know my library is.

Comment by Jonathan Rochkind

#4 25. March 2009, 10:38 pm o'clock

Diane, I know you’ve got no time for it, but I’d love to see a ‘textbook’ version of that workship, that could be used as education for people on their own time (in class or self-), without needing to attend a workshop with a particular trainer (if it were even still being given!)

Wouldn’t necessarily need to be an actual printed textbook (it’s not as if there’s probably much money in library school textbooks), could be an online format too, which would allow useful hyperlinks to external content. But something primarily textual.

It would be incredibly valuable.

Comment by Diane Hillmann

#5 26. March 2009, 3:56 pm o'clock

Jonathan:

I have thought seriously about doing the workshop as a screencast and adding more zing to it in the form of examples and such, but it IS a big commitment in time. I would also like to re-think the entire slide set before doing that, given the difference in presentation mode, and perhaps re-jigger the order, given that I’d be more “in charge” this time around and have some ideas about improvement festering.

Right now I’m spending most of my time trying to keep the stuff we’re working on with RDA Online moving (more on that in later posts), and it’s hard to balance that with teaching. But the balance is important over the long term–I like teaching and I learn a lot from trying to distill what I think I know to those whose background and experience is different than mine.

I appreciate your pushes in that direction, and will very likely get back to you when I start to think about this again. I think your perspective on the slides and the thrust of the course would be very helpful …

Diane