[WEB4LIB] Re: FW: Important Article

[David Merchant]

>>1. the 'Net has connectivity problems.  Where would this "one catalog" sit?
>
>A great many "big catalogs" or "gigantic repositories" are replicated in 
>multiple locations on multiple continents.  There is no need for them to be 

True, that would solve that problem to a degree.  However, since the
article stated 'getting rid of the local catalog' the connectivity to the
Global cat, even its mirror, could be far enough away as to increase the
chances of connectivity problems.  A local cat can still be up and
accessible by at least on campus users even if connectivity to the Net
backbone is down or problematic.  And again, I based my comments on the
article stating that we should _get rid of the local catalog_.  If the plan
included keeping the local catalog, I would not have commented as I did.

>>wants to find out if there is a certain book on the local shelf will have
>>to wait a long time to find that info out, and may find shelf browsing
faster.
>Who said anything about not allowing local shelf browsing?  In addition, 

They didn't disallow local shelf browsing by visual inspection.  My comment
here was to say that "if there is increased connectivity problems or
increased slowness to retrieving information about books on topic X, the
user may find it more expedient to shelf browse visually to find what they
need."

>even if there were a "world catalog", nothing would prevent a local library 
>from having its own catalog.  In fact, OCLC could be considered an example 
>of such a system.

According to the plan in the article, there would be no local catalog.
That is what I was responding to, to me I agree with you, right now nothing
prevents a local library from having its own catalog, but it would not fit
with the "vision" or the plan as stated in the article.

>
>>2. Local collection.  Sometimes I want to find which books on topic X _my_
>>library has.  I don't care what others may or may not have, I want to find
>>what my library has.
>
>Fine.  Any catalog worth its salt has the ability to do that.  Check out 
>http://catalyst.boisestate.edu and you'll see that it is a shared catalog 
>between two libraries.  And, there are also various special collections 
>that can be searched independently.  The same could hold for any other set 
>of collections in a catalog.

Again, I think we are talking past each other.  On a Global cat, where
there are listings, links, to every holding of book X, the returned hits
would be huge, even a not all that popular of a book  could return a huge
number of hits of where copies of that book could be had from Russia,
Japan, America, etc... For a person who is _just_ interested in what
_his/her_ library has and is not interested at all in what any other
library has that could be a bit of a nuisance.  And yes, if I could set the
search parameters to just my catalog, then what is the difference between
that and my library keeping it's own catalog?  Remember, the article talks
about each library getting rid of it's own catalog.  I wouldn't mind a
Global cat as long as each library could keep its own cat, and that is one
of my main complaints about the article's plan.

>Regardless of the "whatever-centric" thinking that may or may not be 
>present, no system will ever be adopted by everybody (unless they appoint 
>one of us King of the World....but of course he died out there in the North 
>Atlantic anyway)

:-)

>And, coming from a North American source, it hardly seems surprising that 
>it may have such thinking.....just as a similar document from another 
>country or region may be oriented to its way of thinking.

Aye, 'tis very very true.

TTFN,
David
Systems Librarian, Louisiana Tech University  <www.latech.edu/tech/library/>
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