[Web4lib] MARC strictness

[Mike Taylor]

> Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 09:05:43 -0800
> From: "K.G. Schneider" <kgs at bluehighways.com>
> 
> It intrigues me that the answers so far have provided solutions to
> the technical question but have not addressed the question of
> whether inconsistency in metadata is worth addressing (and "worth"
> is a very loaded word in this context, since metadata is expensive).

Yes, I am also intrigued by this ... and sort of scared of what the
answer will probably turn out to be.  While I am a structured
information professional, whenever I want to find, say, C. S. Lewis's
_The Abolition of Man_, I just use the single search-box on the home
page and type in "lewis abolition man" -- and sure enough, all ten of
the hits are correct.  I don't recall the last time I used the
"advanced search" facility that lets me separate the author and title
parts of the search -- it just isn't necessary.

This tells me that all MARC records could be replaced a single line of
undifferentiated keywords and identifiers, like this: "c s lewis the
abolition of man moral law subjectivism 0060652942".

No!  Don't shoot me!  I'm only joking!  I think!

What it really _does_ show -- I think -- is that _for the purposes of
Amazon-like searching_, this ultra-weak metadata suffices.  The
question is what proportion of all catalogue searching is in this
sense "Amazon-like", and my feeling is that the answer is very close
to 100% of it.  Not quite 100%, though: sometimes you really do need
to differentiate between searching for books _written by_ Winston
Churchill and books _about_ Winston Churchill.

Let me reiterate: I don't want this to be an accurate analysis (not
least because my career largely depends on people wanting more precise
searching); but my experience leads me to think it might be.

Finally let me also say that of course metadata has other uses as well
as searching.  Roughly, the other half of the equation is retrieval,
or display.  But again, I find myself thinking that the world probably
need rather less in the way of structure here than we information
professionals tend to want to give them.

OK.  _Now_ you can shoot me.

 _/|_	 ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <mike at miketaylor.org.uk>  http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  It's hard not to suspect that SOAP was thought up late one Friday
	 night after a few too many beers.