repositories for the rest of us

2007/08/21: CC:DA, SciVee & academic cataloging

I want to write about CC:DA comments on RDA Ch.6 and 7, but it will take me eons to pull together the issues. I started the new gig yesterday and have some thoughts akin to Karen's about starting a new job.

In the meantime, I want to point out SciVee, an incredibly cool tool for disseminating scientific information. It makes me incredibly happy to see SDSC's involvement. I first saw scientific visualizations back in 1996 when I was SDSC's librarian. At the time I was responsible for maintaining a bibliography of publications by the center's researchers. The "bib" as it was affectionately known, was kept for NSF reporting purposes. Big grants mean big accountability and the number of peer-reviewed publications is one measurement of a project's success. At the time I felt that it would be really cool to create metaworks of articles with their associated publications, presentations AND raw data. Those metaworks would need to be engendered via metadata for bibliographic families. Ten years later all of these disparate yet related materials are beginning to come together within tools scientists can use. That's just wicked rad!

Even though I'm glad to see this trend, it does make me ponder the role of cataloging and metadata services within academic libraries vs. public libraries. Our audiences are so different and the types of materials we deal with are so different that I wonder if it's a good idea to continue to hold alliances with rules such as RDA. As CC:DA reviews RDA, I'm continually reminded to think about small, rural, public libraries and the needs of those libraries with less funding. Can a standard for bibliographic description work for both the academic handling bibliographic families pulled together on-the-fly AND the small town librarian handling graphic novels?

I have my doubts.

Labels: CC:DA, metadata, RDA, SciVee, SDSC

posted by Laura @ 7:46 AM