If we can't provide access ... there's no point!

Some interesting blogging coming out of the Summer Institute for Chinese Studies Librarianship. One blogger, Dawn Lawson, writes:

Dr. Allyson Carlyle, associate professor at UW's own Information School, spoke to us for two hours about providing access to digital materials, which in another age would have been referred to simply as cataloging. Listing the acronyms of the topics covered--FRBR, FRAD, FRSAR, DCMI, RDA, IME ICC, etc--belies the fact that these are, in many ways, the most exciting and relevant topics of all! We can talk endlessly about  selecting, acquiring, and preserving electronic resources, but If we cannot provide ready access to them, there is no point! [emphasis mine]

Comments

[Jonathan Rochkind]

Allyson was my cataloging professor in library school, who reassured me that cataloging really could be a vibrant intellectually rigorous useful endeavor for the 21st century--and that I wasn't entirely crazy for thinking that the way cataloging was done now wasn't what it could and should be! Without her, I probably would have given up on cataloging altogether!