Cataloging Futures

The importance of findability and the library catalog

Whenever someone takes a minority position on future of cataloging issues, I sit up and take notice (especially when has to do with the MARC format). In this post, Findability and the Library OPAC, programmer and librarian, Susan Berdinka argues that MARC is not the problem:

Roy Tennant stated in 2002 (and has since retracted) that “MARC has always been an arcane standard.” There are still those who believe the problem is MARC. All that MARC is is a standardized format. Nothing more. Other than a need for normalization, the only changes I see that need to be made to MARC are the additions proposed accommodate RDA. The relational database model is still the best way to store and retrieve information. The issue is not the storage of the information. The issue is the software interface as it is designed to interpret the user’s needs and retrieve the data. The database queries themselves are trivial. We need a better way of creating queries to produce accurate results.

Finding Findability Blog

This morning I was getting ready to register for the ALA Annual Conference and noticed that the ALCTS President's program speaker is Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability. (I must sheepishly admitted that this book has been sitting on my file cabinet waiting to be read for way too long.)  Anyway, I just discovered from the program notes that "he blogs at findability.org." How cool! I read his "libraries" posts on the way home from work.  Good reading for any cataloging futurists out there!