Just found a promising new blog: all things cataloged. Check out the latest post, Cataloging in the age of discovery systems. Words of wisdom for all those in LibraryLand de-emphasizing the importance of cataloging:
Discovery tools with search engine functionality are increasingly being introduced to replace traditional library OPACs. What does this mean for those creating or managing metadata, the catalogers? The role of catalogers gets more important, because however nifty the frond-end is, the underlying data has to be accurate to be useful and to enable findability, and this is even more true now than it was in the days of the OPAC. Catalogers thus have greater responsibility towards the user. Fill in fields correctly or not at all, but not carelessly – data has to be as reliable as possible for machine processing and for the display generated from it. Fields that seem insignificant today may be essential for tomorrow’s technology. We don’t create metadata just for current systems or tools, we also want it to be usable in the future that may yield possibilities we can’t yet foresee.
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