[DCRM-L] OCLC's IR webinar (May 13)

[Allison Rich]

Hello Will and Richard and all:

I could get snarky here too. But I will try and refrain from such low 
behavior.
Nevertheless I have a few points to add:

1) We are a small community of people who care about item level 
descriptions, as creators. I know that our patrons here at the John 
Carter Brown Library are truly grateful for the full level descriptions. 
But, let's face it, most people who don't use special collections 
libraries simply don't care about such detail. So, in that way, 
Richard's comment of "However that therm is technically defined, we know 
that in our endeavor, this means that Excellent + Good = Good, Good + 
Good Enough = Good Enough, Good Enough + OK = OK, OK + Whatever = 
Whatever, and that the job is to persuade the customers that Whatever is 
the New Excellence" is particularly and very painfully true.

2) We will most likely **not** be using LDB or the new program - whose 
name escapes me at the moment, sorry - simply because the information 
will only be available for viewing by the Brown University system and by 
no one else. The local, full record in the ILS will be better than 
anything LBD can offer. Perhaps at large institutions such as Harvard 
who has numerous libraries this will be a useful program as the larger 
Harvard community will be able to see the local data issued by the 
various holding libraries. But that is just speculation on my part.

3) The ominous statement that OCLC issued about not having a firm date 
for the death of the Connexion client was most worrisome to us after the 
webinar. My gut feeling tells me that Connexion will be killed off after 
BIBFRAME becomes the new MARC. What worries me is that a program like 
Record Manager will be the new form of display for ILS platforms. If 
that is the case then we might be in for a very cruel shock. But this is 
just me, unless any of the rest of you had the same feeling.

4) A plethora of #5 500 fields will overcrowd the MARC record and make 
it look terribly clunky!!! I rarely upgrade the master record because we 
have always utilized IRs and besides in a world filled with variants 
with poor master records without citations how can one **really** 
upgrade a master record made by someone else if they are unsure whether 
that master record is that they truly have in hand???

5) I was the one that asked the questions about getting rid of lesser 
quality records from the database in the very last minutes of the 
presentation. And I meant it. If we are being encouraged to streamline 
ourselves, I submit
a quote to them from the gospel of Luke: "Physician, *heal* thyself". 
And clean up your own house before asking other people to streamline 
their own.

I have worked at institutions where I have only been encouraged to "get 
the books on the shelves". I have always done more. I refuse to do 
mediocre work. Thankfully at my library my work IS appreciated by staff 
and patrons. But in the wider world, sadly, I am "Allosaurus", a big, 
plant-eating dinosaur. I have more years worth of work ahead of me in 
this field (I hope) and I will roll with and learn whatever follows 
MARC. I know that change is inevitable. But, like Richard, I fear that 
"Whatever" is the new "Excellent".

Best for now,
Allison


-- 

********************************
"Outside of a dog,
a book is probably man's best friend,
and inside of a dog,
it's too dark to read.
- Groucho Marx"

Allison Rich
Rare Materials Cataloguer
ESTC and NACO Coordinator

John Carter Brown Library
Providence, Rhode Island
Allison_Rich at brown.edu

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