Tuesday, June 17, 2003

metaphor watch: exploded content firstmonday on eldred. ... In my view, reclaiming it would make it relevant. Exploding the content within the public domain in a context where it can be built upon and spread (ie, now, with the internet) will make people see again why the public domain is important. And if they see that, then they will again defend it. ... [Lessig Blog] 11:01:23 PM

interesting post from a LiveJournal about library cataloguing today In the old days, Pre MARC [Machine Readable Cataloguing], it was common to have almost as many catalogers as reference people. Books arrived. You hoped for a LC-Card number in the back and if that happened, you ordered cards from the Library of Congress. Eventually most of them came. If the book was new, you knew you had to come up with your own cataloging ... Catalogers are a fraction of the numbers that Reference types are. Do you still need to catalog some things originally? Sure. Is it a substantial fraction of what you buy? hardly. I know of one university with graduate programs that hits over 95% on OCLC. What gets reviewed gets bought. What gets bought gets cataloged. ... I hire catalogers. It's hard. ... I train every new hire. I do more training than cataloging these days. and at the same time, I can't tell prospective students that they'll be able to find work cataloging when they graduate. Medium sized libraries with one cataloger are common. It's like waiting for a tenant to die so you can have their apartment in New York. [librarian50] 10:22:25 PM