A recent
Cataloging Futures post spotlights Paul Deschner's
letter to the Harvard Library community about the importance of quality cataloging for the development of new library applications. Paul is Applications Developer at the
Harvard Library Innovation Lab.
One of the primary challenges in this work is getting data describing
books and periodicals (catalog records) to relate to data from
non-library sources, such as data about book talks on YouTube or to NPR
broadcasts of author interviews or to archival collections. It’s all
about connections in the data. The barer the data, the less described it
is, the more it falls flat.
No software can create these connections if the underlying data hasn’t
been carefully composed into richly structured records, based on solid
analysis and comprehensive description. The difference is like that
between reading a newspaper consisting of headlines only and reading one
which also has accompanying articles. It is dramatic.
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