In yesterday’s ALA TechSource, Karen Schneider wrote,
You may not think you care about AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloging Rules) or its successor, RDA (Resource Description and Access). That may seem like boring old-school stuff, not nearly as fun or glitzy as romping in Second Life or, as I am wont to do, posting the details of your afternoon snack on Twitter.
But the next time you complain about the limitations of library data—the gazillions of records we have created about the physical items in our libraries—and wonder why none of the cool new applications leverage the millions of library records shared worldwide, or why your expensive catalog can’t integrate with a nifty new social software tool, or you wonder why there’s no Google mashup to connect readers and books, consider this: to a large extent, it’s because our data suck.
Read the entire post here.
