Sacred Cow #4: Notes, notes, notes
Posted On Sep 5 2008In case you’re wondering how many cows are in this pasture, I started counting and figured I could keep this series going for at least the rest of the calendar year. How long can I milk this one? After a while, though, it begins to look whiny and tired, so I thought I would end with a cow for which it might make sense to make more hay. (there, have I…ahem…butchered that metaphor enough?). Some of last week’s work had me thinking about notes fields in bibliographic and item records. Boy, do we love notes. We didn’t quite have the …
Sacred Cow #3: Migration
Posted On Aug 24 2008Though I heard it in a much different context once, I like to apply something from religion to the world of libraries (don’t worry). Preparing the congregation for a “radical change,” a senior pastor told his flock: “There’s a difference between ‘tradition’ and ‘traditionalism’.” Tradition is what we do all the time and for some good reason. Traditionalism is what we do all the time but we can no longer recall the reason. I think libraries excel at traditionalism, and I have been giving quite a bit of thought to the processes we use to perpetuate it. In the first …
Sacred Cow #2
Posted On Aug 7 2008Sorry for the long gap between cows…I had some technical difficulties that were making it hard for me to blog. On with it… I’ve been thinking about one of the most bloated sacred cows in library management systems. No, not the MARC record–I’ll leave that one to others. I’m talking about Circulation Rules. It’s become almost cliche to compare what we do in libraries (and this accusation is pointed primarily at academic libraries) to a typical commercial customer service. Picture me at the Blockbuster checkout desk. Me: Hi, I’m visiting here for the next six months and was wondering if …