Next Recommendation: Costs

The recommendations are broken into three major sections, one of which  
speaks to management actions that are needed. Of these, the first  
addresses costs and return on investment. The group felt that without  
some kind of cost benefit, it would be hard to make a good case for  
LLD. At the same time, we don't really have a good grasp of what our  
current practices cost us. Thuus:

*Identify costs of current practices, and costs and ROI to moving of LLD*

There must be some measurement of the relative costs of current  
library data practices and the potential of Linked Data to aid in  
making decisions about the future of library data. There are various  
areas of library metadata practices that could be studied, either  
separately or together. Among these are:

     * The relative costs of the Record v. statement approach: for  
editing by humans, as full record replacement in systems, and the  
capabilities for sharing
     * The use of text versus identifiers approach has costs: actual  
records must change when displays change (Cookery to Cooking);  
international cooperation requires extensive language mapping  
processes; some needed data elements must be extracted from textual  
field using algorithms, which also hinders sharing; and some library  
data formats require catalogers to duplicate information in the  
record, providing both textual fields and coded data for same  
information.

---

Again, comments, suggestions, alternate ideas are all welcome.

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Tuesday, 26 April 2011 17:32:45 UTC