Re: Research Drivers Issue 58 assigned to MacKenzie Smith

It's expensive to produce metadata period (by hand, at any rate).
But if you only use one standard (e.g. MARC) then you get some
efficiencies and economies of scale around training, tools, workflows,
etc. When each item could potentially be described with any schema
or vocabulary then you need some pretty smart people to apply it!
This is why application of community-specific metadata often
devolves to the community to supply -- library staff don't normally
have the same level of domain-specific expertise (in every domain)
as the practitioners.

MacKenzie/

At 06:21 PM 4/28/2003 +0100, Butler, Mark wrote:

Action for: MacKenzie Smith

>MacKenzie, please can you answer this question?
>
>[ 058. ]
>Summary: Section 2.1.1 why is it expensive for libaries to provide community
>specific ways to describe content?
>Raised By: David Hunyh
>Status: open
>Description:
>
>2.      It is expensive for libraries to provide community-specific
>ways to describe or annotate content [why expensive?].

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building 14S-208
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie@mit.edu

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2003 08:26:18 UTC