Barbara's Bib-2 protests :-)

Barbara,

For what it's worth, I have no quarrels with the guts of Bib-2 itself. The 
challenge for Bib-2 is more that Bib-1 is so ingrained, it's going to take 
a lot of persuading to get people to embrace Bib-2 as well.

I am a little concerned that perhaps Bib-2 and the attribute set 
architecture may have grown out of a more expansive phase of Z39.50's life 
cycle, in which some of us believed in a very broad uptake of the standard 
in domains outside of libraries, but close enough that we'd want 
interoperability to the highest possible level of specificity.

 From my perspective, and others may definitely have different views, 
*inter-library* use of Z39.50 is often oriented around a fairly small set 
of access points, almost Dublin Core-ish in their simplicity but with a 
couple of library classics thrown in. We see some inter-domain use of 
Z39.50, but often in somewhat controlled environments, within consortia or 
projects. These applications too tend to use even simpler Bib-1 subsets.

When you add in the fact that we have all for the most part been forced get 
by without relying on Explain, the power and flexibility of Bib-2 may 
sometimes be more than the situation calls for.

I dunno.. that's a bit of a downbeat message, and I'm not primarily a 
bibliographic guy, anyway, and I haven't sat in on your discussions in 
Bib-2 -- so think of this as unsolicited opinions from the peanut gallery. 
But it's probably a good time for Bib-2 take a marketing-like approach... 
talk to the bibligraphic profile people and ask what it would take to get 
them to make Bib-2 implementation a priority. Clearly the Bath's 
cross-domain ambitions would be served better by Bib-2 and the Cross-domain 
set, for instance.

--Sebastian

At 12:20 27-09-2001 -0400, Shuh Barbara wrote:
>Mike:
>Glad to read that you weren't  complaining:-)
>
>But I probably possess a certain amount of angst having worked on something,
>all the while having a nagging inner voice saying "This is too complex.  Not
>worth doing."  while a second voice is saying, "Yah, but if you never do it,
>we'll never have the complete picture - so we'll never know for sure..."
>
>So I had to respond to your aside to Rob.
>
>I didn't think that I protested too much...
>
>Barb
>______________________
>Barbara Shuh
>Library Network Specialist
>National Library of Canada
>Phone:  (819) 994-6969  Fax:  (819) 994-6835
>E-mail:  barbara.shuh@nlc-bnc.ca
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Mike Taylor [mailto:mike@tecc.co.uk]
>Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2001 12:07 PM
>To: Shuh Barbara
>Cc: www-zig@w3.org
>Subject: Re: FW: Sebastian's Euro 2 cents worth of ZNG dicussion:
>
>
> > Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 11:29:58 -0400
> > From: Shuh Barbara <barbara.shuh@nlc-bnc.ca>
> >
> > Since I've scheduled the meeting on Bib-2 to run concurrently with
> > the tutorials on Tuesday afternoon, I can't expect that either of
> > you, Sebastian and Mike, will be free to attend that review session-
> > but hopefully we can address your concerns during the briefing on
> > this work during the actual ZIG meeting.
>
>Barbara,
>
>Just to say that I wasn't _complaining_ that BIB-2 looks more complex
>than BIB-1, merely observing.  As far as I can see, the complexity is
>all real and necessary -- the only reason it wasn't there in BIB-1 is
>because that swept a lot of stuff under the carpet than BIB-2 is
>tackling head on.
>
>So -- no criticism of the BIB-2 work from this quarter!
>
>  _/|_   _______________________________________________________________
>/o ) \/  Mike Taylor   <mike@miketaylor.org.uk>   www.miketaylor.org.uk
>)_v__/\  "[Ken] Bates resembles nothing so much as Michael Winner
>         without a restaurant column" -- Will Buckley, _Guardian_, 19th
>         November 2000

Received on Thursday, 27 September 2001 12:55:33 UTC