What Michael Gorman thinks about electronic resources and metadata, part 1

This summer, I wrote a literature review on cataloging electronic resources for an ALA committee I served on. (Provided it is accepted by the ALCTS web editors, it will eventually be published in the Research Topics... section on their website.) During the literature search, I found two articles by Michael Gorman addressing the cataloging of electronic resources and metadata. They are interesting in that they provide valuable insight into the thoughts of one of the leading library thinkers and leaders of our time. Besides serving as ALA's current president, Mr. Gorman is perhaps most famous for being "first editor of the Anglo-American cataloguing rules, second edition (1978) and of the revision of that work (1988)." (The quote is from the biography on his web page.)

I have provided some comments on the first article below. I will comment on the second article in a future Texadata entry. Because the URL to the article is so long, I have embedded it in the title. The link leads to the PDF version of the article on the Haworth website and access requires a subscription.

First article:
Gorman, Michael. "Cataloguing in an Electronic Age." Cataloging and Classification Quarterly. 36.3/4 (2003): 5-17. [DOI:10.1300/J104v36n03_02].

The bulk of this article is dedicated to recounting a history of the development of universal bibliographic control. The interesting part is towards the end of the article (pg. 14) in a section titled "Metadata - The Third Way." Here, Mr. Gorman describes metadata as "half way between cataloging (expensive and effective) and keyword searching (cheap and ineffective)." His tone is extraordinarily negative. Rather than investigating metadata and electronic resources in an optimistic and progressive tone, he grouses about how "metadata" is inherently inferior to real cataloging. He is very good at identifying problems in current bibliographic control of electronic resources, but he does not offer any positive solutions.

For example, he says on pps. 14-15 that "...Dublin Core is an ill-formulated subset of the MARC record." OK, fine, I even agree with him. Unfortunately, he does not specify the shortcomings of Dublin Core or offer solutions. Dublin Core was developed to be used by broad communities and not as a true bibliographic control mechanism. It is more of a loose semantic guideline than a robust syntactic standard: Dublin Core specifies field names, but not the machine encoding of those fields. It is not a substitute for true cataloging, but even MARC is insufficient given the current state of network technology. On page eight he even admits this, saying "The structure of MARC is that of a catalog card, when computer systems call for a different approach." If neither MARC nor Dublin Core are sufficient for computer systems, why doesn't he propose a standard that is bibliographically rigorous, but also computer system friendly? Perhaps the standard that has the most promise at this time is MODS. It was announced in June 2002, prior to the publication of this article. (You would think that the premier cataloging thinker of our time would be aware of the development of MODS, but perhaps he wasn't.) He also fails to note that metadata has other purposes than bibliographic control. It may also be used for preservation, rights management, and technical data, among other uses.

Another shortcoming of his vision is that he only addresses the need for cataloging electronic resources. He does not recognize the fact that libraries have very nearly abdicated their duty to collect, store, and preserve the actual electronic content that is being created in increasing quantities. This is a greater concern than the mere cataloging of electronic resources. Libraries have moved from an ownership model to a model of "information access," predominantly licensing electronic resources and linking to remote sites. (At our current rate, "the library" will devolve into a proxy server in a closet, maintained by a systems administrator and a licensing specialist. The librarian's role will be limited to a financial one - negotiating a budget and deciding what online serials to cut in any given year.) He does not mention the importance of learning how to develop digital collections, including digitizing special collections, and developing eprint services, institutional repositories, etc. He does not mention the fact that new technologies enable new publishing models, such as Open Access. I submit that libraries should be active in the development of electronic collections, with all that entails, including managing the hardware, developing the software, and cultivating the professional expertise to manage digital collections within the library community.

His solution for the preservation of electronic resources (pg. 16) is to "...turn to the only known way of preserving massive numbers of texts and images - print them on acid free paper." This is an utterly ridiculous proposal given the nature of electronic resources and the sheer quantity of new content now being developed online. Born digital electronic resources are qualitatively different than material resources. There is a reason that websites are coded in a language known as hypertext. The physical medium is simply insufficient to preserve the semantic linking of textual websites, the interactivity of multimedia, the chronological nature of blogs, and give and take of email lists. As for quantity, the Berkeley study "How Much Information? 2003" estimated that the amount of information created in 2002 equaled 37,000 Library of Congresses, and that this was growing at the rate of about 30% a year between 1999 and 2002.

Instead, we should be actively investigating preservation methods for digital media. Imagine the resources that could be brought to bear on this vexing and monumental problem if the current president of ALA used his position to raise awareness and promote research?