Intellectual Property Law

Has the Library of Congress surrendered its role in standardizing how we catalog knowledge?

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

According to the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (Library of Congress):

The Working Group envisions a future for bibliographic control that will be collaborative,
decentralized, international in scope, and Web-based. The realization of this future will occur
in cooperation with the private sector and with the active collaboration of library users. Data
will be gathered from multiple sources; change will happen quickly; and bibliographic control
will be dynamic, not static.
The Report is based on the key premise that the community is at a critical juncture in the
evolution of bibliographic control and information access/provision. It is time to take stock
of past practices, to look at today?s trends, and to project a future path consistent with the
goals of bibliographic control: to facilitate discovery, management, identification, and access
of and to library materials and other information products. Libraries must work in the most
efficient and cooperative manner to minimize where possible the costs of bibliographic
control, but both the Library of Congress and library administrators generally must recognize
that they need to identify and allocate (or, as appropriate, reallocate) sufficient funding if they
are serious about attaining the goals of improved and expanded bibliographic control.

So what does this mean? Can anyone explain to me what the ramifications of this are for the collection and distribution of knowledge? Collection building? Cataloging?

If anyone out there can help me, I sure would appreciate it.

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on January 29, 2008 (boomark / email).