One Big Library.

At dinner near CiL 2007 tonight with a couple of people I admire a lot I stumbled into something I think they'd both being trying to tell me for about a half hour. It's a real problem that we have a bunch of people ranting about MARC and RDA and what's cool about FRBR, but we have very little positive direction about what's needed from descriptive and other cataloging/metadata from a technical perspective to build good systems. There are a lot of people doing cool work with Solr and replacement OPAC demos these days, so maybe we can start to document a set of unit tests or use cases or functional requirements (in the Joel Spolsky/Microsoft vein of functional requirements for developers, not the international library committee vein for users - we already have that bit, and they're quite good, thank you!) for what we systems types need from bibliographic data.

The authors of Cradle to Cradle suggest a paradigm shift that's relevant here. In talking about manufacturing, they highlight how removing particularly toxic materials from processes and products only makes for a less toxic scenario. To have a positive flow of materials through the system, it's far better to work forward from a list of positive ingredients -- as in "this is what we want to use to build it, and this is what it should contain when it's done, and here are some ways it can affect other things around what we're doing in good ways without major drawbacks" -- than to always be working backward from a negative list of bad ingredients to be removed one by one.

Food for thought, at least, to go along with the tasty spanakopita and baklava on the mysteriously hidden street that isn't where a street should be.