cerusee | Metadata Clusterfuck: One Book Project's Story (Reply)

Posting this in a third social networking venue, hah, because I think it's just that interesting. From the linguistic blog Language Log's Geoff ~~Pullum~~ Nunberg: Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck. If you're interesting in the Google Book Project, Google, scholarship, librarianship, digital libraries, cataloging, metadata, or even bookselling, this is a captivating read. Read the comments! A lot of them are kind of dumb and hand-wavy ("Don't be mean to poor little Google! I dun need no stinking accurate metadata."), but there's some very smart stuff in there, and a long response from the fellow in charge of Metadata at the project, which Nunberg annotates, as the OPs often do at LL. Great stuff. Librarians and catalogers start showing up at the bottom. (It's a linguistics blog, not a librarianship blog, so I think at some point, the link must have gotten passed around some cataloging listservs.)

There's a short follow-up post here, but it's mainly just a comment on the literary ranking errors.

Most interesting non-fiction thing I've read all week, since my class readings are the introductory ones. I was supposed to be working on Library Automation stuff, but since I want to be a cataloger and I'm taking a metadata class this semester, this barely even qualifies as slacking...

[edit: Nunberg, not Pullum. Geoffrey Pullum is a DIFFERENT linguist at LL. My bad.]