Id like to start my thanking you for inviting me, and apologising for having to address you in English, please interrupt me if what I'm saying isn't clear or my use of colloquialism is obscure.

Id like to begin by being conciliatory, if the tone of what follows is seen as an attack on the IFLA Guidelines it isn't meant to be. I've very glad that IFLA is working in this area and I'm particularly glad that the work is being discussed. One of my worries was that little seemed to be happening in response to the publication of the Guidelines. That may be because the discussion was not very public or I just wasn’t looking in the right place. There is much to be recommended in the Guidelines and what I'm about to say is I hope positive criticism and indicates ways it might be taken forward.

I would also like to be positive about Martha Yee's work in general and would recommend her articles on 'What is a Work ' in CCQ in particular which has been influential and useful to us in the work we have been doing at Bradford.

I do think we need Guidelines but I'm concerned about the effect of the current proposals.

So I'd like to start by talking not about catalogues and computers but by showing some pretty pictures (well what clip art I could find easily) to make a few points about technology in general. The point here is that the present, let alone the future, doesn't look like or work in the same ways as the past. Early attempts at cars were called horseless carriages, and we still have horsepower as a measure of performance, the controls were even rein like. But although they fulfil the same function as a means of transport the form, the structures and techniques are quite different, wheels not legs. We still have some of the same problems, but in a different form. At the turn of the 20^th century the pollution prediction was that Londoners would soon be up to their knees in horse manure if the numbers of horses continued to grow as the same rate. We still have pollution problems but of a different sort. Similarly with flight, early attempts at human flight mimicked birds, with attempts to create flapping wings. We still use wings on planes but don't attempt to power the plane by flapping them.

We can make similar observations in many areas. For example, the changes in medium for written text have brought new concepts such as pages that we now accept automatically, other concepts such as paragraphs have continued and some such scrolling which faded away but with electronic systems have regained importance.

If text on paper seems to show more continuity than some changes the means of data input from quill or pen, via printers type to the keyboard has show massive changes in form to fulfil much the same function.

The next pictures are my approximations of the move from card catalogue to OPAC

(and beyond) which I would suggest need to be dealt with in a similar way concentrating on function and not being caught up in (old) forms. I didn’t have an appropriate librarians or information scientists clip art set so I apologise for the pictures. You will notice that I reuse the computer, this is deliberate. I will return to this point in my next lecture.

I finish with the clip art for a librarian (I assume that is what was indicated, I note that the person is female and handling thick tomes on a shelf). In the future we have to ask how much of the material will be in books at all. I don’t want to go over the top with the cry of 'The book is dead'. I don’t think it is but it is changing and we, and catalogues, must change with it.

All this owes much to the notion of paradigm shifts as theorised by Thomas Kuhn in Structure of Scientific Revolutions. We carry on in the old fashion adding features till the old edifice crumbles and we start again on new sounder foundations

A general point that I feel I should make is that I'm a pragmatist. This comes from a number of years of trying to build systems that largely dealt with existing MARC records. Working in this area you soon realise that you must be pragmatic or nothing will work. In contrast I think there is an unspoken idealism in the Guidelines that assumes that we have a perfect catalogue and perfect authority control. I don’t think these exist even in isolation and in a networked world even putting two systems of good quality together can produce many problems. This perhaps means that some of my comments are a little unfair on the Guidelines and are more related to the underpinning AACR and MARC standards (or at least how these are actually implemented).

Despite introductory remarks that the guidelines should apply to all types of catalogue they seem to be very biased to dumb terminal displays, with references to 'screenfulls of displays'. Many of the principles would seem not to be applicable to catalogues based on different paradigms. This is the case for BOPAC which I will talk about later and I think would be even more so for alternative interfaces such as those based on virtual tours of a library. Again as a pragmatist I'm wary of the introductory statements that the Guidelines are attempting to establish default displays and that 'it is not the intent to restrict the creativity of system designers'. I fear that rather than being minimum standards they may become all that is on offer, from talking to libraries negotiating over new systems I know that it can be very hard if not impossible to get features you want. Welcome to the world of WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get and its all you get.

In general the notion of establishing a number of principles and then introducing recommendations is a good one. I feel that there is a problem because I'm not convinced that all the principles are in fact principles some strike me as merely examples of good practice.

Take as a starting point part of the Headings Principle. We leap into the Headings Principle and only discuss what a heading is as a footnote. This in itself strikes me as problematic. The heading is surely a means to an end, an organising tool, rather than a principled structure. Its function is to give some form of synopsis of a full record. And I believe the form used has more to do with history and the display limitations of dumb terminal OPACs than function.

In the footnote a work heading is summarised as principal author and (uniform) title.

(Whilst not wishing to restart too many old wars about main entry lets examine the short forms usually used to identify a work). This in itself is a point I've raised before with Martha, such a heading is not a good summarising of books like:

These are computing examples where these works are known by both the authors's names (or initials K&R) never by one alone. This may be more a criticism of AACR's notion of authorship. (In computing terms we talk about data modelling and I'm suggesting that the AACR notion of prioritising one author doesn't actually accord with the real world that we should be modelling.) Why do we have a principal author, I think it is so we can file the card alphabetically by that author. In an online system there does not need to the same raising of one author, both authors should have equivalent entries in author indexes. The other reason for loosing one author is also the reason for loosing part of the title in short displays in many OPACS, saving space. Here we see where the technical limitations of OPACS in the past are in danger of being enshrined as fundamental principles for the future. Taking two more computing examples off my bookshelf I can find title and author combinations longer than the Clocksin and Mellish example

These wouldn’t be truncated by some traditional OPACs or if they were it would be the truncation of part of the title, possibly leaving the heading a mystery. The second being a prime example of the problems of OPACs which return this title as

in response to a query about Logic Programming. These are features that have their origin in dumb terminal system design where there is a priority on getting the maximum information in a 25x80 (or less) character screen. These are the issues we must tackle. In fairness to the Guidelines Principle 15 states that we should not truncate headings but this has been separated away from the Headings Principle itself and comes after the implicit truncation of only using a principal author.

Returning more directly to what is discussed under the Headings Principle an exception is made and it is said that

This seems to me to be a prime example of a piece of good practice rather than a principle. Why one record? Why not two or less than some small number? I suspect that we are used to thinking that one record is a screenfull and therefore can be seen in one go. The principle would seem to me that we should minimise the numbers of steps to the full record. This also raises the point that the Guidelines are 'for OPAC DISPLAYS' but in fact we are often considering, as in this case OPAC operation.

'Display what was searched' seems to be good advice yet I believe the situation is more complex than indicated. The example says' if a user does a search that searches note fields all indexed note fields should appear'. But this does not always correspond to the principle. A user searching for a term 'anywhere' should see where that term was found. But should they necessarily see all notes fields (for all records) by default. If their search had been explicitly on notes fields, we might assume an interest in notes but an 'anywhere' search may respond in matches throughout the record, including notes, over a number of records. What is important here is the principle, or rather 'Display what matched'. I won't go into the potential minefield of 'all indexed note fields' other than to say that searches 'anywhere' across a number of systems can produce very strange results. Different definitions of anywhere clearly exist. This is particularly a problem in Z39.50 systems when the MARC records returned sometimes do not seem to include what was searched so it cannot be displayed.

'Emphasise Author, Work or Subject sought in Resultant Display' seems to be more a matter of good practice rather than a principle. Again it seems to be rather problematic to establish what this might mean in some circumstances. The assumption is made that the user is for example searching for a particular author and therefore author should be 'prominent' in the display. This makes sense if the user searched for Dickens, we should which to emphasise the author if we have works by Monica Dickens and Charles Dickens. If we only have works by Charles Dickens or the search was for Charles Dickens then emphasising that element becomes redundant.

(In contrast in the BOPAC projects we aimed to emphasise the differences between works as a default, whether that meant arranging by author, title, volume depending on the retrieval set.)

'ISBD is an International Display Standard' and 'Design the "Look and Feel" of the OPAC for its Primary Audience'. There seems to me to be a great deal of potential conflict here especially when allied with the introductory remarks that the Guidelines are setting out minimum defaults. Surely the record display format is a crucial part of the 'look and feel' of a system and that should follow Principle 27 in being appropriate for the audience. Is ISBD the right default for children to follow Principle 27's example? By all means let ISBD have its place as the Guidelines do for MARC under

Principle 28 ' Allow Display of the MARC Record'.

Moving on to the second part of my title 'What are Standards for'. It may seem obvious that standards are a good thing. Computing is often criticised (by computer scientists as well as others) for being too fond of standards. We like standards so much and we have so many of them, it just a shame that they don't work together. We also have a variety of levels of standards with many defacto standards as well as more official ones. The real purpose, it seems to me, of standards is communication.

In the bibliographic field the establishment of MARC on the foundations of AACR has meant that libraries and other utilities have been able to transfer records very successfully. In the past once those records had been communicated to another system the transfer was over and there was no necessity to use MARC anymore. That reflected more isolated times and with another standard Z39.50 we might expect more use of MARC as a communication means beyond the original creation of bibliographic records. Other standards, such as ISBD, should have meant that what was in those records could be communicated to users, although I have my doubts about that. I'm sure ISBD is popular with some people but I'm not sure users recognise it at all, perhaps they should but I don’t think they do. Not all standards get taken up or live for long, some fall by the wayside, sometimes for good reasons sometimes for bad. We must not be too attached to the standards of the past if that impedes progress. That is what I think in summary worries me about the Guidelines

That they may be setting some standards that won't be met where they relate to the OPACs of the past and will be ignored by OPACs of the future.