Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
The needs of a library versus a private collection are very different. calibre is meant to make creating private collections as painless and easy to use as possible. As for dublin core, in the coming digital information revolution, you will find that existing systems of classification and indexing (derived as they are from the needs of a time when "books" were produced in miniscule numbers, by a limited and reasonably well defined set of entities) to be wholly inadequate.
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Dublin Core is not a system for classification and indexing, but a protocol for describing information objects. It has been developed to be object-type
neutral for the very reason that object-type
specific standards (such as the International Standard for Bibliographic Description ISBD) are not adequate in a digital environment where the concept of a 'book' has little or no meaning (or at least remains undefined).
The wider point is that a system such as Calibre, however useful on a personal level, has little future in a coming digital revolution where personal data will be seamlessly linked to or harvested by other users or aggregate systems (e.g. a e-book repository). The digital revolution and the concept of a (semantic or otherwise) web of information is ultimately based on descriptive standards. If Calibre does not adopt these, it will remain a great tool, absolutely isolated from the rest of the digital world.
To be fair, I must add that my 'criticism' only applies to Calibre as an e-book manager. I use Calibre and my e-reader mostly for downloading and reading news content. Calibre is excellent for this, much better than anything I have seen so far. This means that the data resides in Calibre for a few days at most. Inter-operable metadata is not an issue for this kind of use.
I even wonder if devices such as the Sony e-reader might be more successful if they were to be marketed as
news-readers, together with Calibre(-like) software. But that is off-topic.