Puffbox

I see Steve Dale’s stirring again 😉 – with further noises of discontent regarding that mandatory government subject taxonomy, the IPSV.

I picked up a report on a recent meeting of local authority webmasters and managers held in Birmingham (England), where most present appeared to conclude that IPSV, now the official Government Metadata Standard, served no useful purpose and should be ignored and not implemented.

In the comments which follow, Dan Champion notes:

We (local gov web managers) have been expected to invest time and energy in implementing and maintaining the LGCL and now IPSV on our sites, for nothing more than a promise of riches to come. We should be questioning why we’re making that investment.

And that absolutely hits the nail on the head. These initiatives (and don’t forget the GCL, too) began because people (generally librarians, let’s be honest) assumed that they would pay dividends in the long run. Well, version 1.0 of the GCL was issued in January 2002 – a full five years ago. Can anyone point to a single substantial end-user benefit yet? How much longer should that ‘long run’ be?