JF Waste?

[Mark Roberts]

On Nov 10, 2009, at 2:36 AM, Steve Cavrak wrote:

> Perhaps the problem is a "straight forward" collection management  
> one - they may not have a full time media librarian on staff, may  
> not have a online library database, etc

The JF has librarians. They have an online database. It's public, on  
the web, and their libraries in Japan have terminals to the databases.  
It's all pretty modern, really. As mentioned earlier in this thread,  
evidently the catalog of film holdings is secret because the rights  
holders will not allow them to publish it. True, we can guess titles  
and they will dutifully tell us whether they've got them, but there  
are a number of problems with that.

W.r.t. compiling our own list. Even if "we" were to do that, it would  
be a partial list, it is non-trivial to get all the important details  
(16 or 35mm print, language of the subtitles, condition of the print,  
etc.), somebody would have to work to maintain it in the future, etc.  
Meanwhile, all of this information already exists inside the JF, it is  
already in electronic form, and their staff maintain the list.

To my mind, it doesn't make sense to duplicate what their staff are  
already doing, with imperfect results. Wouldn't that effort be better  
spent on doing whatever it takes to get them to abolish the secret  
catalog?

M