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just as the open source software movement has revitalized and disrupted the production of high-quality software products
I am not sure the "open source" movement has revitalized or disrupted anything. I do remember one MSFT share holders meeting in which Steve Ballmer talked about the 'open-source threat.' But, that fear lasted about 30 nano-seconds in technology time. Open source didn't offer anything new to the users other than free crappy software with little to no support. Also, many in the open source movement moved on. As William F. Buckley said, "Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive."
A better example might be The Unicode Consortium that got together to put meaning to ISO standard 10646 that deals with character encodings. The Unicode consortium composed of software manufacturers, educators, etc. got together to define transformation formats and assign characters to code point values to replace outdated and limiting character encoding standards such as ASCII.
The point is, there was a serious limitation with ANSI and other encoding standards. Additionally, the software manufacturers united (for the most part) to support the consortium. Ultimately, it led to a successful overhaul of character encoding technologies for data storage and transmission while providing backwards support for the majority of existing data around the world.
To bring it back to the conversation, in oder to change the cataloging system the current cataloging companies and the major dealers around the world would have to identify serious limitations in their own systems, and also realize some significant incentive to change the cataloging system, and then convincing other catalogs, dealers, and even collectors to adopt a new catalog system (and possibly providing backwards compatibility with existing catalog systems).
Sorry for the long story to bring it back to the topic.
Posted 03/24/2015 9:08 pm
