Before I sign off....

On The Record is a really cool report that came out over the course of this semester. Well, really cool or really scary, depending on how you look at it. Apparently, the Library of Congress, which has been providing cataloging services to libraries across the nation for chump change for years, is thinking about stopping the practice.

Basically, the LoC has been making their library cards (or files, now, in the digital age) available to other libraries for a nominal fee. Of course, if you provide any invaluable service for next to no cost, people are going to take advantage of you. So, due to all the demand, the Library's resources have been stretched to the limit. Employees are churning out library cards for the public library in Nowheresville, Nebraska (sorry, Nebraska fans! Um, go Huskers!) instead of cataloging and making available the Library's unique, historic documents. Obviously, this is a Bad Thing.

The solution outlined by the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control could be even worse, though. They want to pull out of the library card business entirely, seeking to be just another library in a community of libraries. Apparently, libraries need to do their own cataloging and share the fruits of their labor over the Internet. This is a little naive, and will probably never happen, but what if it does? Rigorous standards could go out the window as hundreds of variant cards are made available for any given book.

The whole issue seems to me to boil down to, "We're not getting paid for this." So why not pay them? Up the cost of these cards, use the proceeds to hire librarians for that exclusive purpose, and let your regular staff do their regular jobs. Sure, the added cost will sting smaller libraries, but wouldn't it be even worse if they had to hire an accredited librarian to build a catalog from the ground up? And this way, things will remain centralized and standards will be upheld.

Anyway, this could represent a real sea change in how cataloging works. Then again, it could be just another bureaucratic missive that means nothing. Read it for yourself!

http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/lcwg-ontherecord-jan08-final.pdf

Other Library Blogs of Note

This simple blog may or may not illuminate some of the background and concerns of library cataloging. I did my best to approach the topic with candor and humor, but I understand that cataloging is something of a dry subject, and therefore not all that are interested in libraries are, can, or should be interested in it. For those of you more interested in other aspects of libraries, I point you towards the following blogs:

http://librarytrendz.blogspot.com/ - An incredibly well-executed blog on current events and new developments as they relate to libraries.

http://librariesandthelaw.blogspot.com/ - A look into library court cases, the PATRIOT Act, and free speech issues.

http://www.persuasionandrhetoric.blogspot.com/ - Those of you with interest in school media centers and the theoretical framework of making them work would be well-served to check here.

http://amyschopfer.blogspot.com/ - A blog on the types of people who go into and should be served by libraries.

Dewey Decimal

The Dewey Decimal system is the granddaddy of them all. Developed in 1873, and now in its 22nd edition, its ease of use has made it a favorite of public libraries and media centers everywhere. In fact, many classification systems used outside of the United States, such as Universal Decimal Classification and Nippon Decimal Classification, have their roots in Dewey.

The Dewey Decimal system, or DDC, is set up, at its core, as a branching hierarchy, sort of like a family tree. "The library is first divided into nine special libraries which are called Classes" (Dewey 1876, Preface, para. 1). Each of these represents a massive category of human knowledge which is represented by a digit from 1 to 9. For instance, "5" represents the Natural Sciences, while a "9" means History. The tenth (or first, depending on how you look at things) set, the "0's," originally contained general reference works such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, and books about libraries proper. Since its advent, computer science, too, is contained in this null category.

The aforementioned class makes up the first digit of a DDC filing number. Each class is then further stratified into Divisions, which are, in turn, divided into Sections, each of which is assigned a digit from 0-9. "Thus 513 is the 3d Section (Geometry) of the 1st Division (Mathematics) of the 5th Class (Natural Science). This number, giving Class, Division, and Section, is called the Classification or Class Number, and is applied to every book or pamphlet belonging to the library" (Dewey 1876, Preface, para. 1).

This classification can go even deeper by introducing a decimal point and continuing to introduce new sets of 10 subdivisions. This can get almost painfully long (for instance, horses are 599.6655), but this allows for a remarkable amount of fine-tuning. One can even use the system to build new numbers using Tables. For example, "0901" can be tacked on the end of any Dewey number to indicate a time period of "to 499 A.D." So card games, which are classified under 795.4, can become 795.40901 to indicate ancient card games. Again, cumbersome, but really, really cool.

Anyway, the system isn't perfect. As said above, the numbers can get really unwieldy. In addition, while the revisions have introduced new categories to better classify modern stuff, the structure itself is immutable, and mired in the worldview of a 19th century New Englander. For instance, the 200's cover Religion. In there, 200-220 cover general philosophical theses on religion, 220-290 cover the Bible and Christianity, and every other religion on Earth is crammed into the 290's. This isn't as much of a problem as it might seem, since the numbers can be extended infinitely, but it is still inconvenient and embarassing.

Despite these warts, though, the DDC remains easy to use and convenient. If you know the Classes, you can even begin your search without the help of a catalog. Pretty neat, huh?

Sources:

Dewey, M. (1876). A classification and subject index for cataloging and arranging the books and pamphlets of a library [Electronic version]. Kingsport, Tenn.: Kingsport Press.

WebDewey. Accessed through connexion.oclc.org.

Authority Control

Authority Control is central to cataloging. Every system has what's called an authority file, a "master record" against which all records are compared. Why is this needed? Well, let's take the obvious case. Let's say you have a book of literary criticism by Samuel Clemens. Making a record for this book would seem to be fairly straightforward. Under author, you put "Clemens, Samuel."

But then what happens when a fan of Tom Sawyer wants to browse your entire library of Mark Twain's works? Without proper authority control, your book of criticism will be passed over entirely. In most authority files, all of Clemens' works are filed under Mark Twain, with a search for Samuel Clemens redirecting to Twain.

Issues of Authority Control also pop up in dealing with various subjects. The animal lover searching for dogs should get the same results as the zoologist searching for canis domesticus. A search for a biographical work on John Ronald Reuel Tolkein should redirect to J.R.R. Tolkein.

So that's Authority Control. Time is getting short, so my next post will launch into the systems with the Dewey Decimal System.

Collection organization

After three introductory posts and a long absence (in which everything was due in every single class), let's get down to brass tacks.

Cataloging systems exist for one very important reason. Without such a system in place, good luck finding a specific book in a collection larger than two bookshelves. Now, admittedly, one could simply arrange the books in alphabetical order, either by author or title. Indeed, this system is fine for extremely small, homogeneous collections.

If there's any variety to the holdings, though, you're going to want to arrange like with like. If you're looking for information on, say, the saturation process used to create shortening, then unless you know of an author who specialized in the subject, or even one who wrote in the field of food science, you're out of luck. You're going to be starting with the A's and scanning each and every spine until you find something useful. And if you do happen to know of an author in the field of food science, if he or she didn't write exactly what you need, you're back to square one, since the neighboring authors wrote about the American Civil War and the use of alliteration in John Donne's Holy Sonnets.

What you need is a way of organizing those books such that they can be searched quickly and efficiently. Being forced to browse the collection as a whole, without the ability to go right to the Food Science or even the Chemistry section could turn a five-minute trip to the library into a week-long sojourn amongst the shelves. Therefore, the most common method of organization is by subject area. And this brings us to Authority Control, which I will go into later today or tomorrow.

More Thoughts on Documents

Ack. It's been far too long since I last sat down to this.

All right. Let's pick up with the firm idea that our realm of information is one of textual descriptions, graphic depictions, and sound recordings, in either paper or digital format. Documents, in short.

While we must keep in mind that many of these books and articles are necessarily secondary sources (describing a thing or event which would be primary), we must also understand that, for the most part, the primary sources are out of our purview. As I described in last week's post, a book extrapolating an allosaurus's diet from its jaw and tooth structure will often "cite" a skull in some museum somewhere, but a library cannot be expected to keep said skull in the reference section.

Besides its size and general unwieldiness, the skull is not in the library for one main reason: It is in the museum. There is only one fossil to go around, and it belongs at the end of the allosaurus neck in the Jurassic exhibit, menacing museum patrons with its massive teeth. Documents qua documents, though, have the advantage of being merely carriers for the information recorded upon them.

For example, the first line of Dante's Inferno is "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" ("Midway on our life's journey"), whether you're reading the original as penned by Alighieri himself or my sixth printing of the Noonday press edition translated by Robert Pinsky and bound in 1997. Now, certainly the original is far more valuable (I doubt I could get $2 for mine on the open market), but that is for reasons completely separate from the words themselves. The original is both a primary document and an immensely valuable artifact (assuming it still exists).

Now, there are documents that are disputed. The order of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for instance, is still debated today. In these cases, an original could be said to be more valuable in a purely documentative sense, since it would lend insight into the intended sequence. But once said information is gleaned and written down, the original once again becomes a mere curiosity. A curiosity that is worth more than everything I own combined, I will admit, but a curiosity nevertheless.

The point of all of this is that, as librarians, something can be a copy of a copy of a copy, and, so long as it is faithful to the original, it can serve its purpose in our collection. In this glorious age of print, a library is constrained by space more than any other factor in building its collection. Admittedly, there are limited print-run books and out of print books and fancy-dancy books whose price as objets d'art far exceed their informative value, and some libraries are so strapped for funding that even paperbacks stretch the budget. By and large, though, a modern library can possess any book it wants.

Now, things have come a long way since the days of Hellenistic Egypt. No longer can everything that is known and written down even be hoped to be collected under one roof. Even the massive Library of Congress falls short of that goal. In the age of digital information, though, perhaps this ideal could be renewed. Through databases and metadatabases, and with the constant transcription of books and journals to the internet, perhaps, one day, everything that is known and written down could be accessed from a humble personal computer from anywhere.

Regardless, that revolution is not yet compete. For the foreseeable future, at least, it is the library's task to select a few representative scraps of the record as a whole in the hopes that they will suffice to serve their clientele. So before we even have a stack of books to organize, we must first attend to the primary, central question: What books do we include in the library?

It is with that question that I will begin my next post (hopefully in a more timely fashion than this one).

Sources:
Buckland, M. (1997). What is a “Document”? Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 48(9): 804-809.

Buckland, Michael (1991). Information as thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 42(5): 351-360.

What is Information?

Before we can talk about the organization of knowledge and information, we need to know what they are. They're fairly abstract, ambiguous words. Michael K. Buckland, in Information as Thing, identified three core meanings of the word "information."

Information-as-process is simply the act of informing. When one person communicates a fact to another, this activity could be called information. Information-as-knowledge is the datum or data being imparted in the information-as-process. Both of these are interesting, but they're kind of hard to file away on a bookshelf.

This brings us to information-as-thing. Buckland identifies this as the physical embodiment of the informing process. These manifestations, especially in the form of books and recordings, are what we concern ourselves with as librarians. As with any useful definition, though, this inclusion of the written word under the umbrella of information is not without controversy. F. Machlup (1983, p. 642 as quoted in Buckland 1991, pp. 351-352) states that "any meanings other than (1) the telling of something or (2) that which is being told are either analogies and metaphors or concoctions resulting from the condoned appropriation of a word that had not been meant by earlier users." Were we to allow this objection, though, we would simply invent a new word for this excluded informative material and categorize that.

The real power and utility of information made manifest in the form of books, recordings, and other physical things is that these objects (or files, in the digital age) can be filed in and retrieved by information systems. It is here that the distinction of knowledge vs. thing comes into play. Knowledge cannot be checked out from the library. The book is merely a representation (information-as-thing), but it is a representation that can be used (information-as-process) to learn data (information-as-knowledge).

So what qualifies as information-as-thing? What is informative? Buckland states that we should judge information sources as we judge evidence. In other words, What does it teach us? How unique is it? How relevant is it? In this way, objects are only informative (and thus only qualify for our attention as librarians) if a) they have something to say, and b) we are aware of their having something to say. A book of gibberish has no reason to be in any library, unless, say, the book is revealed to have been the last mad writings of Friedrich Nietzsche before he fell to syphylitic fever. Only then does the book gain significance and warrant inclusion in a collection.

Objects other than books and documents can be considered information. Just as a book about a 17th-century sailing ship can inform a layman about the structure of its sails, so too can a model of said ship or a preserved bit of rigging. Indeed, one could say that the rigging is the primary source, and the book and model based upon it are merely secondary. Of course, such informative objects as the artifact and the model are more at home in a museum than a library, but this only serves to highlight the connections between the two institutions. The Great Library of Alexandria was, after all, only part of the Mouseion. Nevertheless, we can safely discard such things as models and skulls from our purview, though it is worthy to note that a book might be included in a library not only for the words on the page, but only for the significance of the book itself (as in the hypothetical case of the Nietzsche scribblings above).

So, ultimately, we end up at the commonsensical answer that we could have given before this lengthy sojourn into esoterica. What goes into libraries? Books. But defining just what we are dealing with in this rigorous manner not only serves to satisfy the Philosophy major in me, but will also serve us well in setting rules for dealing with objects existing on the hazy boundaries of books and information. In my next post (hopefully to come Thursday or Friday), I will complete my thoughts on information. Next week we'll finally get down to brass tacks and start examining some methods of organization.

Source: Buckland, M. (1991). Information as thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 42(5): 351-360.