Catalogs, strings, and packages

One of the reasons for starting this blog was to get myself to write more. I've tried, and failed, several times to write a book of some kind and in doing so came up against a wall of insecurities--more like a frickin' labyrinth of walls--that I have let defeat me at every opportunity. My desk at home and on campus are littered with papers recording my attempts. So, I thought I might just put some of it out there into the ether....here is something I wrote just over a year ago in August 2015 that I rediscovered this morning:

What do we want to do with our library catalogs?  How separate do we want to make them from the ‘rest’ of the world, and how connected do we want to make them with the ‘rest’? Berners-Lee has this idea that is the Semantic Web, and pretty much anyone involved in the information and communication technology (ICT) world tends to follow his lead. He is a true visionary, I’ll give him that. It’s not going to get easier, our catalogs. They will become more complicated, more layered, more nuanced, and will not at all be like our beloved traditional no-it-isn’t-a-card-catalog-but-okay-really-it-is catalogs.

So, let’s ditch them, yes?  No?  There is still a bunch of useful information in them. We just need to convert it—transition it over to the ‘new way’. This means we transition our work, too. First, let go of the book. Second, let go of MARC. Third, learn to think in terms of information packages, not information strings. We’ve spend decades coding information strings—a piece of data here, a piece of data there—cobbled together into a ‘unit’ or ‘record’. We have to think of packets of information because that is how linked data works and linked data, for now, is the goal. The future? Perhaps. Let’s take it one frightening paradigm shift at a time.

What is a packet of information? 

How do we take our objectives and principles and translate them into packaged speech? We still want people to find and identify things, to select them, to obtain them, yes?  Of course, yes, we do. So, have the fundamentals really changed, or is it just the top layers?

How do stop building from the bottom up and build from the top down?  What does that even mean in terms of how we do our world?  Does it mean we don’t build a base, a system, to put records in? Do we just start making ‘packets’ and let them find each other, like amoeba in a petri dish?  Maybe, yes. I don’t really know for sure how it will work, but I want to make it work. I still want to be a librarian, a cataloger, and have a library catalog that represents the collection in the library. I am not deluded by the notion that everyone is ‘online’ and has infinite ‘access’ to what is on the Web and the Internet. I’m a realist (I hope).

How do we continue to help citizens be informed citizens—the bedrock of a democracy—and at the same time do cutting edge information organization? Let’s explore this. 

Faint and wispy words....

Little power, big power : bibliographic control and the ‘situation of the uncomplaining’

....or, bibliographic ignorance and the cost to resource discovery

Wilson (1968) asked us to image a Supreme Bibliographic Council given the task of evaluating bibliographical situations in order “to estimate the degree of bibliographical control needed” by individuals or groups based on both the complainants and non-complainants.  In doing so, the council would realize that the “situation of the uncomplaining was as bad as, or worse than, that of the complaining.” Nearly 50 years later, what sort of power does bibliographic control have when faced with the reality of what Wilson described as ‘lamentable bibliographic ignorance’?

What service does a library aim to give its users based on assessments of user information needs, including their bibliographic ignorances?  Bibliographic control itself seems to be making progress but that progress is ignored or abandoned for both financial simplicity and less complexity. At the same time, people demand easier and faster access to all information resources, in all their complexity. For example, instituting linked data using Resource Description Framework (RDF) so that we may one day have a “semantic web” requires more complex information organization practices then we have ever employed. Yet, that type of information work is underfunded or outsourced, or ignored completely, often because of complaints about information systems that are too cumbersome, too complex, too slow, etc., or the assumption that search engines are better and have access to everything. This even though most anyone using one would be hard-pressed to identify the depth and breadth, or even origin, of the resources retrieved (or not retrieved) by said engines, let alone their validity. Studies have even shown that some groups of people lack, or are losing, the ability to judge the relevance of information retrieved to their own information needs. This is not to say that all information gleamed via a search engine is useless but a recognition that different information needs often need a variety of different resources is lacking.

At the same time, as scholars, scientists and practitioners, how costly is our bibliographic ignorance to the growth of knowledge? From a scientific and scholarly standpoint we expect our libraries and institutional repositories to keep a record of research and published works so that we may know our scientific and scholarly histories, theories, etc. We need this record to understand that our present advances, in whatever direction they are headed, may proceed without devastating or costly mistakes. In other words, that we make forward progress by putting that knowledge to use. However, how do we put to use that which we may not have access to, or that which we are ignorant of even existing?

Wilson (1968) addressed the power of bibliographic control in his essay Two Kinds of Power, which holds an almost mythical status in library and information science—even though at times it reads as if addressing an entirely different world. It begs the question, what kind of power does bibliographic control have today? Is bibliographic control losing power? At the very least it seems the type of control it currently has is shifting towards an entirely different configuration. Wilson stated in 1977 that we needed a ‘reorientation toward the functional’ and while the global cataloging community has finally created functionality models (e.g., FRBR, FRAD) in order to ground its information systems in the logic of the entity-relationships database model, the systems themselves have not made the leap to reflect these changes due to, for one thing, a lack of communication between the organizers and the system developers. This speaks to a profound disconnect between what bibliographic control is intended to accomplish and what it actually has the power to accomplish. This is especially important in terms of evaluating and solving bibliographical situations and the information needs (and bibliographic ignorance) of its users, both complaining and non-complaining.

Wilson, P. (1968). Two kinds of power : An essay on bibliographical control. Berkeley, Los Angeles : University of California Press.

Wilson, P. (1977). Public knowledge, private ignorance: Toward a library and information policy. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press