Took myself out for an excellent dinner and a couple pints of Guinness. Had a Greek salad with balsamic marinated chicken breast. Was very tasty.

Read an article for my collection development class and then worked on some web page coding for the two sections of Cataloging and Classification that I broadcast. It is a bit of work but I enjoy it because it keeps my coding skills and mind sharp. Plus it makes use of the 2 copies of Dreamweaver that I’ve paid for; bastards! But that’s another story….

Hickey, David, and Shelley Arlen. “Falling through the Cracks: Just How Much “History” Is History? Library Collections, Acquisitions & Technical Services 26 (2002): 97-106.

I found this to be a very interesting article. Many of my interests are of an interdisciplinary nature, and even those that aren’t I try to tie into my life as a whole. Thus, they are all interdisciplinary. Interesting, but odd, thoughts for a guy who wants to be a cataloger. Nonetheless….

Discusses how interdisciplinarity “is difficult to accommodate in current academic library practices” due to the way they are arranged, and how collection development responsibilities are assigned and funded (98).

States that “much has been written about the growing interdisciplinary nature of contemporary scholarship as a whole, though comparatively little has been written on the implications of cross-disciplinary research for building library collections” (98). The authors list the Fall 1996 issue of Library Trends as the rare exception. This issue is entitled, “Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry,” and is edited by Carole L. Palmer. Well, well. Dr. Palmer is my collection development professor, and my advisor, and even better, I have a copy on my bookshelf.

The authors’ study focuses on the selection of history materials for the University of Florida Smathers Libraries. Their methodology was to look at “four specific historical journal titles” that include reviews to determine just how much “history” is not history; that is, does not fall under the “traditional “history” LC call numbers of C, D, E and F” (100). They looked at The American Historical Review; History, The Journal of the Historical Association of England; Journal of American History; and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. They also looked at the years 1978, 1988, and 1998 “to determine if there had been some change in emphases over these three decades, a period that has seen the development of an overall academic trend toward interdisciplinarity” (101). They did this by checking the call numbers for all the titles reviewed by these journals in these years.

They found that the amount of interdisciplinarity has remained basically stable over these decades in history. This is somewhat understandable as history has always been rather interdisciplinary. But the really interesting finding is that the average figure for “out-of-scope titles” was 55% (102).

Fifty-five percent! The implications are enormous if collection development is as compartmentalized as the authors claim in the introduction.

Other disciplines will vary in their amount of interdisciplinarity, and history may be at the high end, but this only underscores the amount of research that needs to be undertaken to get at least a rough idea of these ‘fields of impingement’ on other disciplines. Which fields flow into other disciplines, and which fields flow out?

The authors go on to discuss some possible strategies for “plugging the cracks,” and for “achieving more effective interdisciplinary collection development” (103). I will leave this section to you to read for yourself, along with the other bits that I’ve left out or glossed over, such as, which other disciplines and what percentages make up the 55% figure of non-history materials of relevance to historians.

I found this article to be extremely thought provoking. It will also help me to better think my way through my first project for my collection development class; a Collection Assessment and Evaluation Plan. I hope to “assess and evaluate the UIUC LIS collection, along with online materials available through the UIUC Library Gateway, for support of cataloging and classification education and the education of catalogers and metadata librarians. By this I am including support for formal GSLIS courses, student self-education, and the continuing education of practitioners.”

Of course, my concept of cataloging and classification is very broad and will easily require the inclusion of materials classified in other disciplines, e.g., philosophy and computer science, among others. Whether I will really have to be concerned about those physical materials that are located in other libraries on campus will be dictated by the scope of the assignment. My guess is not although I’m awaiting a response from Dr. Palmer. If I had to actually execute the plan then it might be a different story. Of course, the most important thing for me, and any others pursuing a broad education in cataloging and classification, is to know that there are relevant materials in other physical locations on campus.

The article is highly recommended.

Hey, the LIS Library has a blog.