I may try to keep this up but I know I won’t, nor will it be complete. But I’d like to try, for a couple of reasons: (1) as a motivator for myself, (2) to make me feel better about the small number of books I actually read, and (3) as possible ideas for others.
I will try to put comments sometimes as a help to others but, if you are at all like me, seeing that an article even exists might be enough of a trigger. Many of us, myself included, have and do complain about the lightweight nature of much of the LIS literature. BUT. It is not all like that. There is some amazing stuff out there; much of it older than you are. And while it is disheartening to see many of the age old debates still being discussed, and often for the same reasons, it is incredible to follow much of this literature, and to see the depth and breadth of sources that some of it draws on.
As an example, although not quite “age old,” except maybe to some of you, I stumbled over this while looking for an article on algorithmic and cognitive approaches for info retrieval in the stacks on Tuesday:
It would be an understatement to say that there is a lot of talk and writing about the role of librarians and libraries in the future, however, there is not much normative discussion of what kind of institution libraries should be, or what kind of societies we are becoming, and whether any of this is good. For all our professional obsessing about the . . . the discussion is remarkably one-sided. It focuses almost exclusively on how best to implement the new resources and make sure that librarians are not left out of funding, planning, and policy decisions for them. I should state up front that I don’t question that there are profound changes taking place around us, and these changes are being seen in libraries.
The source is listed below. Can you guess which one? I elided the specific technological obsessions of the day because we can so easily substitute our own today. Seems to be a continuous trope of the library field; just one of so very many that many today seem to think are new because they have no idea of the history of their own field, or society.
Clearly I’m forgetting some things…
Warner, Julian. (2007) “Analogies between linguistics and information theory.” JASIS 58 (3): 309-321.
I tried hard, but this one is still a bit beyond me. Julian Warner seems to be a nice man, with a wonderful twinkle in his eye, based on the two occasions that I have met him, but his writing is still over my limits of comfortableness with pushing myself.
Barlow, John Perry. (1994) “A Taxonomy of information.” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science 20 (5) June/July 1994: 13-17.
Who knew ASIST was this hip? Especially in 1994. OK, I was a bit disappointed when I found out it was excerpted from a March 1994 Wired article. I have very little respect for Wired. But still, ASIST published an article by John Perry Barlow! In 1994.
Frohmann, Bernd. (2001) “Discourse and documentation: Some implications for pedagogy and research.” Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 42 (1) Winter 2001: 12-26.
Garrett, Jeffrey. (2007) Subject headings in full-text environments: The ECCO experiment.” College & Research Libraries 68 (1) January 2007: 69-77.
This is a pretty good article that, in a sense, is a follow up to Gross & Taylor (2005), which is one of my favorite articles. It provides more demonstration as to the value of subject headings, even in a full-text environment.
But, dude, that gratuitous V. Bush reference was completely uncalled for! As one of my profs said, “That’s just lazy!” It’s worse than lazy, it’s wrong! Bush had little (or no) use for controlled subject headings. Anyone who reads this—do me a favor—if you ever need a citation for the kinds of associative relationships that subject headings provide contact me and I’ll give you several high quality citations to choose from. But. Do. Not. Cite. Bush. I will make fun of you.
Bodenreider, Olivier and Carol A. Bean. (2001) “Relationships among knowledge structures: Vocabulary integration within a subject domain.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 81-98.
Beghtol, Clare. (2001) “Relationships in classificatory structure and meaning.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 99-113.
Buschman, John. (1995) “Libraries and the underside of the Information Age.” Libri 45 (3/4) Sep/Dec 1995: 209-215.
Marco, Francisco Javier Garcia and Miguel Angel Esteban Navarro. (1995) “On some contributions of the cognitive sciences and epistemology to a theory of classification.” International Information, Communication, and Education (INICAE) 14 (2) Sep 1995: 178-192.
This one was cited by Beghtol (above) for a minor point, but I was intrigued by the title. English is definitely not the first language of the authors, which in a fairly technical article makes it a bit hard to follow what they’re saying at points. Still, pretty good, but not sure it was worth tracking down in the bowels of the main stacks and photocopying.
Green, Rebecca and Carol A. Bean. (1995) “Topical relevance relationships. II. An exploratory study and preliminary typology.” JASIS 46 (9):654-662.
I read the first part about 9 days ago, which is: Green, Rebecca. “Topical relevance relationships. I. Why topic matching fails.” JASIS 46 (9):646-653.
Bean, Carol A. and Rebecca Green. (2001) “Relevance relationships.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 115-132.
This article is, in effect, a combination of the 2 JASIS articles, but a bit different too.
Popper, Karl. (1978) “Three worlds: The Tanner Lecture on human values.” Delivered at The University of Michigan, April 7, 1978. [pdf] This is for Ontologies this week.
Chapters 8 and 10 of Svenonius, Elaine. (2000) The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization. These are for Representation & Organization this week.
Shera, Jesse H. (1959) “What lies ahead in classification.” Originally presented as a paper at the Allerton Park Institute on The Role of Classification in Modern American Libraries, Graduate School of Library Science, University of Illinois, 1959. Published in the Proceedings of the Institute, 1960: 116-128. Although my copy comes from Libraries and the Organization of Knowledge, 129-142.
More of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge.
I think I’ll go ahead and end this as of Saturday; splitting at the calendar week might be easiest, although it splits the weekend.
I just got back from the library where I spent $13.14 on copies. I actually stopped because I was tired of copying and I had already copied the things I actually need, plus a lot more. At $0.09/each that’s 146 pages. I also printed some things at the schoolhouse before heading to the library and just now printed another article here at home. Oh, and there was an article in my mail folder at school to be read for Wednesday’s class. So, now it’s off to read articles and even more articles.