Sunday, 10 Feb 2008
Maxwell, Robert L. 2008. FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago: American Library Association.
Most of the holdup on this post was in trying to get good comments on this down. I cannot finish them right now, though, so I have cut what I did write and moved it to a separate draft review. But for now:
So far I can say that I would recommend this book, but with a few caveats. The most important is stressed by the author in the introduction and that is that is it based on several documents that are not in their final form, particularly FRAD.
This is an important book. It needs to be read by most librarian-types. But it will be more than difficult for many, including the willing, I fear.
I hope to be able to write more on this important book and even try publishing it.
Monday, 11 Feb 2008
Harris, Roy. 2005. The Semantics of Science. London: Continuum.
Finished this for the 2nd time.
Monday - Thursday, 11 - 14 Feb 2008
Kari, Jarkko, and Jenna Hartel. 2007. Information and higher things in life: Addressing the pleasurable and the profound in information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58, no. 8:1131-1147. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.20585 (Accessed February 8, 2008).
Kirsten, Into the Stacks, pointed me to this and I’m glad she did. Thanks, Kirsten.
This was a bus and lunch article for a couple of days, which is no reflection on it s quality or whether I liked it; only of my limited contexts for reading over those days. There were several things of reasonable length that all took me a couple days to get through around this time.
Kirsten expresses some concern for the distinction between higher and lower things. I do share that concern but I think the authors covered it as well as possible. They basically say that this dichotomy is simply a useful model to address an important—but currently lacking—perspective of information use in people’s lives. And I fully agree with the critique and proposals. My main caveat is that others respect that useful but false dichotomy as the (currently) useful explanatory concept that it is. A second concern, in individual studies, would be how higher and lower get operationalized since they really aren’t that kind of concept.
For me, this article presents an important critique, especially of the “information as problem-solving” paradigm [which I too find as utterly naive], and provides much fodder for the use of domain analysis. Its critique and methods can certainly be spun Integrationally and it will, thus, almost certainly make it into my paper as an Integrationist-type critique of the concepts of information, information need, information use, et. al.
I thought Kirsten did an excellent job relating the concepts into a lived example for her and communities of yoga practice. I’m not so good at those things myself—especially on short notice— and I’m already way behind on this post. If one were to take these ideas seriously then the possibilities for info use research has just mushroomed for you. And that could and should feed back into interface design, classificatory structures, vocabularies and indexing practices, ….
Kirsten was right that they cite Hjørland quite a bit, but it is interesting how all 7 cites to 5 articles are on one page in the section on A Research Front. They point out several ways Hjørland’s ideas are useful in this area, which just supports my contentions above.
Saturday, 16 Feb 2008
LeBlanc, Jim, and Martin Kurth. 2008. An Operational Model for Library Metadata Maintenance. Library Resources & Technical Services 52, no. 1:54-59.
Very interesting article that presents a model to operationalize thinking about library metadata maintenance. While it is quite probable that there are other ways to model this domain, this model looks to be quite useful for helping to think through what should be considered and at what, if any, level of commitment.
Highly recommended for anyone involved in the maintenance of library metadata.