Saturday – Sunday, 22 – 23 Mar 2008

Mann, T. (2008). “On the Record” but Off the Track” a review of the Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on The Future of Bibliographic Control, with a further examination of Library of Congress cataloging tendencies. , 38. Washington, DC: AFSCME 2910. Retrieved from http://www.guild2910.org/WorkingGrpResponse2008.pdf.

Sunday, 23 Mar 2008

Weinheimer, J. (2008, January 1). An Open Reply to Thomas Mann’s report “On the Record” but Off the Track. . Retrieved March 23, 2008, from http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00013059/.

DeLillo, D. (1986). White Noise. , Contemporary American fiction., 326. New York: Penguin Books.

Finished.

 

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature (285).

Technology is lust removed from nature. Oh man! Does “fiction” get any better that?

Monday, 24 Mar 2008

Levy, N. (2007). Neuroethics. , 346. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Read the Preface and Introduction to this (73 pp.) Man! This sure made me miss all my work in consciousness. Looks like it’d be a very good book, but I’m just not sure I can devote the time to the rest of it right now.

 

The introduction does a great job of dispelling many myths of self-hood and consciousness among other topics. One is the equation of the self with consciousness:

 

Many of our actions, too, including some of our most important, are products of unconscious mechanisms. The striker’s shot at goal happens too fast to be initiated by consciousness, similarly, the improvising musician plays without consciously deciding how a piece will unfold. Think, finally, of the magic of ordinary speech: we speak, and we make sense, but we learn precisely what we are going to say only when we say it (as E. M. Forster put it, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”). Our cleverest arguments and wittiest remarks are not vetted by consciousness; they come to consciousness at precisely the same time as they are heard by others (24).

Another is the myth of internal representation:

 

Our visual experience is as of a world that is internally represented. But the world is not internally represented, at least not in any great detail. There is nevertheless a sense in which we do possess a rich representation of the world. We represent the world to ourselves not by way of an internal image, but by having an external model: the world itself. Rather than take a snapshot of the scene and store it internally, we rely upon the actual stability of the world. We store our representation outside us (34).

 

Yes, I have only reproduced some claims here. Do not worry; there is plenty of science and good philosophy to back it all up.

 

Monday – Friday, 24 – 28 Mar 2008

Swift, J. (1996). Gulliver’s travels. (Unabridged [ed.].). Mineola N.Y.: Dover Publications.

For these Reasons, the Trade of a Soldier is held the most honourable of all others: Because a Soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold Blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can (185).

 

Is it really satire? And please feel free to be offended if you like. I was a soldier for over 20 years, and technically will be until I die. My son is also a soldier with over 8 years of service and is a combat veteran. Satire may well be truth.

Tuesday, 25 Mar 2008

Mazzochi, F., Tiberi, M., De Santis, B., & Plini, P. (2007). Relational semantics in thesauri: some remarks at theoretical and practical levels. Knowledge Organization, 34(4), 197-214.

Friday, 28 Mar 2008

Some articles by David Bade that have been submitted for publication. Not sure if I am allowed to discuss them yet so will hold off.

Mugridge, R. L. (2008). Experiences of newly-graduated cataloging librarians. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 45(3), 61-79. doi: 10.1300/J104v45n03_06.

I only skimmed this one so I will hold off from any real commenting. It is interesting to me as it is highly related to my original CAS topic, although I had hoped to go a bit deeper.

Friday – Saturday, 28 – 29 Mar 2008

Kari, J. (2007). A review of the spiritual in information studies. Journal of Documentation, 63(6), 935-962. doi: 10.1108/00220410710836439 .

I was hoping that this piece might serve as a piece of the domain analysis-integrationism connection for my CAS paper but I was wrong.

While it is possibly interesting to some, I think Kari is confused about several things. In particular, what is science and what are the limits of what it can study. This confusion is readily apparent in the article itself and not only in the confused critiques made of the literature being reviewed.

One example is this non-starter of a statement: “Documenting a spiritual occasion in an objective fashion is so much easier: all one needs is a video camera” (949). WTF? First off, most of the what could possibly pass for a spiritual occasion can not in any sense be documented in an objective fashion.

This is related to what seems to pass for the author’s view of what science is and what doing science consists of. While no formal definitions are provided, the best sense that I could get is that simply counting things and turning numbers into a statistic or two is science. Well, It is not. I also have no doubt that the author’s views are a bit less simplistic than this but nonetheless that is the sense I get from the article.

Another example that shows that the author is confused about the separation of science and other modes of inquiry is demonstrated in his critique of an article by Babb, and especially in this statement: “The above extract shows that Babb is well up on the matter, but also sometimes she apparently forgets to maintain the critical or objective attitude of a scientist” (955).

That comment is not only wrong but ignores what Babb was doing in her article [Babb, N. M. (2005) "Cataloging spirits and the spirit of cataloging." CCQ 40(2):89-122] Babb can easily be (and was) critiqued for using such a small sample but she was not attempting to do science. She was looking at title pages of books purportedly written by spirits and how our cataloging rules have evolved to handle such attributions of authorship. There is no serious sense in which that could ever be considered to be doing science.

I will leave you with the conclusion, which while it makes some valuable points also commits the same fallacy.

It is time for information researchers to start asking themselves not only how to exploit context in reaching a holistic picture of informational phenomena, but also what the empirical contexts are that are bona fide foreign to them and potentially significant to humanity. By doing so, we may open up new grounds for further research and thus widen the scope of information studies as a branch of science (959).

Read that through once or twice and tell me you can’t see the confusion. If we want a holistic picture then we must admit ways of knowing besides science. If we are only talking the empirical then we are excluding whole realms of phenomena, of human experience, and of human knowing. Information studies is not a science (and that is OK), but if we only admit the empirical then we have excluded far more than we can honestly cover.

Saturday, 29 Mar 2008

Budd, J. (2008). Self-Examination: The Present and Future of Librarianship. , 281. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited.

Started this yesterday and it looks quite good. So far I have read the Introduction and the 1st chapter: Genealogy of the Profession.

There are a few minor issues and claims that I have trouble with but they do not have much to do with (or influence on) the larger purpose so I am trying to be forgiving. I am going to comment on one, though, as it is directly related to many of my current interests.

Early in the 1st chapter Budd writes, “In order for there to be communication there has to be language; do we know what the first language was, how it came to be, who spoke it” (3)?

Unless one is equating communication and language—actually under any account—that is a complete non-starter. They are and never have been coextensive. And, as Harris so ably demonstrates, it is communication that must proceed language. The very idea of a language (in use) requires that there be communication. The simplest refutation is that most people will agree that almost every animate being on this planet communicates between others of their own kind, and often as not with beings of other sorts. The vast majority of these people will also adamantly deny any use of language, much less the capability for language, to these creatures.

As I said, not really relevant to the larger purpose of the text, but it will cause me to keep a sharper eye on his larger arguments. I find it hard to believe that a scholar with the philosophical bent of Budd could make that mistake.

Saturday, 12 May [due to early posting last week]

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:

• Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” [a snippet]
• Emily Dickinson, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death
• Emily Dickinson, “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers”

Tuesday, 15 May

Ward, Jewel. “Unqualified Dublin Core Usage in OAI-PMH Providers.” OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 20 (1), 2004: 40-47.

Hutt, Arwen and Jenn Riley. “Semantics and Syntax of Dublin Core Usage in Open Archives Initiative Data Providers of Cultural Heritage Materials.” JCDL ’05 June 7-11, 200, Denver, Colorado: 262-270.

Both of these were read for Metadata Round Table tomorrow.

Wednesday, 16 May

Shreeves, Sarah L., Ellen M. Knutson, Besiki Stvilia, Carole L. Palmer, Michael B. Twidale, amd Timothy W. Cole. “Is “Quality” Metadata “Shareable” Metadata? The Implications of Local Metadata Practices for Federated Collections.” ACRL 12th National Conference April 7-10, 2005, Minneapolis, Minn.: 223-237.

Also read for Metadata Round Table today. I even attended this presentation at ACRL.

Priss, Uta. “Multilevel Approaches to Concepts and Formal Ontologies.” In Efthimis N. Efthimiadis, ed. Advances in Classification Research, Vol. 12: Proceedings of the 12th ASIST SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, held at the 64th Annual ASIST Meeting, November 2-8, 2001, Washington, DC. Medford, NJ: Information Today, c2004: 93-111.

Argues for viewing the “classical” or symbolic approaches to representation and that of fuzzy or category-based approaches as complementary forms of representation that can and should be combined.

ontologies, symbolic representation, formal logic, category-based representation, categories, fuzzy logic, neural networks, formal concepts, associative concepts, knowledge systems, emergent structure, cognition, feedback, ASIST SIG/CR

Tennis, Joseph T. “Layers of Meaning: Disentangling Subject Access Interoperability.” In Efthimis N. Efthimiadis, ed. Advances in Classification Research, Vol. 12: Proceedings of the 12th ASIST SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, held at the 64th Annual ASIST Meeting, November 2-8, 2001, Washington, DC. Medford, NJ: Information Today, c2004: 113-129.

Proposes a multilayer conceptual framework for a system for subject access interoperability, where levels of meaning, relationships, extension and intension are individually controlled. Claims this will solve the problems Lancaster identified as inherent in switching between vocabularies: 1) overlap of subject matter, 2) specificity, 3) degree of pre-coordination, and 4) hierarchical, synonymous and other relationship structure.

subject access, interoperability, subject access interoperability, vocabularies, mapping, switching, compatibility, ICC, BSO, intension, extension, meaning, relationships, supra-thesaurus, reconciliation, conceptual warrant, literary warrant, Universal Source Thesaurus, conceptual framework, concepts, subjects, classes

Thursday, 17 May

Greenberg, Jane and Eva Méndez. “Introduction: Toward a More Library-Like Web via Semantic Knitting.” Co-published simultaneously in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 43 (3/4), 2007: 1-8 and: Knitting the Semantic Web (ed. Jane Greenberg and Eva Méndez) Haworth Information Press, 2007: 1-8. doi:10.1300/J104v43n03_01

This is the introduction to the issue of CCQ that was mentioned several times at the LC Working Group meeting. Basically sets up the issue and then gives a brief overview of the articles. The issue is divided into 2 parts: Semantic Web foundations, standards and tools; and Semantic Web projects and perspectives.

Semantic Web, web, libraries, introduction

Harper, Corey A. and Barbara B. Tillett. “Library of Congress Controlled Vocabularies and Their Application to the Semantic Web.” Co-published simultaneously in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 43 (3/4), 2007: 47-68 and: Knitting the Semantic Web (ed. Jane Greenberg and Eva Méndez) Haworth Information Press, 2007: 47-68. doi:10.1300/J104v43n03_04

This article was also mentioned several times during the LC Working Group meeting. Discusses how historically-library controlled vocabularies and classification schemes “can serve as some of the building blocks of the Semantic Web” (47). Talks about how they might fit within the structure of the Semantic Web, possible uses, how they can be encoded, and some early collaborations. Also discusses authority control and how this can fit within the Semantic Web.

Is at a fairly big picture view and falls short of any discussion of the economics and rights management. Based on all the discussion at the LC Working Group meeting I thought this was supposedly some “radical” call to “Free the Authorities!” Alas, it is no such thing. Jennifer Bowen was far more radical than this. That isn’t saying much, btw.

Semantic Web, web, LC, controlled vocabularies, compatibility, authority control, standards, XML, OWL, SKOS, MODS, MADS, DCMI, DC Abstract Model, MARC relator terms, DC, MARCXML, RDF, DDC, LCC, LCSH, TGM I, TGM II, GSAFD, TGN, AAT, classification schemes, UDC, MeSH, NLM, Terminology Services (OCLC), identification, disambiguation, collocation, VIAF, AUTHOR, metadata, FOAF, markup, encoding

Weibel, Stuart L. “Social Bibliography: A Personal Perspective on Libraries and the Semantic Web.” Co-published simultaneously in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 43 (3/4), 2007: 227-236 and: Knitting the Semantic Web (ed. Jane Greenberg and Eva Méndez) Haworth Information Press, 2007: 47-68. doi:10.1300/J104v43n03_13

Billed as “present[ing] a personal perspective on libraries and the Semantic Web” (227). Major sections are: Computing power, Processable text, Social software and Web 2.0, and the final section, Social bibliography and the declining hegemony of catalog records.

Weibel begins by asking if perhaps we are not seeing the same sorts of claims for the Semantic Web as we did for artificial intelligence two decades ago. He then sets out to show what is different in this situation, and seems to have a fairly balanced perspective. Part of the problem as he says is that the “Semantic Web isn’t primarily about semantics at all” (228). As the W3C states:

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for interchange of data, where on the original Web we only had interchange of documents. Also it is about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects (228)

A few sentences that resonated with me:

Libraries need to support not the Semantic Web, but the semantic lives of our users, … (231).

MARC cataloging remains one of the most successful structured data exchange standards in use (and one of the most long-lived, as well) 232.

The specification of an ontology implies a thorough understanding of the scope and structure of a knowledge domain. Semantic coherence of this kind is rare outside a tightly constrained domain, and leads one to wonder whether ontologies are likely to play a practical role on the open Web (233).

[This is extremely interesting considering Ontologies make up one of the main layers of the Semantic Web Stack, and that this layer has been implicated in the slow progress of the Semantic Web by Berners-Lee, for one (See Harper & Tillett (above p. 49).]

The last section talks about “social bibliography” and I must admit I am not really familiar with this concept. Hmmm … there’s a book by this title by Ranganathan, although I don’t think this is the same use as some of the web pages I saw using this term. I’m not convinced it is even one concept, but perhaps many. I wish Weibel had said more about what he meant by this concept. The discussion was mostly about online reviews at places like Amazon.com and how reviews should be first class objects and, thus, need to have persistent identities, be harvestable on the open Web, and be “managed intellectual content in their own right” (234). In other words, be curated, be citable (linkable), and claimable by their authors (234).

I’m not really sure what work “social” is doing in this concept, although it is doing some. I’m just ready for the day when “social” is no longer applied as a modifier to almost every concept. But then perhaps we need to grow past “friends” first.

Semantic Web, web, libraries, social bibliography, Web 2.0, computing power, processable text, social software

Tennis, Joseph T. “Diachronic and Synchronic Indexing: Modeling Conceptual Change in Indexing Languages.” [pdf] In online proceedings: Clément Arsenault and Kimiz Dalkir, eds. “Information Sharing in a Fragmented World: Crossing Boundaries” Canadian Association for Information Science. Held at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, May 10 – 12, 2007.

The 1st important point is that there are several years worth of proceedings of the Canadian Association for Information Science available online. The link for this article was sent to me by my advisor for my controlled vocabulary-related work, along with a few others from these proceedings.

Outlines a model of conceptual change in indexing languages; in other words, provides for diachronic indexing. Demonstrates conceptual change in an indexing language by looking at eugenics in DDC. Describes3 ways in which meaning and relationships are established and change in n indexing language: structural, terminological, and textual.

I hope to get a few minutes to talk with Joe Tennis at NASKO. I’m not sure how his work has been progressing the last few years, but most of his papers that I’ve been reading (see above for another) are at this fairly abstract level. They sound like great ideas, but can we code them (currently) and make them work? And, if so, do they actually make a positive difference towards any of our needs? Maybe he can fill me in on such work, or point me to the work itself.

indexing, conceptual model, diachronic indexing, synchronic indexing, annotation, revision, concept record, classification format, transfer encoding, structurl change, terminological change, textual change, intertextuality

Thursday – Friday, 17 – 18 May

Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, ch. 15 “Putnam’s Theorem.”

Discusses Putnam’s logical critique of objectivist semantics as internally inconsistent.

Friday, 18 May

Harris, Roy. “Epilogue: Saying Nothing.” In The Language Machine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.

This is quite good as David Bade said a few days ago. I read the Epilogue and have now begun at the beginning. I also picked up 3 other Harris books.

Saturday, 19 May

Harris, Roy. The Language Machine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Read Introduction and chapters 1 – 3.

I was quite disappointed with the amount [not the quality] of public testimony. I did not work up anything to say as I figured that there would be many people far more “qualified” than me jostling for room at the microphone. Sadly, that was not the case. The 3 hours set aside for public testimony lasted about 30 minutes with only 3 people signed up.

I will be providing written testimony to the Working Group and I highly encourage anyone and everyone to do so! All written testimony (such a fancy word, eh? Input, comments, concerns,…) must be sent to Dr. José-Marie Griffiths. Contact info on this page.

Please do so! Particularly those of you in the public, special and school libraries. As you will see (shortly), it was noted that there was little representation from, of, or by, these communities. Do not let your voices and concerns go unheard.

Public Testimony

Sara Shatford Layne -Principal Cataloger – UCLA and professor in SJSU distance program

(1) Don’t forget the needs of research faculty members. There is a danger in trying to do the best for the largest number. Who will do this if not the academic libraries. An example. One researcher creates the cure for cancer vs. 4000 undergraduate papers on Hamlet.
(2) Seem to need more, not less structure and people are asking for the structure
(3) Systems we use are a kind of structure; we need to influence system creation
(4) Authority data has been underutilized
(5) What can be automated?
(6) Cataloging as a public good, we need to lobby for this over the business model – the business model does not apply here. [An economist told her at a meeting she attended that "Cataloging is a public good."]

Kevin Randall – Northwestern University, Head of Serials Cataloging

Interested to hear about the conflict between Bade/Hillman. I saw none; one is talking about WHAT, the other HOW. There is a loss of balance, too much emphasis on improving the container at the expense of content. My concern with the container is that it not leak!

Relating to CONSER standard level record:
We are focusing too much on Access, not Identify. This is being rushed to implementation. We need a graduated level of standards; the present ones are like an opaque un-marked measuring cup. It is difficult for cataloging managers to give guidance. Here it would seem that a cooperative program is being pushed by one member at the inconvenience of all other library/cooperative members. We must ask, what is the essence of cooperation? The standard level record is touted as “a floor, not a ceiling,” but with Encoding Level marked as blank it inference is full-level cataloging.

Don’t manage mortgage the future of FRBR user tasks in catalogs, we need to build up user services, but not at the expense of bibliographic control which connects our users to resources. [Updated 15 May via feedback from Kevin Randall, and in his own words: "I would suggest a correction to the last paragraph, though: instead of "manage", I said "mortgage". The point being, with the direction currently being taken in stripping things out of catalog records, we're mortgaging our future in terms of being able to meet FRBR user tasks. Without proper bibliographic control, we won't be able to connect
users to resources."]

Michael Norman – UIUC, Head of Content Access Management

Discussed U of I digitizing efforts. In our current project we have opportunities to augment/enhance records but find that current structures do not accord places for this. We are working to convert MARC records to MARC XML with a METS wrapper. We are looking to integrate MARC with other standards. (out on the web) there are examples of books with the table of contents displayed as tag clouds, we need standards for this.

The U of I digitizing effort will double the size of our catalog, and the records will go into OCLC. We need more discussion about single vs multiple records, this is a different world. How do we build these structures?

How can we use OAI/PMH to make records better and refresh them as changes occur?

We need to be where the user is and we are working on this at the U of I: by creating widgets to assist with library searches across assorted databases and the OPAC as well as digital collections.

As to looking to automate records – they are imperfect, especially with regard to subject analysis, but there are parts that can be automated. One publisher, for example, Springer-Verlag generates metadata for e-book packages at the title and chapter level and these records are not too bad, though they may need tuning.

Clifford Lynch – Director of the Coalition for Networked Information; Working Group member

Summation

Speaking for the task force:

This is a process and I urge you to submit comments.
The next meeting will be about Organization (Systems) and Economics and I will build/ frame questions for the third meeting.

An extract from the comments today:

There have been important reminders about quality control starting with Bade’s questions about the scope of bibliographic resources we are trying to manage. Is the scope national? International? Quality control relates to this question intimately. Perfect quality is easy to talk about and advocate for – is a moral position, and few human systems can provide this. [To which Bade replied later].

Discussions of quality control operationally must consider:

• How will we measure it? With what metrics?
• We are constrained by economics (funding is not infinite)
• What are the trade-offs? We must think deeply about these.
• What do user communities have to do with quality? Is it collaborative? Should it result only from internal efforts?

Many insightful comments today about legacy vocabularies and related tools. I agree, especially with the issue of the economic models for opening these up. If these can become components of infrastructure their values will increase. Presently the economic models are impediments and need to be revisited. There has been surprisingly little discussion about rethinking the content of these vocabularies. How should something like the Name Authority File change in a networked environment? What is the role of the author ID that is being discussed in different communities? We need to think in a much broader context. Discussions about the author ID are vigorous elsewhere.

There has been much about the interplay of traditional bibliographic practices and “new bibliographic practices” such as user tagging, etc. More central questions come with the implications of fully digital objects. The argument is not between user tags and LCSH, but about text retrieval computations or representation and retrieval but little has been said about this.

As to a new term for bibliographic control: It is easy to become intoxicated by visions of the digital future. Physical artifacts won’t go away. We need to help people find them. Surrogates will become the order of the day.

What is a bibliographic record? Is it a structure to populate with the digitized text of a book and an bibliographic record? Do we want to go further? What about computational derivatives – forming a concordance of the most common words. What about fully digital items? Do we need to think about the whole spectrum or draw some line in the sand? This is no longer a theoretical question posed in order to come up with best practices.

There were also valuable comments about interactions between tools, systems and standards. We need to be mindful that the systems themselves can affect our viewpoint.

Regarding better tools for cataloging: What is our goal? What are the priorities? I want more correct records, speed for copy cataloging and deeper records.

[Yes; we should do more than just say we need better tools for cataloging. But anyone who has spent more than a day or two using our current tools can easily start down this road! Nonetheless, I agree with him. Hmmm.

What would be the best context for starting and recording this discussion? Another wiki? Perhaps the NGC4LIB list? LITA and/or ALCTS? Catalogers and metadata specialists, what do you say? How should we go about documenting what we need to do our jobs—perhaps even faster, better and with less expense?]

Let us return to the point about making it easier to contribute to or improve collective metadata. There is a group called the proof-readers collective [Distributed Proofreaders] in which individuals sign up to do as many pages of proofreading a day as possible for Project Gutenberg. Can we think of ways to do this?

Comments regarding systems and economics; i.e. questions for the 3rd meeting:

(1) We need to move from “absolute perfection” to resource allocation.
(2) We need to open up our vocabularies to achieve maximum value
(3) We need notification of changes and propagation of system improvements.
(4) The locus of responsibility for maintaining, notifying and improving standards is too diffuse now. There are many different players with many different ideas. The process is complex, to the extent that we want wide use, we need coherent explanations for outside communities.
(5) We need to think about public accessibility of standards. These products should be easily worldwide accessible like NISO standards. This is urgently necessary. “Our descriptive standards are dead in the water if not widely and readily accessible, in electronic form.”

[And I do not believe Cliff meant the current RDA product model, but more directly like NISO. If I want a copy of the Z39.19-2005 monolingual controlled vocabulary standard I just download a FREE copy. But he also means available in a "Webified" version, not just as a pdf.]

Public comments on Cliff Lynch’s Summation

Richard Stewart – Indian Trails Public Library District

Seems to be a serious lack of representation of much of the library community here today, especially with the invited speakers. Public, special and school libraries have needs that all need to be addressed; I hope they’re being considered in the overall process.

Lynch asked that these communities please provide feedback via the written testimony process.

James Nye – Asian bibliographer, UIC

What about the international and multilingual communities? The area of the world that he covers is composed of approximately 2 Billion people; think of the extensive opportunities for collaboration and learning from each other.

Scripts and character sets are still major issues.

Joan ?? Schuitema - Head of Cataloging at UIC [Sorry; I tried to find out who this might be, but UIC servers seem hosed this morning.] [Updated 15 May thanks to Kevin Randall.]

Wants to confront the “all or nothing” thinking that seems prevalent

Is also a therapist. When people are under stress, black and white thinkers (catalogers, by training) will shift even more to black and white. We need to move back to the center to address the gray areas.

Marc Gartler – Director of Library Services, Harrington College of Design

In our description fields, ‘ill.” is not sufficient. Access even to just titles [of images in resources] would be of immense value to the study of visual design. More granularity.

Deanna Marcum – Summation

Thanks to the speakers and for the commentary.

Bowen referred to gray areas in this discussion of the bibliographic future: LoC is in the middle of a large gray area. It may be helpful for you to hear the considerations that LoC is making as we discuss the future:

Are there roles and responsibilities of LoC that we want to continue or to embrace?

As part of this strategic planning process in library services I read all of the annual reports of the Librarians of Congress back to the beginning. In the early years these were philosophical documents, that contained views of what LoC could or should be.

For decades LoC has been the leader in bibliographic control:

(1)Because of volume
(2) Because it assumes professional and moral responsibility for creating records to be used by the library community. This is a valuable contribution.
(3) Because of a belief that LoC should be an innovator. My article: “Too much consensus” (2000) discusses our standards and structures. They provide quality and support but such a stance may not also allow for innovation. How much should we allocate to support and maintenance of our bibliographic structures?

We know that libraries depend on us. We will continue to innovate where we can in concert with the library community.

As to the future structure of LoC: It would be helpful to know for which community we are working. LoC serves all libraries, all citizens of the US, all citizens abroad and national libraries internationally. In policy discussions we serve all communities, but at a time when funds are declining, this decline will not reverse in the foreseeable future. We must decide where to invest.

Only 30 million of 130 million items at the LoC are under bibliographic control. The tradeoffs are this: do we digitize for direct availability or do we invest in bibliographic control?

As to work in other communities – should LoC do work ‘as good as’ theirs, or in collaboration with them. If it is a piecework approach, we all become part of the information network and this makes a lasting contribution to society.

LoC works in approximately 470 languages. These are almost all very underrepresented; should they (or who) fund script/character set development?

When I met with the ALA board 2 summers ago the first question was: How much money is allocated in support of LoC services to other libraries? The answer is zero. Congress has generously funded LoC and LoC has supported other libraries in turn, but Congress has never directly funded this work. It is our tradition. We want to do what is beneficial for the library community

[A few comments and questions followed, including Bade’s assurance that he was never talking about the perfect record, for he knows this is impossible, rather bibliographic control at the level suitable for the users at a given library].

May 9 2007 Chicago, IL ALA Headquarters
Meeting of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.

Many thanks to Kathryn La Barre for providing me her copious notes in electronic format and for allowing me to use them as I saw fit. I hope someone finds this material of value.

If anyone has any corrections to anything I may have gotten wrong from the beginning or perhaps mistyped, or any of the speakers who might have an issue with my transcription, please feel free to comment or contact me via my Contact Page.

Comments from any and all others are also certainly welcome!

I may try to add another post with my overall impressions and thoughts on this meeting and the Working Group process, but I need to step back for a bit. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, flowers are blooming, it’s Mother’s Day, and I have friends graduating who I need to support and help celebrate. And since Kathryn ordered me to get offline and enjoy myself I thought I might listen for once.

BTW, Kathryn, I did read something non-LIS related yesterday; 3 poems and Paglia’s commentary on them.

Sunday, 6 May 2007

Ingwersen, Peter and Peter Willett. “An Introduction to Algorithmic and Cognitive Approaches for Information Retrieval.” Libri 45 (3/4), Sep/Dec 1995:160-177.

Cited by Radford, Gary P. and Marie L. Radford. “Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and the Library: de Saussure and Foucault.” Journal of Documentation 61 (1) 2005: 60-78. DOI 10.1108/00220410510578014 Read back in late Jan.

Post-structuralist tendencies in LIS can also be seen in the newer paradigm of “best match” that focuses on relevance and attends to issues of context and complexity (see Ingerwersen and Willett, 1995). (76)

Although now a bit dated, provides a decent intro into both algorithmic approaches and cognitive approaches (more user-oriented) to information retrieval, and how they are complementary. Not directly applicable to relationships but had its moments, and it did provide two interesting citations to sources on relevance and retrieval outcomes.

information retrieval, algorithmic approach, cognitive approach, Boolean searching, best-match retrieval, statistical approaches, term conflation, stemming, similarity measures, weighting, information need, intermediaries, cognitive IR theory

Monday, 7 May 2007

Charnigo, Laurie and Paula Barnett-Ellis. “Checking Out Facebook.com: The Impact of a Digital Trend on Academic Libraries.” Information Technology and Libraries 26 (1), March 2007: 23-34.

Reports on a survey conducted in early 2006 to determine academic librarians’ “awareness of Facebook, practical impact of the site on library services, and perspectives of librarians toward online social networks” (27).

Hmmm…? Well, if you use Facebook already there’s not a lot you will learn here, although it provides some early data on academic librarians’ perceptions of Facebook use in their libraries. The limitations of the survey—mentioned in one paragraph—are fairly significant, though, and I must wonder how useful of a baseline it will provide for the future. Speaking of which, the article will appear extremely “quaint” in five years or less.

If you are not familiar with Facebook already you will learn something, but it won’t be much about Facebook, which, of course, is not the purpose of the article.

The only other critique I care to make involves the use of Stephen Downes’ definition of social networks as “a collection of individuals linked together by a set of relations” (24). First off, that really ought to be relationships, not relations, but many people use relation this way.

My main concern is that this definition is not in the slightest bit useful as a way to discriminate any particular group of individuals from any other, completely random, group. Thus, it simply cannot mark off any social network from another, nor from any collection of individuals that do not form a social network. It is something about those relationships between the individuals that actually constitute the social network. The definition, at least as cited by the authors, completely fails to define just what it is about the relationships that does so.

Here is the Downes citation in case anyone else besides me would like to see if there is any further discrimination in Downes’ article: Stephen Downes. “Semantic Networks and Social Networks.” The Learning Organization 12, (5), 2005: 411.

Facebook.com, academic libraries, academic librarian’s perceptions, surveys

Downes, Stephen. “Semantic Networks and Social Networks.” The Learning Organization 12, (5), 2005: 411.

C’mon, be honest. You thought I was joking about tracking this down. But I had it read less than 2 hours after writing the previous. The definition comes from the very first sentence of the article and is never elaborated.

Entities in a network are called “nodes” and the connections between them are called “ties” (Cook, 2001). Ties between nodes may be represented as matrices, and the properties of these networks therefore studied as a subset of graph theory (Garton et. al. 1997). (411)

Why, yes, this is true. But these are still not mathematical relations, nor necessarily kin. Describing something using mathematics does not make the thing described mathematical; and while it is possible that people in your social network are your kin it is more likely that they are not.

People are certainly free to use relation in this manner, but I choose to follow Bean & Green’s usage:

(Because “relation” has a technical meaning, we will reserve its use for mathematical and data modeling contexts and for such phrases as “public relations” and “phase relations.” Note that all relations are relationships, but not vice versa. We will instead use the term “relationships” exclusively for the notion of semantic association, although the terms “relation” and “relationship” are often used interchangeably outside formal settings.) (B&G, 2001, vii-viii).

Now I am fully aware that data modeling is exactly what these people are doing when they study social networks and that, as such, relation is fully appropriate. But the statement, “A social network is a collection of individuals linked together by a set of relations,” (Downes, 411) is not about the abstract mathematical model or, at least, should not be. In the second paragraph Downes discusses “six degrees” and how a farmer in India and the President of the US may be closely connected, that is, nodes can be widely dispersed. So, we are talking about extant human beings and the relationships between them.

I guess I’ll consider this nit picked.

Citation:

Bean, Carol A. and Rebecca Green, eds. (2001). Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. Information Science and Knowledge Management, Vol. 2. Dordrecht : Kluwer Academic Press.

semantic networks, social networks

Jouis, Christophe. “Logic of Relationships.” In Green, Bean and Myaeng, eds. The Semantics of Relationships: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Information Science and Knowledge Management series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002: 127-140.

“Proposes associating logical properties with relationships by introducing the relationships into a typed and functional system of specifications. … [A] specific relation may be characterized as to its: (1) functional type (the semantic type of arguments of the relation); (2) algebraic properties (reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity, etc.); and (3) combinatorial relations with other entities in the same context (for instance, the part of the text where a concept is defined)” (abstract, 127).

relationships, logic, functional type, algebraic properties, combinatorial relations, concepts

Wednesday, 9 May

Bade, David. “Structures, standards, and the people who make them meaningful.” Presented to the 2nd meeting of the Library of Congress’ Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control on “Structures and Standards for Bibliographic Control.”

See “LC Working Group – Structures and Standards, part 2 – David Bade” for comments.

bibliographic structures, bibliographic standards, cataloging, Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, LC

Thursday, 10 May

Turkle, Sherry. “Can You Hear Me Now?” Forbes 7 May 2007. Found via Library Juice.

Discusses the impact of technology on the self.

self, psychology, technology, virtuality, fragmentation

Hall, Stephen S. “The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis.” The New York Times. 6 May 2007. Found via 3 Quarks Daily.

Article on the history and state of wisdom research.

research, wisdom, aging, cognitive, reflective, affective

Thursday – Friday, 10 – 11 May

Machery, Edouard. “Concepts Are Not a Natural Kind.” Philosophy of Science 72 (3), July 2005: 444-467.

Originally read 23 March 2006, but was cited in a review of Lenny Moss’ What Genes Can’t Do by Machery in the newest Philosophy of Science so decided to re-read it.

If you are interested in concepts/categories ala Lakoff and others and would like an entry into the philosophical literature then this would be a good piece for you. It’s actually quite easy to follow compared to much of philosophy.

concepts, natural kinds, philosophy, argument from explanatory necessity, categories, prototypes, theories, examplars

Friday, 11 May

Blessinger, Kelly and Michele Frasier. “Analysis of a Decade in Library Literature: 1994-2004.” College & Research Libraries 68 (2), March 2007: 155-169.

Interesting article, as citation studies go, that looks at the top subjects, resources and authors for the decade from 1994-2004. It is, of course, based on a sample so one question is how representative is it really?

The study looked at 2,220 articles in ten journals. I find it interesting that the highest number of articles were on cataloging, 548 (24.7%), and the 2nd highest on user studies, 449 (20.2%). That’s approximately 20% more articles on cataloging than the next highest subject. Intriguing. Maybe that’s why I don’t find it so hard to find good articles; not that everything I read is on cataloging. I read from all of the categories (5) in the article, if not all subjects.

citation studies, LIS literature, Walt Crawford

Svenonius, Elaine. “Reference vs. Added Entries.” [link] Paper presented at Authority Control in the 21st Century: An Invitational Conference, Dublin, OH, March 31-April 1, 1996.

Found via a 8 May 2007 posting to AUTOCAT by Bryan Campbell, “246 and variant title access.”

Oooh, lots of interesting looking things to warm a boy’s heart on that conference page.

The article pulls apart the difference between added entries and references and how their functions are confused and often collapsed due to our cataloging rules. Presents a proposal to fix the issue.

authority control, added entries, references, collocating function, finding function

I’m going to go ahead and post this a day early as tomorrow will not likely include any new reading due to the amount of transcription I have to do. If I do read something, I can easily enough tack it on next week’s list.

Sunday, 15 April 2007

The first 3 items are from my Bloglines backlog and are all also from the wonderful 3 Quarks Daily.

Smith, Justin E. H. “Selected minor works: Where’s the philosophy?” 8 May 2006

This is absolutely brilliant and if I start quoting it I’ll just have to reproduce the whole thing. So just go read it! It is brilliant and hilarious.

Now that I am a tenured professor of philosophy, and thus may resign from service in my profession’s pep squad without fear of losing my salary, I’m going to come right out and say it: after all this time as a student, and then as a graduate student, and then as a professor of philosophy, I still have absolutely no idea what philosophy is, and therefore what it is I am supposed to be doing.

…

There’s formal logic, but if I agree with Heidegger on anything it is that logic, like shortpants, is for schoolboys. In the good old days, when one learned anything at all at school, one learned the forms of argumentation, the fallacies together with their Latin names, etc. This is all really just advanced critical thinking, and if I can see that q follows from p on a symbol-dense page, I still don’t believe that counts as knowing anything. As Wittgenstein said, everything is left the same.

…

But Richard Rorty is at least right to say that what philosophy departments offer fails largely to live up to the sense that newcomers have that the discipline ought to be doing something rather more, well, important.

Bravo! [And, yes, I realize that I just contradicted myself.]

Huber-Dyson, Verena. “Gödel in a nutshell.” Edge 14 May 2006. At 3QD 19 May 2006.

This is a very short piece.

The essence of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is that you cannot have both completeness and consistency. A bold anthropomorphic conclusion is that there are three types of people; those that must have answers to everything; those that panic in the face of inconsistencies; and those that plod along taking the gaps of incompleteness as well as the clashes of inconsistencies in stride if they notice them at all, or else they succumb to the tragedy of the human condition.

Harpham, Geoffrey. “Science and the theft of humanity.” American Scientist Online July-August 2006. At 3QD 9 July 2006.

Medium length article detailing the fall of the integrated thinker with the rise of the Modern university, the segregation of the disciplines, the beginning reintegration with the rise of interdisciplinarity, and the recent “plunder” of the humanities by the sciences.

Humanists, who have been only partially aware of the work being done by scientists and other nonhumanists on their own most fundamental concepts, must try to overcome their disciplinary and temperamental resistances and welcome these developments as offering a new grounding for their own work. They must commit themselves to be not just spectators marveling at new miracles, but coinvestigators of these miracles, synthesizing, weighing, judging and translating into the vernacular so that new ideas can enter public discourse.

They—we—must understand that while scientists are indeed poaching our concepts, poaching in general is one of the ways in which disciplines are reinvigorated, and this particular act of thievery is nothing less than the primary driver of the transformation of knowledge today. For their part, those investigating the human condition from a nonhumanistic perspective must accept the contributions of humanists, who have a deep and abiding stake in all knowledge related to the question of the human.

Guarino, Nicola and Christopher Welty. “Identity and subsumption.” In Green, Bean and Myaeng, eds. The Semantics of relationships: An interdisciplinary perspective. Information Science and Knowledge Management series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002: 111-126.

This is an interesting but difficult article, heavy on logic. Builds on the philosophical notions of identity, unity, and essence and the constraints they impose on the subsumption relationship (so-called is-a relationship) in the service of building “simpler, cleaner, and ultimately more reusable taxonomies” (124).

Sunday – Monday, 15 -16 April 2007

Green, Rebecca. “Internally-structured conceptual models in cognitive semantics.” In Green, Bean and Myaeng, eds. The Semantics of relationships: An interdisciplinary perspective. Information Science and Knowledge Management series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002: 73-89.

Delivers a highly readable account of the basic cognitive semantic phenomena within cognitive semantics and establishes the prevalence of internal structure at all conceptual levels. Image schemata, basic level concepts, and frames are lucidly explained before moving on to mappings between these phenomena—metonymy, metaphor and blended spaces.

Highly recommended.

Wednesday, 18 April 2007

Khoo, Christopher, Syin Chan and Yun Niu. “The many facets of the cause-effect relationship.” In Green, Bean and Myaeng, eds. The Semantics of relationships: An interdisciplinary perspective. Information Science and Knowledge Management series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002: 51-70.

Provides an overview of the cause-effect relation from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology and linguistics. Focuses on causal inference in text comprehension by looking at explicit expressions of causation (causal links, causative verbs, resultative constructions, conditionals, and causative adverbs, adjectives and prepositions) and implicit causal attribution of verbs. Also considers types of causation and roles in causal situations.

Recommended.

Tuesday – Saturday, 17 – 21 Apr 2007

IFLA. Functional Requirements for Authority Data: A Conceptual Model (Draft), 2007-04-01

Am most of the way through it; may finish it today. It looks like Kathryn and I (and perhaps Allen) will be leading a discussion on it for Metadata Roundtable in June or early July before comments are due.

Wednesday – Friday, 18 – 20 Apr 2007

Baggini, Julian. Atheism. A Very Short Introduction (series). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Read the 1st 2 chapters before and after the Andrew Bird show. Finished reading it Thursday and Friday during lunch.

Excellently written and argued. I only had one real issue.

On page 69, in a section on Death in the chapter on Meaning and purpose, Baggini writes:

Take the idea that life can only have a meaning if it never ends. It is certainly not the case that in general only endless activities can be meaningful. Indeed, usually the contrary is true: there being some end or completion is often required for an activity to have any meaning. A football match, for example, gains its purpose only because it finishes after 90 minutes and there is a result. An endless football match would be as meaningless as a kick around the park. Plays, novels, films, and other forms of narrative also require some kind of completion. When we study we follow courses that end at a determinative point and don’t go on forever. Take virtually any human activity and you find that some kind of closure or completion is required to make them meaningful (emphasis mine).

I understand the point he is trying to make and, in general, I agree with him. Also, part of the problem is that he never defines “meaning,” although he does define “meaning of life.”

But I still say WTF? Depending on the level of play, and perhaps other factors, a football match may very well serve a purpose (and this have meaning) whether or not it ends in 90 minutes. It may end early due to an injury or weather (non-pro), and does any game that goes into overtime not have a purpose?

And his equating a “kick around the park”—in essence, play—as meaningless is unconscionable. I get so very tired of bright—and not so bright—people claiming play serves no purpose and/or is meaningless! It may, in fact, be one of the highest forms of meaning attainable by humans.

And as for study always ending at a determinative point (at least to have any meaning), well, I imagine many of you can just about guess at the apoplectic fit that brought on.

Please realize that I am being particularly harsh on Baggini over this paragraph. This is a lovely little book that is overall quite well argued, despite the shortcomings of this paragraph. It is a wonderful read for the atheist, the agnostic and the religious. It is not dogmatic in any sense. He detests fundamentalism in any form.

Very highly recommended.

Sickness and death

Been having odd sick-like things going on for a couple months now. Went to the doc last week. Sinus x-rays showed an infection and I’m a third of the way through 20 days of antibiotics. My electrolytes were also off and I had to have them retested. Go back Monday for a follow-up.

I need to call the pest control dude back. Maybe it’s the cold snap, but I have had a couple ants the last couple days. I have about 3 more weeks to get a free touch-up spray. It’s stressful enough right now with the semester’s end rapidly approaching without needing to kill more ants. “Stay outside, you little bastards!”

End of the semester

Speaking of the end of the semester … I’m OK, but really need to get productive quickly! I’ve been reading a lot as you can see, but now it’s time to do something with what I’ve read and to actually research some (i.e., visit and play with) some terminology services-type projects. I’ve been entering many of my readings in Zotero, too, so I can do my bibliography.

My project for Representation and Organization is probably going to be an annotated bibliography. Kathryn’s left it up to me to produce something useful for the class on my topic, relationships, although she suggested a few things including the bibliography. I am going to structure it around Bean & Green’s 4-way grouping from the introduction to Relationships in the organization of knowledge:

1. Bibliographic relationships between units of recorded knowledge
2. Intratextual and intertextual relationships, including those based on text structure, citation relationships, and hypertext links
3. Subject relationships in thesauri and other classificatory structures
4. Relevance relationships (vii)

I will, of course, expand on these (non-mutually exclusive) categories and try to include at least one good article on each topic. Many topics will have several good or even great ones. And, if you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that I’ve even gone back and read some of the early classic articles.

Allen really liked my first paper for Ontologies and now I just need to do a bit of expansion and try to add a couple sentences here and there on some points he said I’d get nailed for if it were a conference paper. Our initial limit was 3 single-spaced pages and now I have 1-3 more to “play” with. Of course, I’m supposed to explain the notion of hierarchies, my choice of methodology (chose the right one, but need to say why), and also what I mean by “fundamental category.” I love how he said that “I need to do something (about “fundamental category”), that it’ll be hopeless, and that I won’t be satisfied.” Truer words of advice from a philosopher were never spoken. In 1-3 sentences I need to stave off criticism from those who think they know what they are and that I don’t, and criticism from those who think no one knows what they are. Certainly a simple task, eh?

I really had no idea what to expect from Allen when I went in to talk to him last Sunday since I had never written an actual paper for him before, but it was delightful. We chatted for a good while about a fair few things and it did my heart good. Those memories are mine, though.

I need to get on this paper, though, as I present it to class on Tuesday the 17th. I’ll post it here at some point. I’m even considering posting both versions, but I want to have the expanded version written before I post the original.

Assistantships

I just realized that my thesaurus assistantship is over May 15th, and I verified that they have no money to pay me (hourly) after that. At least I didn’t get let go like several other folks a month or two back. That means I will not completely finish my first pass through FireTalk, although possibly all Top Terms except TT00 General. The problem is, I’m still waiting for node labels (maybe next week) and it will really need a 2nd pass. ::sigh:: “‘ferris wheel rescue’, ‘ferris wheel rescue’, ‘ferris wheel rescue’…”

I think I’m set for Fall, though. I scored another assistantship in Rapid (monographic) Cataloging and kept my Serials gig. Sweet! I’ll get to sit at my own desk all week, and get some great monographic copy cataloging experience. I’ll certainly see a vastly wider range of subjects, class nos, and some other MARC fields than I do now. My only concern is that if some adjustments aren’t made it’ll be 60% total, and those extra few hours/week make a big difference.

My serials gig is through the summer, but I need to find some way to make up the $$ from the Fire Service gig. Cause it only adds up to rent and utilities for 3 months. Else it’ll be a very boring summer as I basically sit in my house and it ramen.

Blogging, or not so much

See the next post…

Future classes

This summer I’ll be taking a class on Topic Maps with Patrick Durusau via LEEP. This Fall, who knows? Registration opens Monday and we don’t have all the classes listed yet! Now this is certainly abnormal for us, but it sucks nonetheless.

I am taking Bibliography with one of our amazing emeritus professors, Don Krummel. After that, hmmm? There really aren’t many decent courses being offered in my opinion. But one should keep in mind that I’ll have 74 semester hours of LIS credit by the time Fall semester starts. Maybe it is about time to move on.

There are a couple that might be interesting in light of my previous socio-technological work, but they are with someone I don’t think I’d take any class from based on what I’ve heard from many of the PhD students.

Julia Flanders (who is amazing!) will be teaching Electronic Publishing via LEEP again. While interesting, I had a look at last year’s syllabus and I don’t know. Kind of peripheral to my main interests.

An analysis of contemporary electronic publishing from the perspective of the production process, emphasizing the role of information processing standards and the concept of documents as knowledge representation systems. Specific topics will include the organization of digital document production, tools and techniques, technical strategies, business strategies, and policy issues. Particular attention will be given to the use of key XML-related standards in the production process, and to the general role of data standards in supporting the development of a high-performance electronic publishing industry. As a vehicle for presenting a coordinated selection of fundamental issues, we will focus on the development and use of the Open eBook Publication Structure, a new industry specification for the content, structure, and presentation of “electronic books”. Students may approach the material from a variety of perspectives. Final projects will be individualized to student’s interests and backgrounds and may be either analytical research papers or technical projects designing and implementing portions of publishing systems (From GSLIS Course Catalog).

Dave Dubin will be teaching Foundations of Information Processing in Lib & Info Science, which will include Python programming. Allen Renear highly suggested I take this after hearing of the other classes I have taken and my professional plans. He’s right; I need to do this. But it’s LEEP and I broadcast this class for Dave once and had a hard time keeping up when in the same room with him even. That boy can pack an English sentence like none I’ve ever known!

Covers the common data and document processing constructs and programming concepts used in library and information science. The history, strengths and weaknesses of the techniques are evaluated in the context of our discipline. These constructs and techniques form the basis of applications in areas such as bibliographic records management, full text management and multimedia. No prior programming background is assumed (From GSLIS Course Catalog).

More important to my current goals are the independent studies/practica that I’m trying to put together. I want to do some work with “authority control,” both traditional (AACR, MARC, LC) and newer, non-traditional forms like embedded gazetteers, term lists, etc. They will probably have to be separate, but who knows? I’m drafting a letter to ask for a meeting to discuss possibilities with our head of cataloging but am waiting on a couple feedback responses first. Quite possibly something could come of this that would shape my CAS project. It’d be nice to do some real work and learning, and benefit the library and our patrons at the same time.

I thought I had the authority control thing sewn up when I got a CETRC Mentor, but seeing as I never heard from them I seem to need to find a different route. And speaking of never hearing from….

ALA and its offshoots

Almost 2 months ago, I wrote about ALA membership processing being broken. I called them a couple of days after that and was assured that everything was right with the world. The lady I spoke with really was very pleasant. She assured me that, “No, I did not owe any more $$ for ACRL and that I really was no longer a member of ACRL, and that surely LITA knew I was a member because they have exactly the same info as she does.” She suggested that maybe I hadn’t heard from them yet as their journal is quarterly and, well, Nov. to Feb. When I asked whether I should have at least received a welcome email or such she was a bit perplexed but, nonetheless, “All is right with the world.”

Well, damn it ALA! All is not right with the world. I still get ACRL publications. I have yet to receive any thing—journal, email, “Fuck off but thanks for the $$”—except for a kindly welcome from a member in my post comments. As I said in my previous post:

I voted for the dues increase ALA. I expect you to actually fix some of the broken parts with it. Starting with membership services might be a good place. That seems like such a basic concept for a membership organization, especially one whose purpose really isn’t to serve their members but where their members work. It seems to me that asking people to pony up large sums of money to be a member of something that actually supports their employers—truly one heck of a concept—would particularly make the organization pay attention to the “small” matter of membership.

I said a lot more, too, and I stand by every word of it. There are other games in town and as I figure out exactly where I want to put my limited time and energy professionally ALA is at the bottom of the list. I also doubt that they could do much to improve the situation for me at this point. I’ll probably stay a member of ALCTS next year, but after that when I am no longer a student and depending on where my 1st job takes me … who knows?

ALA, you are improving in a few small ways and I am truly glad for that. But you still truly suck in some very overarching ways that are far more important. So keep putting money into Second Life because that is far more important than even recognizing that someone is a member of part of your organization. Yeah, seems like the right priority to me. In the meantime you can find me at ASIST and NASIG.

That is all I’m willing to say because I don’t want to find myself in a situation like someone else I know who swore “Never again ALA…” and ended up taking a job there a few months later. See, my ethical sensibilities would have a real hard time with that.

That’s all for now as I have another post to finish so I can concentrate on school work.

Sunday, 4 Mar

Zeng, Marcia L. and Yu Chen. (2003) “Features of an integrated thesaurus management and search system for the networked environment.” In McIlwaine, I. C., Subject retrieval in a networked environment: Proceedings of the IFLA Satellite Meeting held in Dublin, OH 14-16 August 2001 and sponsored by the IFLA Classification and Indexing Section, the IFLA Information Technology Section and OCLC. München: K. G. Saur. 122-128.

Cited by Zeng, Marcia L. and Lois Mai Chan. 2004. “Trends and issues in establishing interoperability among knowledge organization systems.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55 (5): 377-395. Cited by Vizine-Goetz, et al. (read last week)

Freye, Elisabeth and Max Naudi. (2003) “MACS: subject access across languages and networks.” Also in the above, and cited by the (indented) above. 3-10.

Kuhr, Patricia. (2003) “Putting the world back together: Mapping multiple vocabularies into a single thesaurus.” Ditto, ditto. 37-42.

This article is about H. W. Wilson’s merging of their 12 individual thesauri into one megathesaurus, much of it algorithmically.

Re-read: Olson, Hope A. and Dennis B. Ward. (2003) “Mundane standards, everyday technologies, equitable access.” In McIlwaine, I. C., Subject retrieval in a networked environment: Proceedings of the IFLA Satellite Meeting held in Dublin, OH 14-16 August 2001 and sponsored by the IFLA Classification and Indexing Section, the IFLA Information Technology Section and OCLC. München: K. G. Saur. 50-58.

Monday, 5 Mar

Nicholson, Dennis and Susannah Wake. (2003) “HILT: Subject retrieval in a distributed environment.” Same source and citation as the 1st 2 articles in this list. 61-67.

Bean, Carol A. and Rebecca Green. (2003) “Improving subject retrieval with frame representations.” Same source as above. No citation though; just stumbled over an article by the duo of Bean and Green while retrieving the other cited articles. More importantly, it’s a Rebecca Green article. 114-121

Tuesday, 6 Mar

Cayzer, Steve. (2006) What next for semantic blogging? Hewlett-Packard. [LIS: Michael Habib 23 Nov 06.

Tuesday – Wednesday, 6 – 7 Mar

Cordeiro, Maria I. (2003) “From library authority control to network authoritative metadata sources.” Also In McIlwaine, I. C. (see above). 131-139. This was a good article, but poor editing led to approx. one-quarter of its cited references not being in the reference list.

…, the field of authority work appears as one of immediate feasibility and effect by which libraries can gain ground in the Internet environment. It does not represent investments from scratch, it carries an added value that is almost a library exclusive and it has a strong learning and linking potential for the integration of traditional library activities in the interactive network reality. It is like finding a market niche for owned and under-exploited values, with the advantage of contributing to help libraries’ penetration in the WWW environment, while maintaining their traditional role of bibliographic control, extending it to the Web resources, at their own pace (137).

Wednesday, 7 Mar

Lakoff. Chap. 13 of Women, fire, and dangerous things.

Thursday, 8 Mar

Farmer, Linda. “Automatic categorization: What’s it all about?” The Serials Librarian 51 (2), 2006: 91-101. doi:10.1300/J123v51n02_07

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read the Introduction.

Friday, 9 Mar

Spiteri, Louise F. “The Use of folksonomies in public library catalogues.” The Serials Librarian 51 (2), 2006: 75-89. doi:10.1300/J123v51n02_06

Shakespeare and Paglia. Sonnet 73 and Sonnet 29, and accompanying commentary. In Paglia, above. 3-11.

Friday – Saturday, 9 – 10 Mar

Wilson, T.D. (1994). Information needs and uses: fifty years of progress, in: B.C. Vickery, (Ed.), Fifty years of information progress: a Journal of Documentation review, (pp. 15- 51) London: Aslib. [Available at http://informationr.net/tdw/publ/papers/1994FiftyYears.html]

got a garden of songs
where i grow all my thoughts
wish i could harvest one or two
for some small talk
seems like i’m starving for words
whenever you’re around
nothing on my tongue
and so much in the ground
nothing on my tongue
and so much in the ground

Ani DiFranco. “this bouquet.” Not A Pretty Girl.

Looking back at the last dozen (or more) posts, I see that I have said very little about any LIS-related topic. At best, I’ve commented on some of the many articles I’ve read, but rarely in any depth.

Let me assure you that I have plenty on my mind! I have one blog post in draft, and many things in draft in various text files. Some of the topics I’m thinking about and working on are: the current state of “cataloging,” in many of its facets; several of Hope Olson’s writings; several topics within and around FRBR; CIDOC CRM; Terminology Services; and so on.

I want to do some research and considered writing on all of these topics.

The biggest problem, though, is that my semester is, in a sense, finally starting. My first set of products are finally coming due. To date I’ve only had to be prepared for and to show up to class. Now I need to produce; and school production gets in the way of other efforts. In fact, my first “graded” product was a presentation/leading of discussion in Representation and Organization this morning.

Last night when I was supposed to be sleeping, and perhaps I was and was dreaming, I spent most of the night thinking in, with, and about FRBR and CIDOC CRM, with a bit of Terminology Services mixed in for good effect. I just wish there was a good way to recall large portions of those self-”discussions” after-the-fact. I can only hope that some of all that mental processing finds its way into retrievable memory.

Thus, Ani’s metaphor is quite apropros.

got a garden of songs
where i grow all my thoughts
wish i could harvest one or two
for some small talk

I really hope that everything on my mind doesn’t end up tabled until after the semester. I’d really like to do some harvesting for both some “small talk” here on the blog, and for some more formal “talk,” that is, publication.

nothing on my tongue
and so much in the ground

Saturday – Sunday, 24 – 25 Feb

Lakoff, George. Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chaps 6-8.

Sunday, 25 Feb

Vizine-Goetz, Diane. 2004. “Terminology services: Making knowledge organization schemes more accessible to people and computers.” OCLC Newsletter 266 (October/November/December). Available online from http://www.oclc.org/news/publications/newsletters/oclc/2004/266/ in either pdf (PDF:181K/1p.) or html formats.

Vizine-Goetz, Diane, Carol Hickey, Andrew Houghton, and Roger Thompson. 2004. “Vocabulary Mapping for Terminology Services.” Journal of Digital Information, 4,4 (March), article no. 272, 2004-03-11. Available online at: http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v04/i04/Vizine-Goetz/

Gardner, Tracy. 2001. “An Introduction to Web Services.” Ariadne Issue 29. October 2001. Cited by Vizine-Goetz, et al.

Zeng, Marcia L. and Lois Mai Chan. 2004. “Trends and issues in establishing interoperability among knowledge organization systems.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55 (5): 377-395. Cited by Vizine-Goetz, et al.

Olson, Hope A. The Power to name: Locating the limits of subject representation in libraries.

Began this; read through 1st half of Chap. 3 (long chapter). For fun.

This quickly became not-fun. I am writing about this is a separate post after quitting 100+ pages in.

Monday, 26Feb

Chaps. 9 – 10 of Lakoff.

Gilreath, Charles T. (1992) “Harmonization of terminology – An overview of principles.” International Classification 19 (3): 135-139. Cited by Zeng & Chan.

Tuesday, 27 Feb

Olson, Hope A. and Dennis B. Ward. (2003) “Mundane standards, everyday technologies, equitable access.” In McIlwaine, I. C., Subject retrieval in a networked environment: Proceedings of the IFLA Satellite Meeting held in Dublin, OH 14-16 August 2001 and sponsored by the IFLA Classification and Indexing Section, the IFLA Information Technology Section and OCLC. München: K. G. Saur. 50-58.

Wednesday, 28 Feb

Olson, Hope A. (2001) “Sameness and difference: A cultural foundation of classification.” Library Resources & Technical Services 45 (3):115-122.

Re-read. More on this in another post.

Le Boeuf, Patrick. (2001) “FRBR and further.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 32 (4): 15-52.

Good article discussing various international critiques and suggestions to improve and extend FRBR. Almost all of the many sources are available online. Thanks to Tom Dousa for suggesting this to me.

Thursday, 1 Mar

FRBR, Final Report. Chaps. 5 – 7, “Relationships,” “User Tasks,” and “Basic Requirements for National Bibliographic Records.” [pdf]

I read portions of this and skimmed others over lunch. It had me highly confused as it talks about obtaining a manifestation. See Lee, Renear and Smith below for more.

Thursday – Friday, 1 – 2 Mar

Chaps. 11 – 12 of Lakoff.

Friday, 2 Mar

Fallgren, Nancy J. (2007) “Users and uses of bibliographic data: Background paper for the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.” [Lorcan Dempsey.

Weinberger, David. “Taxonomy out of the box.” (IA Column) ASIST Bulletin Feb/Mar 2007. Probably not worth the (small) effort to read.

Friday – Saturday, 2 -3 Mar

Four Danish libraries. “The hybrid library: from the user’s perspective.” pdf – English February 2006, issued in English September 2006.

Very interesting from many perspectives! Unfortunately, it has a very small sample and is thus not generalizable. They intend to do a follow-up quantitative study, but if it is out I do not believe it is in English yet. Worth watching for. Lots of things in here that go counter to much of the “new” librarianship; maybe an artifact of Danish higher ed, or the small sample size, or the fact that much of the statements used to justify the new views comes primarily from surveys and librarians’ views of the matter.

Saturday, 3 Mar

Lee, Jin Ha, Alln Renear and Linda Smith. “Known-item search: Variations on a concept.” In Grove, Andrew, Eds. Proceedings 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) 43, Austin (US). Retrieved from E-LIS 3 March 2007.

Saturday evening while at the LEEP Dinner I was complaining to Allen Renear that FRBR seemed to blow it in the last few chapters as they talk about obtaining a manifestation and skip items completely. His ever generous self suggested it was perhaps inadequate editing and not a mistake, and suggested I read this article because he didn’t think they made that conceptually confused claim. [My words, not Allen's!]

Or, at least, I think this is the article he referred to. ‘Twould be funny indeed, based on the content of this article, if it wasn’t the “known-item” I was, in fact, looking for. So as soon as got home I found this article online, printed it out and read it.

Well, they are much clearer about it. Items, or an item, is the thing being obtained.

I have gone back and looked at the FRBR chapters and perhaps it is mostly editing, although I still think they have some muddled concepts. In Chap. 6 on “User Tasks,” [Section 6.2.4 Obtain an Entity] they talk about obtaining manifestations and items, and note that obtain is not applicable to works and expressions.

In Chap. 7 on “Basic Requirements for National Bibliographic Records,” at the end of Section 7.1 they do mention, “It should be noted that inasmuch as the recommendations in this chapter relate to records created for listing in a national bibliography and such records normally do not reflect data pertaining to the item, the user tasks related to the item are not addressed” (98).

OK, maybe went past that note a bit too fast the first time; explains why there is no chart about obtaining an item. I still have issues with obtaining a manifestation. I think it has to do with the muddled FRBR explanation of manifestations and items as physical. Manifestations are not physical in the same sense as items. The items in a manifestation [elements in a set] are physical; leaving aside the issue of fully electronic items at the moment. But the manifestation qua manifestation is a fully abstract conceptual entity. There simply is nothing physical about a manifestation. There is a level of abstraction that the FRBR report glosses over in several places. I could, as always, be wrong, but I think this is one of the most confusing points for people who want and/or need to understand FRBR.

Lee, Renear and Smith state the case far more clearly, although I am changing their “searching for” to “obtaining”:

• (a) …obtaining a particular copy (e.g., one desired for its scribal marginalia, provenance, or the passport used as a bookmark and forgotten).
• (b) …obtaining a copy which exemplifies a particular manifestation (e.g., the 1851 NY Scribner’s edition).
• (c) …obtaining a copy which exemplifies any manifestation that embodies a particular expression (e.g., say the emended text of the 1851 edition).
• (d) obtaining a copy which exemplifies any manifestation that embodies any expression of a particular work (e.g., Moby Dick) (10-11).

Maybe this reads less well narratively, but it far more ontologically clear. And if we are going to try and impose entity-relationship diagrams on the everyday librarian (or anyone else) then ontological clarity is of the utmost importance.

So, in the end, I think the FRBR committee probably full well understand what they are trying to say, they just aren’t saying it very well. They are probably trying to keep the document as narratively simple as possible so more people will read it and perhaps internalize it, but this only leads to confusion. Clarity should not be sacrificed for simplicity.

Except in some odd cases, most of which I am not ready to spend time elucidating yet, there simply is no obtaining of a manifestation, at least not in libraries.

Sunday, 18 Feb

Section 5, “Review of current terminology service activity,” in Tudhope, Douglas, Traugott Koch and Rachel Heery. Terminology Services and Technology: JISC State of the Art Review [pdf version] Read for Independent Study.

Henson, Jim, The Muppets and Friends. It’s not easy being green and other things to consider. Reviewed by The Gypsy Librarian.

Don’t care what they say, ’cause I know where to find my way,
It won’t be the way they said to go.

But I’m not like they say, I just want to find my way,
I’m goin’ the way I’ve got to go.

So show me a way to go and I’ll go free, I hope you’ll see
That I’m goin’ the way I’ve got to go.

Cotterpin Doozer (56)

Well, when the path is steep and stony and the night is all around
And the way that you must take is far away
When your heart is lost and lonely and the map cannot be found
Here’s a simple little spell that you can say:

You’ve got to face facts, act fast on your own
Preparation, perspiration, dynamite determination
Pack snacks, make tracks all alone
Don’t be cute. Time to scoot. Head out to your destination.

Chase the future, face the great unknown.

Gobo Fraggle (63)

Monday, 18 Feb

Lakoff, George. Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Began reading.

Monday – Wednesday, 18 – 21 Feb

Harley, Heidi. Chapter 6 “Lexical semantics” in A Linguistic introduction to English words. Not sure exactly why I had this. I had recorded that on 9 Feb 2006 a search on my blog had me at #1 and this at #2; but a search on what terms is the open question. Oh well; at least I recorded the URL.

Tuesday, 20 Feb (my birthday)

Crawford, Walt. Cites & Insights 7 (3): March 2007. I wasn’t feeling so hot come evening, so I curled up with the newest issue of C&I and read it. It was a nice”birthday present” to find myself quoted in this issue.

Wednesday, 21 Feb

Sections 6 & 7, “Standards” and “Conclusion,” in Tudhope, Douglas, Traugott Koch and Rachel Heery. Terminology Services and Technology: JISC State of the Art Review [pdf version] Read for Independent Study.

Wednesday – Thursday, 21 – 22 Feb

Original Penguin Classics Introduction by Q. D. Leavis to Silas Marner. Seems I was confused last week about the intro and the original Penguin intro is hidden away as an appendix. So, both the current and the original intros are very good.

Thursday, 22 Feb

Finished Chap. 2 and read chap. 3-5 of Women, fire, and dangerous things.

Willpower Information. Thesaurus principles and practice. Very basic description of the use of thesauri for the museum field. Read for Oranization and Representation.

Mai, Jens-Erik. “Contextual analysis for the design of controlled vocabularies.” ASIST Bulletin Oct/Nov 2006. Read for Oranization and Representation. Did not find the slightest bit useful; sort of like “feeding” a starving man a savory aroma—no real substance.

Friday – Saturday, 23 – 24 Feb

Chapters 5 and 6 of Svenonius, Elaine. (2000) The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization. These are for Representation & Organization this week.

Saturday, 24 Feb

Olson, Hope A. The Power to name: Locating the limits of subject representation in libraries. Began this; read Preface and Chapters 1 and 2. For fun.

See. This is exactly the crap I’ve been complaining about! I might like to buy this book for myself, but it is $103.00! One hundred + three dollars! That is so freaking wrong.

And please spare me the lectures on supply and demand. I do get it; I truly do. And if I didn’t, I’d ask either my sister or her husband (both Econ PhDs working at the Federal Reserve).

It’s still wrong.