[Update 3 Nov 2008: Just uploaded a revised PPT with updated Notes which are much closer to what I spoke from. Although, they clearly are not what I said verbatim.]

ASIS&T is going well.  I arrived late Saturday afternoon in Columbus (OH) and am getting along fine with my roommate whom I met over the Internet by posting to my blog.

Our panel* went well yesterday and I am far happier with my portion than I thought I’d be. I have received some nice comments since, including one from a “luminary.”  I was asked if I’d be posting my slides and I said I would. I still need to make an explicit entry on my “Writings” page but here are the links for now.

http://marklindner.info/presentations/ASIST2008/mrlASIST2008.pdf [This is large! 6.2 MB PDF]

http://marklindner.info/presentations/ASIST2008/mrlASIST2008.ppt [3.1 MB Powerpoint]

My friend, Christina, blogged the panel I was on here. She is also blogging many other sessions at her blog, Christina’s LIS Rant.  She also told me that what I said was more important than my slides. While there are notes in the PPT they aren’t the final ones I used.  Perhaps I’ll post those at some point. Of course, they aren’t exactly or entirely what I said either.

Socializing is going well. I’ve seen several interesting posters and a few good sessions. And tomorrow night I’ll get to see my “baby girl.” That is, the one who turns 25 on Election Day.

* “Tagging as a Communication Device: does every tag cloud have a silver lining.” My portion was a suggestion that tagging researchers make an explicit commitment to a theory of language and communication. If you were to guess that I even had one to suggest—Integrationism—you’d be right.

Thus, I tried to give a very, very basic intro to Integrationism, show how community fits into/is described by the macrosocial (within the theory), and how tagging (as a user behavior) can be explained by Integrationism.  As I said above, I have gotten some nice feedback and interested a couple people in Harris and Integrationism. That, my friends, was the entirety of my scheme. Mission accomplished.

Sunday, 6 Apr 2008

Read this for Tom’s presentation/discussion of his project this coming Tuesday (see Tom’s bibliography mentioned last week).

Read this for Tom’s presentation/discussion of his project this coming Tuesday (see Tom’s bibliography mentioned last week).

The section on The Syndetic Structure is an excellent read that points to many failures of our current systems. Don’t misunderstand, I am not particularly commenting on what Marshall writes, as I am pretty much completely reading her in light of being highly informed by several previous articles on specificity and closely related topics (although a fair bit older), along with the daily struggles—experiential and conceptual—within these systems as a cataloger and catalog user. If one construes what she writes as a call for tools that would make entering, maintaining, and making the syndetic structure usable and useful then run with it. Please.

But. I am also loathe to say “go out, read this, and go forth.” I have many reservations about much of what Marshall (and the folks she cites [much of which I had just read]) advocate. The point, though, is that this is easily a century old discussion. And lest any foolish youngster or modernist thinks we have really made any serious “progress” towards solving—much less defining—specificity then I want them to steer clear.

There are, at least, two major (and somewhat related) issues here. What has been and is the state of the theoretical view(s) on specificity? And, what has been, what are the reasons why, and what is the state of specificity in action? That is, how has it been implemented in our systems, and how does it, or does it, work?

Issues of theory are complex enough, and highly disparate and even contentious. As for “progress”, we have had some if beginning to pull apart past and other possibly productive uses of the concept can be defended as good conceptual analysis. Svenonius’ 1976 article [see last week] gave us 7 concepts of specificity. Certainly useful, and clarifying, in a sense. The number has not gone down in the last 30 years, either.

I do think that there is much of value to be learned from, tested, and applied (or re-applied more smartly) from much of our literature. But it is also extremely rare that much of the conversation can be had by reading one or two articles or books. And I think that it is the conversation that is often of far more value than simply an answer or two to run with. But I do wish more folks would run with more of them.

And, yes, I know that includes me.

Monday – Wednesday, 7 – 10 Apr 2008

• Ch. 2: Libraries, Information, and Meaning. (Mon)
• Ch. 3: What Does a Communication Process Look Like? (Mon-Tue)
• Ch. 4: The Library in the Communication Process (Wed- )

Ah, yes. I did actually leave ch. 4 hanging. I temporarily abandoned it as my bus/lunch reading for the running and philosophy essays below.

This is one of the few books on libraries and communication, and especially on libraries in communication. I ordered myself a used copy on Saturday when I also ordered the Carely below, despite its faults.

Main fault: Although discusses assorted models of communication, they are all transportation/transmission-based. The language from the beginning allows no other option; those metaphors are just assumed. There is no real space to even ask broadening questions.

So why did I buy it? Because it bears study; on several fronts. And whether I borrow much of the good and/or use it as a foil—as an exemplar of a (group of) paradigm(s) or viewpoints—it will be valuable.

This is much like the Raber book in that it discusses a critical concept, [more on Raber] [finale] but much clearer on whose views are whom’s, and better argued. I have a lot of respect for Budd as a writer and a thinker, but this is far more rooted in a single meta-view than one might (I do) hope for, despite its seeming diversity within that view.

Monday, 7 Apr 2008

• Read Introduction and ch. 1: A Cultural Approach to Communication.

Wow! Can I just say, “Wow!” Recommended by Tom Dousa.

Carey pulls apart the concept of communication into two of its dominant metaphors, one of transmission/transportation and one as of ritual. That is, cultural.

From such sources one can draw a definition of communication of disarming simplicity yet, I think, of some intellectual power and scope: communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed (23).

To study communication is to examine the actual social process wherein significant symbolic forms are created, apprehended, and used (30).

The widespread social interest in communication derives from a derangement in our models of communication and community. This derangement derives, in turn, from an obsessive commitment to a transmission view of communication and the derivative representation of communication in complementary models of power and anxiety. As a result, when we think about society, we are almost always coerced by our traditions into seeing it as a network of power, administration, decision, and control—as a political order. Alternatively, we have seen society essentially as relations of property, production, and trade—an economic order. But social life is more than power and trade (and it is more than therapy as well). As Williams has argued, it also includes the sharing of aesthetic experience, religious ideas, personal values and sentiments, and intellectual notions—a ritual order (34).

Carey may not have the answer, but he provides a useful counterforce to much; for instance, Budd above. Although Tom only really recommended the first chapter, I ordered myself a copy as it has lots of overlap with previous and current studies. And I’d love to see the ritual and magic of human communication taken a bit more seriously in our field. We have such primitive notions of communication in our field.

Wednesday – Friday, 9 – 11 Apr 2008

• Foreword by Amber Burfoot
• Preface: Warming Up Before the Race by Michael W. Austin, ed.
• Ch. 1: Long-distance Running and the Will to Power by Raymond Angelo Belliotti
• Ch. 2: Chasing Happiness Together: Running and Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship by Michael W. Austin (Thu)
• Ch. 3: Running with the Seven Cs of Success by Gregory Bassham (Thu)
• Ch. 4: The Phenomenology of Becoming a Runner by J. Jerry Wisnewski (Thu)
• Ch. 5: In Praise of the Jogger by Raymond J. VanArragon (Fri)

Cataloged this a few weeks ago. Gave it time to get to Applied Health Sciences and then went and got it.

Started running again last week. I made it out last Saturday and again Monday. Then the weather got crappy (for running anyway) again. Definitely a fair weather runner but I need to get back into some kind of shape. I took a coupe years off due to my hip acting up, but it hasn’t bothered me for quite a while.

I tried to start up again last year but things just got in the way repeatedly and then it was hot. I will run when it’s hot but I have to acclimated to the heat first. Hopefully I will do better this year.

These essays are really helping me to be in the proper mindset to start running again. All of these things, and more, are, or at least can be, part of the experience of being a runner. I am looking forward to reading the rest of this. This is what replaced Budd as my current bus/lunch book.

Saturday, 12 Apr 2008

Given to me by Tom Dousa a couple days ago due to commentary on the catalog as communication tool. Highly dated but useful mini-critique of some of the issues with our catalogs and LCSH. Still. And of interest to me due to its explicit mention of library praxis as communication.

NOTE: WordPress’ formatting issues, even using the HTML editor, are biting me hard in this post. Notice how the variously formatted entries are snugged up against the citations. I have tried assorted fixes; some of which hold for short periods; none which work. There are other issues of format but that is the most virulent and most easily spotted. What sort of idiot would crowd those elements like that? Intentionally? Not me. I find this positively distressing.

Hmmm. They are printing just fine; I did a print test of this draft post for other reasons. Verified the display stupidity in Safari.

Going to have to edit my template’s stylesheet to place some “padding” around some of these elements in display. Although it wasn’t the template that changed. Grrr. More things broken by so-called technological “progress.”

Note: Not that it matters to anyone but me but my chronology may be a bit off due to Comcast pretty much taking over my life for most of this week and the end of the last one.

Sunday – Thursday, 30 Mar – 3 Apr 2008

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

Read ch. 2 Place and Identity (Sun.?) and began ch. 3 Being Informed about Informing (Thu).

For anyone interested in the current debates about the profession/”just who is a librarian?” there is a decent discussion in ch. 2 of this topic, along with one on LIS education. Not saying I fully agree with Budd on either, but he makes some good points on both heads.

Monday – Friday, 31 Mar – 4 Apr 2008

Critchley, S. (2001). Continental philosophy : a very short introduction, Very short introductions, 43. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

This is an excellent introduction to the split between Continental and Anglo-American (or analytic) philosophy, along with why it needs to be eradicated and some ways to work towards a reconciliation.

The primary reason for the split is the professionalization of the discipline and self-identification by said professionals. Hmmm. Sounds kind of familiar. Sadly.

Highly recommended.

Wednesday – Thursday, 2 – 3 Apr 2008Dousa, Thomas. (2008) Subject Heading Specificity with Especial Reference to LCSH: A Basic Bibliography.

Tom has produced an excellent annotated bibliography for his 3rd assignment in 590SA (Subject access & subject analysis).

Friday, 4 Apr 2008

Budd, J. (1992). The Library and Its Users: The Communication Process. , Contributions in librarianship and information science., 71, 193. New York: Greenwood Press.

Grabbed this because Budd cited it in ch. 3 of Self-Examination. “As one would suspect, the literature on communication is voluminous. That literature will not be covered in great depth here; elsewhere I (Budd, 1992) have examined it in some detail” (79).

Now that was interesting to know, so I grabbed it the next day as quickly as I could. And I might, in fact, read this one first and then go back to Self-Examination.

I need to know about these texts. There is another one Pauline told me about that used to be a textbook, at least 4 editions. I picked up all 4, which we had. It seems our profession goes through cycles in the (mostly) lip service paid to our being in the business of communicating.

Read the Introduction and ch. 1 Libraries, Information, and Meaning at lunch.

As I suspected, and complained about last week, Budd does not make the same mistake here re the need for language for the possibility of communication.

Saturday, 5 Apr 2008

Library of Congress. (1951). Subject Headings: A Practical Guide. , 140. Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office.

Read parts of this for Tom’s presentation/discussion of his project this coming Tuesday (see the bibliography above).

Svenonius, E. (1976). Metcalf and the principles of specific entry. In W. B. Rayward (Ed.), The Variety of Librarianship: Essays in Honour of John Wallace Metcalfe (pp. 171-189). Sandy Bay, Tas: Library Association of Australia.

Same as above. Recommended.

Web Ontology Language: OWL (ch. 4 of a soon-to-be published book on the Semantic Web from MIT Press, I believe. Handed out in class last week.)

For 590OD. Good stuff to know, to say the least. But it just feeds my beliefs that the Semantic Web will not save the world despite what Sir Tim and others might think. There is actually so little of importance that can be modeled using First Order Logic, or, should I say, there is so much more of importance than what can be modeled by FOL.

In fact, I believe they even blow one of their examples. I may have to go to class on Tuesday just to find out. Or else I’ll simply talk to Allen or Karen about it

The end approaches and Tuesday I spent preparing for it.

A few weeks ago I sent in a petition to the Grad College to move my “additional” 2 hours from my MS (42 vs. 40-required) to my CAS. That was approved last Friday (Feb 1st).

Seeing as I had 72 completed hours that put me at 32 for the CAS and as I’m doing (fingers and toes crossed!) my 8-hour paper this semester I applied for (another) May graduation (also 40-required hours).

I did finish my Bibliography class last month but it remains ungraded so I will have an additional 4-hours at the end after all.

I also have what I continue to think of as an Incomplete (4-hrs.) but it is actually an F now. That could be changed if I could turn something in but that is looking unlikely. It is the independent study I was working on last spring on Terminology Services.

I’m still immensely interested in many aspects of the topic but even though my advisor and I went into the semester thinking I could probably do something she could grade we agreed Tuesday that I best just focus on my CAS paper. So I also filed a petition to have the grade changed to a W for Withdrawn. It’ll remain on the transcript—Independent Study will be so illuminating—but have no effect on my GPA. Current impact? OMG!!

[Of course, it's all relative. As UIUC grads know, here an A- will reduce your GPA. I got one and it was deservedly so (last MS semester). So I had a 3.96 last graduation and now I have 3.76. Ouch!]

Don’t confront me with my failures.
I had not forgotten them.

Jackson Browne. These Days. For Everyman. [WorldCat]

I do actually have a terminologies idea but it is way too deep for a semester paper, especially if I’m actually trying to graduate ….

… and find a job. [I once ended up in the Army for quite awhile trying to avoid finding a job.]

As to the topic, I’m not even ready to talk about it here. I’ve put a couple of feelers out and I’m noticing bits here and there and trying my best to record them for now. My 1st coherent comments on the matter came in an IM conversation with my good buddy, Iris, who was so kind to “listen” as I tried to “say” something coherent. Thanks, Iris. All in all, all I have at the moment is one half of a hypothesis that seems pretty uncontroversial (but how it is fleshed out might well matter to some) and another half that is the vaguest hand waving in the direction of something that is hard to state even in skeletal form. To me it sounds like it couldn’t be the slightest bit controversial in skeletal form (but I know better). As to how it’d play if actually coherently fleshed out I cannot begin to say. But I sure as hell would like to.

I am pretty certain that what I am claiming is so. The question is whether or not the differences make a difference. Finding those differences will involve falling down a couple of rabbit holes once the descent of the current one begins to slow down.

Seems I now have a “research agenda” as a future academic librarian. I just need to find the job interview way of saying it. Luckily I am pretty much there now with the current one, which I foresee going on for a long time, at least the Integrationism bit.

Which brings us back to the Alpha. It seems that I am officially on the job market and looking for a job. There is no way that I can rely on staying here no matter how many people might tell me they want me to stay. All I can say is “Show me the job(s)” then. Cause I’d be happy to stay for the right job.

One of the problems with UIUC is the fact that we have an LIS school and a large academic library (40 some odd truthfully). Lots of folks stick around here for assorted reasons—townies all along, spouse still in grad school, …. Despite the size of our library there are not that many full-time openings available, nor do they tend to hire our own grads.

But one of the benefits of being large is we get lots of grants and there are all sorts of grant-funded Visiting Professorships in the library. There might also be hourly work available, but that means no benefits, which might be OK if you have an employed spouse. I really have little doubt that I could stay, at least for a while.

I have told my bosses (and others) that as much as I’d like to stay I certainly do not have to. I also have no need to take any job just to stay. Nor will I.

Personally, I think I could do the institution a lot of good if they kept me around. Not just for UIUC or the Library but for GSLIS, too. Just an opinion, mind you.

I can go anywhere, technically. I have no restraints. I’m pretty certain I don’t want to be in a major city, though. Nor do I want to be at a school with 400 students in the middle of nowhere.

Most of the above was written a couple days ago but I am having a hard time finishing this as I need to be careful. I don’t want to seemingly rule something out so that someone on a search committee can say, “That describes us so he doesn’t even want to be here!”

I am a long way from applying for any jobs that I don’t want (as best as I can tell from all sources short of visiting). In fact, I doubt I’ll get to that point. That behavior has never made sense to me.

Of course, telling what kind of job it really is based on a job ad/description is a crap shoot of the highest order.

So. I want an academic position; tenure is not important. I could take it or leave it. I will pursue continuing opportunities to learn about interesting things and to share that with others via formal and informal publishing whether or not I am required to do so.

I want to do cataloging/metadata work, preferably descriptive and classificatory work of resources more towards the individual end than in the aggregate. Vocabulary work and other forms of classificatory structures are also on the table.

Serials do not scare me. In fact, that is where most of my current experience lies, although I also do monographs now. I do not think I am ready to be an electronic resources librarian but I do hope to learn more of what I need to feel qualified, along with many other things that I am interested in but have little or no experience with yet.

Working with people who are interesting, hopefully fun, and who are actively engaged in helping each other learn their craft so as to provide better service to their patrons and to move the profession forward are all important. I am not out to save the world (20 years in the Army demonstrated the futility of that endeavor) but I do want to make it a better one.

Anyone knowing of anything they think I might be interested in is welcome to point me towards them.

Welcome new readers

On the 14th of Jan, Blake posted a story at LISNews, The LINews 10 Blogs To Read in 2008. My lowly little blog was included in that list. I have at least 29 new readers in Bloglines, which means, perhaps, 80-120 total new readers since then. Of course, the fact that the list was reproduced all over the blogosphere didn’t hurt either.

Now Blake’s recommendation is wonderful to me, but I wonder what people expect based on that description. It is accurate but such a small part of me, even the part shown here. Also note the methodology; I come recommended based on a sample of probably one, perhaps two if I flatter myself. [There's a tie-in in that previous link to the name of my first (public) blog, ...the thoughts are broken....]

So, welcome to everyone who has come this way via the list. Please check out the other folks, too.

Please feel free to comment, correct, say your piece, etc. I do not worry about whether or not you agree with me or how long your comments are. Sometimes substance requires several paragraphs.

I do moderate all first time comments, though, to cut down on spam. Links are allowed but at some number shortly after 1 your comment will get flagged as spam, which I’ll hopefully catch. I do try to address all comments, and try to do so in a fairly timely manner. But I do sometimes fail.

And you can always use the Contact Form to send me non-public comments, too [Scroll back up and use the Contact tab at center top].

Who am I?

I am finishing a Certificate of Advanced Study (CAS) in LIS at GSLIS, UIUC. I also did my Masters here just prior to this degree. Organization and access of information has been my area with a focus on classificatory structures. Some of my post-MLS classes include thesaurus construction, classification systems seminar, information modeling, humanities ontologies, Topic Maps, bibliography, and Python programming. [Full list of my 80 or so grad LIS hours is here.]

I have worked as a computer technician for the department, broadcast distance ed classes and assisted with classroom technology, both on campus and virtual, been a thesaurus maintainer, and most recently work as both the serials cataloging GA and as one of the monographic cataloging GAs.

As I hope to be done this May (my 3rd Mother’s Day graduation, hopefully) I am now on the job market. I am primarily looking for an academic job doing something related to cataloging, metadata, vocabulary work, etc. If you know of any feel free to send me a link.

I am also a “habitually probing generalist” as my tagline claims, but that may be causally based more on brain chemistry at an early age than by culturally-trained bent [Although I have assimilated much of the cultural quite well. I'm one hell of a manual citation tracking machine, for instance]. I get intensely interested in highly specific things on occasion. And in the process of diving in deep one finds so many things one did not know about. Some of that stuff is going to be highly interesting and itself lead off in other directions. What a deliciously dangerous vicious circle this is.

3rd blogging anniversary

Three years ago today …the thoughts are broken… debuted with “So, what is this about, and for?” I once had a “best posts” which I began to update quite a while back. Not a job I actually relish although I would like people to see the stuff I prefer for whatever reason I label it “best.”

Oh. Crap. That page is much older than I thought and all of the links are broken since it moved from the first blog to this one. Oh well, perhaps you can search titles if you are interested in some of my early stuff (1 Feb – 25 Oct 2005). Some day I may get that list updated but since I’m nearing 1000 posts [and taking into account other time constraints] it won’t be any time soon.

My first blog was hosted at TypePad. On 20 July 2006 Off the Mark debuted [It does include all of my previous posts at ...the thoughts are broken... but all internal links are broken]. This means I’ve been on LISHost and WordPress for more than half my online existence; that is, blogging existence and paying for hosting.

The name of my 1st blog came from a line in a Grateful Dead tune while this one was named by Richard Urban and Walt Crawford.

Since May 2006 I’ve been taking a fairly narrow path for a generalist; that is actively taking. Much of my time is taken up by this. [See this post and comments for some comments on the curse of being a generalist; and also of having an "actively wired" brain.] I am looking at what the Integrational theory of communication and language might mean for LIS if taken seriously. Thanks go to David Bade for starting me down this road.

So not an anniversary for this specific blog (although my friend, Iris, said last night that it’s the same blog with a new title. Perhaps.) but a blogging anniversary. Just to be clear.

Zotero, COinS, WorldCat, linking …

My blog has a plug-in that generates COinsS data so that OpenURL and COinS aware tools will recognize this data and do something contextual with it. For instance, Zotero (which I recommend highly) can import that data from the web page. If I click the icon [contextually variable] that shows up in my browser’s address bar the post metadata is imported: Post title, author, blog title, date of post, URL, and access date. And, no, I don’t have many of my own posts in Zotero. There are a few posts, though, that are being used in my bibliography and CAS paper so they are there.

But I also use Zotero to output COinS data to put in my posts when I cite a source, like in my weekly reading posts. And I do far more of it for print resources as it is easier and more reliable to get information in automatically. And if I can provide a resolvable URL for a web resource anyway then how important is the COinS data for them. Again, I do not have that many web-based resources in Zotero; comparatively.

I also try to link to WorldCat for stuff they have records for. By the way, they are providing data for the taking by Zotero also. A couple days ago I linked to a work record in LibraryThing that I had brought in from Oxford University being the only one in LibraryThing to have it (or claiming to have it). I got that data into Zotero from the LibraryThing work page which also gave me some data. I think, in this case anyway, that WorldCat would have been better.

So, as Blake said, I write about print stuff. I read a fair few books (mostly non-fiction) and lots of articles, to include photocopying a boatload of stuff not online. Most of it is LIS literature or related to issues in LIS.

Extraneous

Well now. I think it’s all been a bit extraneous and somehow self-indulgent so far.

My blog is both personal and professional. This state has been written about and commented on many times here and elsewhere. Consider the name of my first blog, …the thoughts are broken….

Here’s a few more lines for a bit of context:

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music
Would you hold it near as it were your own?

It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they’re better left unsung
I don’t know, don’t really care
Let there be songs to fill the air

Grateful Dead. “Ripple.” American Beauty.

This is the positive view of making best use of one’s broken thoughts. I’ve been listening to American Beauty since it came out and “Ripple” has always been one of my favorites and always deeply personally meaningful. That meaning has shifted and changed and grown over the years but it has always been positive.

The other side of broken thoughts though is know as fragmentation, depersonalization and moral minimalism. [See these posts perhaps. Actually, I do have an overview post of these issues less than a year old.]

Thus, the title of my 1st blog was both a warning to myself and a positive statement of how to make things better. Changing the name for my new blog had nothing to do with considering my thoughts to no longer be broken. That is a lifetime struggle based on the way our society is structured.

In the meantime, I try to keep my chin up and gently coax a few of those thoughts into being coherent and whole. As Robert Hunter wrote 38 years ago:

Let there be songs to fill the air.

Sunday, 20 Jan 2008

Hjørland, B., & Albrechtsen, H. (1995). Toward a New Horizon in Information Science: Domain-Analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 46, 400-425.

Re-read for bibliography.

Monday, 21 Jan 2008

Liddy, Elizabeth D. “Natural Language Processing for Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery.” In Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 1998. Visualizing Subject Access for 21st Century Information Resources. Eds. Pauline A Cochrane and Eric H Johnson. Champaign, IL: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [WorldCat]

Busch, Joseph A. “Building and Accessing Vocabulary Resources for Networked Resource Discovery and Navigation.” In Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 1998. Visualizing Subject Access for 21st Century Information Resources. Eds. Pauline A Cochrane and Eric H Johnson. Champaign, IL: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [WorldCat]

Fugmann, Robert. “Obstacles in Progress in Mechanized Subject Access and the Necessity of a Paradigm Change.” In Wheeler, William J, ed. 2000. Saving the Time of the Library User Through Subject Access Innovation: Papers in Honor of Pauline Atherton Cochrane. Champaign, IL: Publications Office, Graduate School of Library and Information Science. [WorldCat]

Only about halfway through; good so far, but somewhat difficult, and longer than the other 2 combined.

This and previous 2 for Subject Access and Subject Analysis seminar.

Tuesday, 22 Jan 2008

Finished reading Fugmann. What a torturous writing style; but some important things are said. Lots of contact with both Hjørland and Integrationism.

Several things for Ontologies [Sorry. Bring lazy here, or conserving my time. If you are interested in what we are reading early on for Ontologies I will send you a list.]

Wednesday – Thursday, 23-24 Jan 2008

Harris, Roy. 2005. The Semantics of Science. London: Continuum.

• Re-read ch. 4: Science in the kitchen

This chapter is about the connections (if any) between everyday discourse and scientific discourse. Discusses continuity theories (“… science has both feet on the terra firma of empiricism” 81) and discontinuity theories (“… sharp distinction between the language of science and non-scientific discourse” 81); these, of course, conflict. Reocentric semantics is the reason these integrational problems arise, as “[i]t is typical of reocentric semantics to conflate questions about meanings with putative descriptions of realia” (81-82).

Some of the assorted antagonists in this chapter include: Aristotle, Harré, Adam (Genesis), Medawar, Tarski, Wittgenstein, Whewell, Einstein, Carnap and Popper.

Friday – Saturday, 25 – 26 Jan 2008

Harris, Roy. 2005. The Semantics of Science. London: Continuum.

• Re-read ch. 5: The rhetoric of linguistic science

About the rhetorical topos of ‘linguistic science.’ Includes assorted linguists’ definitions of science. Discusses the “familiar haloes” of science and scientific of implied merit, reliability, and academic prestige.

Some of the assorted antagonists include: Müller, Vico, Osthoff and Brugmann, Saussure, Sapir, Bloomfield and Z. Harris.

Saturday, 26 Jan 2008

Harris, Roy, and International Association for the Integrational Study of Language and Communication. 2006. Integrationist Notes and Papers : 2003-2005. Crediton, Devon, England: Tree Tongue http://www.librarything.com/work/details/26156294 (Accessed January 26, 2008).
[more info here] [WorldCat]

I ordered this print-on-demand book from an English bookseller via abebooks.com. It contains 15 short position papers as essays. The link at “more info here” has the list of the chapters and one essay in the book online, as well as 3 more newer ones.

I adore the preface (blurb on the back only varies up to “The purpose …”):

Integrationist Notes and Papers began in 2003 as an occasional series of leaflets circulated to members of the International Association for the Integrational Study of Language and Communication. The purpose was to give a brief position statement or comment, from an integrationist perspective, on a variety of controversial issues, in order to provoke further discussion and to show that integrationism is not restricted to topics of interest solely to linguists. The word length of each item was determined by the size of an A4 sheet. The present publication reproduces the original texts, with minor corrections, in the order in which they appeared (7).

I’m guessing both sides of an A4 sheet since each is about 4 pages in this 22 cm. book, but perhaps one. Anyway, I think it’s an awesome idea. And not only since it is basically the sort of thing I need to do to see how Integrationism fits with LIS.

Read:

1. Communication: or How Jill Got Her Apple
2. English: How Not To Teach It
3. Texts and Contexts
4. On Indeterminacy
5. Time, Language and Angels

Well, it’s barely after 6 on Saturday but I’m going to post this anyway. Things to do later.

Officially, I am registered for one 8-hour “class” this semester, LIS593 CAS Project.

Individual study of a problem in library or information science; forms the culmination of the Certificate of Advanced Study program. Only 8 hours will apply to the CAS degree [catalog].

As to what I’m doing there pick pretty much any post from last year, but especially starting mid-May. Or, perhaps this is best?

More on this topic <patented hand-waving> in the future </ patented hand-waving>.

Besides working 60% which is beginning to seem like a lot again, I am sitting in on 2 seminars. There are several of us nuts in each of them and some folks actually taking the classes for grades.

Both are on Tuesday, which is my only non-work day, in the afternoon and at night. Both are on campus. I love my distance peeps but I am a bad LEEP student.

590SA Topics in Subject Access : Pauline Cochrane and Kathryn La Barre

An advanced topics seminar in subject access and subject analysis that covers a range of topics including aspects of the traditional bibliographic canon regarding OPACS, the challenge of universal subject access in a digital world, ongoing discussions about Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), new search and discovery tools (including experimentations with hybrid folksonomic and corporate taxonomic approaches (syllabus version). [catalog]

Pauline is emphasizing the duality between subject access and subject analysis, as she says there “is a split in focus in library science [specifically]; these two vantage points are our heritage.”

Early readings/assignments include reading 2 chapters from her festschrift (Wheeler). We’re reading Robert Fugmann, “Obstacles in Progress in Mechanized Subject Access and the Necessity of a Paradigm Change,” and our own Linda Smith’, “Subject Access in Interdisciplinary Research.” I’m not sure if I’ve read the Fugmann but the Smith is excellent. I’ve read it at least 3 times before.

There is another assignment that involves the Clinic book but I am not concerned with doing it.

Readings for next week are the 2 chapters of the festschrift I previously listed, and 2 from Visualizing …: Elizabeth D. Liddy’s “Natural Language Processing for Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery” and Joseph A Busch’s “Building and Accessing Vocabulary Resources for Networked Resource Discovery and Navigation.”

Wheeler, William J, ed. 2000. Saving the Time of the Library User Through Subject Access Innovation: Papers in Honor of Pauline Atherton Cochrane. Champaign, IL: Publications Office, Graduate School of Library and Information Science. [WorldCat]

Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 1998. Visualizing Subject Access for 21st Century Information Resources. Eds. Pauline A Cochrane and Eric H Johnson. Champaign, IL: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [WorldCat]

We also are reading an unpublished paper (1979) of Pauline’s on universal subject access and advising her on its suitability for publication today as a means to think about these issues and, I would add, historically and contemporarily.

590OD Ontology Development : Allen Renear

An introduction to formal ontology focusing on development and implementation issues and contemporary ontology software tools and languages. In spring of 2008 we will use as example ontologies one for museum and heritage information (CIDOC-CRM) and one for biological information (the Functional Model of Anatomy). Students may also do projects on other ontologies in other areas if they wish. The ontology editor Protege will be used throughout and the representation of ontologies in W3C semantic web languages RDF(S) and OWL will be emphasized. [catalog]

This is an odd class for Allen as it involves a hands-on component using Protégé to view, edit, build ontologies. Protégé is a free, open-source ontology editor.

Some of the topics we will be becoming “familiar” with are RDF and OWL, which I certainly need more knowledge of.

Related miscellanea

On a side note, I’m thinking of taking the TEI workshop again later in Feb. I did it 2 years ago on my birthday weekend. The then draft P5 version was formalized this past year so it can’t hurt to have a look again over a weekend.

While in one sense, these classes are completely extraneous to me, although in a larger sense they are important. Luckily I’ll have the flexibility to commit any level of effort, including none, to them. I foresee far more than none most of the time, though. Time will tell.

Technically, I still have an incomplete for my vocabularies independent study from last spring. Four hours. In truth, those 4 hours along with those from Bibliography will be extra hours when completed. This needs to be cleaned up as it has finally turned to an F. There is also the possibility of having it dropped, or more likely changed to Withdrawal.

I am hoping that one of these 2 classes will inspire me to spit out “a school assignment” somehow on the topic of vocabularies that I can turn in to be graded. I’d still really like to do what I had planned all along, but it will not happen, now.

Somehow it seems likely one or both will generate a topic. But will it be one that I can just generate something from? Something of quality, of course. But. Normal-sized.

Sunday, Oct 21

Who Is Tagging Information? – Edward C. Lomax (Georgia State U), Hsin-liang “Oliver” Chen (U of MO-Columbia), and June Abbas (SUNY-Buffalo).

Lomax spoke about Social Tagging in K-12 Education; Chen spoke about Social Tagging and Newspapers; Abbas spoke about Tagging and Libraries and Museums.

The panel was down two members so that had some impact on the program.

I’m not going to get into details as I took few notes but despite June’s best efforts this panel was only the first of several that really left me depressed about this portion of my field. I later had a conversation with June (and have had a few on other occasions) and I know she gets it. But what the heck is most everyone else’s problem(s)?

There are fundamental issues with tagging (as with anything else) in libraries and, in particular, as a means of access and retrieval. But these can be dealt with. Anyone who reads me regularly well knows that I am quick to play devil’s advocate and ask the tough questions while all the cool kids are espousing how great something is. But good God! Can we please move forward with some real research in this area? I most certainly do not mean to disparage June’s or Margaret Kipp’s (and a very few others) here. They are doing good work, but can we please support them?

My conference roommate was also quite disturbed by the state of research in this area and it was having a serious impact on his view of his first ASIS&T. When he questioned me as to why this was it sounded like he was putting much of the blame on the researchers. But this is not the case at all. Tag researchers in no way control the systems (OPAC, tag systems,etc.) that (may) implement these tools. Let’s hope PennTags is doing something useful with their data; even better would be if they’ll share that data with outside researchers.

Another big issue in this equation is that large-scale, easily implementable tag systems are fairly new. Certainly far newer than the 10 years of research in tagging.

Here are only some of the disparate reasons why my roommate and I are so depressed about this:

Much is based on audience reaction(s): complete misunderstanding of tagging and/or how it even works [researchers have to give demonstrations of how tagging works in a session before presenting their research or the audience will be completely lost]; what about Internet predators?; do tags need to be vetted?; what about bad words?; are we just going to throw out privacy?; we can’t have the public adding things to our records, ….

In some cases it is the presenters themselves who are not really prepared to investigate such a multiply complex topic that they have happened to find interesting. One of the presenters in this session offered Amazon.com as the gold standard of tagging sites. Excuse me? There were several other non-starters offered up by two of the panelists but perhaps in the sake of mental health I have repressed them.

Yes, there are serious issues to be addressed in this area. I do not mean to make light of them. But if we cannot move further quickly now that we have systems that will allow us to do some real and useful research then we are failing ourselves and, more importantly, users.

Can someone please provide funding and access to a quality system to folks like June Abbas and Margaret Kipp?

Theoretical/Methodological Exploration (Papers)

Megan A. Winget (UTA) – “A Methodology and Model for Studying Boundary Objects, Annotations and Collaborative Practices: Musicians and Musical Scores.”

Jason M. Turner (Air Force Inst. of Tech.) – “Towards a Social Affordances Perspective of Media Capabilities and Interface Design.”

Miles Efron (UTA) – “What Crossword Puzzles Teach Us About Information.”

Upfront admission, I went to this session primarily based on the crossword paper. Boy, was I ever surprised!

I may not be a musician but Winget’s presentation was fascinating! I look forward to reading the whole thing. She looked at score annotations across amateur, semi-pro, and professional musicians in chamber group and orchestra settings. Annotations are almost always fascinating and this area was especially so.

As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the few must reads from the sessions I attended. Get your hands on the proceedings and read this one.

Efron on crossword puzzles was, for me, a big disappointment. As far as I’m concerned his title is a complete misnomer and a big unanswered and unaddressed question.

He took a mathematical approach to determining the difficulty level of the weekday New York Times crossword puzzles. As you may know, the difficulty level of the NYT puzzle (generally) increases from Monday to Saturday. The puzzle editor is the one to determine which puzzles are printed on which days. This work is an attempt to formalize that determination.

On one hand, it is kind of interesting and it works reasonably well. He also made sure to restrict his claims to being able to determine the difficulty level of a puzzle as to which day of the week it should be offered on and not as to the difficulty level of a specific puzzle for any individual puzzle solver. Kudos for that! Nonetheless, it really doesn’t seem to teach us anything about information and, more importantly, this sort of mathematical approach to word play is an anathema to me and many other word lovers. Color me mostly disappointed in this one.

Dinner at The King and I (Thai) with Karen, Wei and Gina (fellow UIUC students).

Welcome Reception/SIG Rush.

Monday, 22 Oct

Assuring Quality in the Information Professions – Nancy Roderer (moderator), Ann Prentiss (for José-Marie Griffiths), Charles Henry (CLIR), and Libby Trudell (Dialog)

Prentiss presented some early results from a 2006 IMLS study for Griffiths who could not be there at the last moment. Due to this we couldn’t get much beyond the slide content and it is early results. There may be something interesting to come out of this study, and I hope there will be, but not so much yet.

Henry as the President of CLIR had some interesting things to say.

Context: higher education, specifically the profound changes in HE, and the continual redefinement of libraries in HE

1 Rise of cyberinfrastructure – 3 major reports recently on the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are all in agreement

• technical layer
• software
• new kinds of expertise [these 3 are the definition of cyberinfrastructure]

leads to new research methods and new intellectual strategies [CLIR is more interested in these, along with the incredible collaboration that arises (from Q&A)]

2 Rise of new disciplines

3 Rise of undergraduate research

4 New models of scholarly publishing – books and articles less and less as growth of knowledge, more and more as accreditation

Trudell (Senior VP at Dialog and on SLA Board of Directors)

Context: Information industry and the role of info pros in business

Roles:

• Service supply side: large number of roles
• Product development end: design, QA, editorial, product documentation
• Senior management roles

Professional competencies across this broader perspective:

• core competencies
• people skills
• business savvy
• strategic perspective
• attitudes – assertiveness, proactiveness, flexibility, driver for change

Spectrum – varies by role

technical vs. content

knowledge of particular target area, e.g., pharma, …

Person should have an interest in a wide variety of ways info can contribute to success of the organization.

How can industry contribute?

• expand core curriculum
• partner in creative ways
• professional organizations, continuing certification, advocate for values of profession

What is role of service provider?

• on-going education and training: product/content, “Quantum program”/leadership development
• provide support for prof. orgs./library schools to do their jobs

Key is vendor participation in prof. orgs., not just as vendor display & funding, but as colleagues, and investment in education.

Q&A

Archivists and info managers are much more embedded in orgs. than libraries.

What about the downsides?

• HE doesn’t study itself closely. Info pros see these changes more clearly. Thus, we have an opportunity to lead. Onus is on us to do so.

Plenary: Anthea Stratigos, Outsell, Inc.

I took a few notes that I am not going to reproduce. This was highly disappointing on so many levels. ASIS&T is full of corporate and business types along with academics and practicing professionals, but I resent being sold a message of the market economy, which is all this boiled down to!

She really rubbed some of us the wrong way when she started off the section on the Library Environment with a slide with a picture of a card catalog and the caption, “It Used to be Simple.” While there is some truth to what she was trying to get at there are much better ways to get at that truth visually. There simply is nothing simple about the card catalog as a technology and/or information environment! While I am well aware that many of my colleagues think there was, it only goes to show their lack of education and understanding of history and systems.

I was so proud of Karen for going up during the Q&A and correcting Ms. Stratigos on this point. Oh, one should know that Karen is highly mathematical and her research focuses on the application of logic in our field. Way to represent, Karen!

One of her main claims is that libraries are not keeping up and/or moving fast enough. Of course, this claim was across libraries broadly. Enough said.

Under What Does this All Mean? we get the claim that all of this is “creating a permanent shift in consumer habits.” Sorry, Ms. Stratigos, but there is nothing permanent about this shift (these shifts, would be truer, also)! Shifts have happened before and will happen again. Shift may be permanent, but this shift is certainly not.

Under A New Order Emerges we get the shift from product-centric to market-centric. We also get Information as Entertainment and Entertainment as Information (ala Richard Saul Wurman). As something to celebrate. Perhaps I ought to learn to play the fiddle at this point?

Essential Actions gets summarized in the statement, “Be a digital marketer delivering a digital experience.” Um, no thank you.

So, yes, a marketing talk delivered by a marketer.

Lunch at the mall with Christina Pikas.

Poster Session II

Most interesting to me:

How Incorrect Information Delivers Correct Search Results: A Pragmatic Analysis of Queries. Jin Ha Lee and Allen Renear (UIUC)

What Exactly Is an Item in the Digital World? Ingbert R. Floyd and Allen Renear (UIUC). How often do you find research with two different views presented?

Tag Decay: A View into Aging Folksonomies. Terrell Russell (UNC-CH)

Tagging the Tags … Process, Observations and Analysis of Conversations in Metatagging at an ASIS&T Interactive Poster Session. Jennifer E. Graham and June M. Abbas. (SUNY-Buffalo). This was an initial follow-up to their amazing poster at last years ASIS&T. [Photo from about the mid-point.] Great stuff!

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) Standards – Marcia Zeng (Kent State U), Margie Hlava (Access Innovations), Jian Qin (Syracuse U), Gail Hodge (Information International Associates), and Denise Bedford (World Bank Group)

Zeng covered some of the work that the ASIS&T Standards Committee did this past year [I am a member of this committee].

Hlava covered KOS standards, focusing primarily on the US and British controlled vocabulary standards.

Qin covered Encoding KOS: Languages for Machine Understanding and Processing.

Hodge covered KOS in the Government Environment: From Traditional Thesauri to Standards Integration.

“Agencies are interested in how better management of semantics can improve organization and access.” This quote makes me smile (as long as I ignore a literal parsing of “management of semantics”).

Bedford discussed Popularization and Use of Standards at World Bank. This was real-world usage on a vast scale across many languages. Fascinating stuff. My jaw about hit the floor when she said they use MultiTES! Primarily due to its reporting capabilities. Now MultiTES is just one small part of a very complex system, but still ….

I was also quite impressed when she said that recently one group within WB wanted to add an area to the system. Something like 91,000 terms reduced to under 15,000 and properly related in something like 2 weeks! Clearly she has better systems and more people than when I was doing real-world thesaural work, but I still find that amazing.

Standards Committee meeting

Dinner at The King and I with Edward Corrado, Heather Pfeiffer, Emma Tonkin, Margaret Kipp and Qiping Zhang.

Tuesday and Wednesday to follow

… the wrong thing at the right time, or, perhaps, can it just be there are too many right things to do at overlapping right times?

I know I haven’t fully explicated my bibliography topic yet but a potential change has arisen already. This change is both negative and beneficial; as most changes are. [And as many who ardently advocate for change seem too often to ignore.]

I have chosen a “topic” of immense interest to me which will also allow me to pursue it (reading sequence, primarily) in a fundamentally different way. The topic is (much of) the work of one specific author who writes in areas of immense interest and importance to me. They often write about the larger issues, or at least situate their thoughts in context with the larger issues, argue for making our epistemologies (and assumptions) explicit, and argue for an explicit epistemological basis which I am clearly drawn to.

This person is also going to be visiting GSLIS in the near future and will also be at ASIS&T Annual. This will provide me several opportunities to talk with them. And while at ASIS&T I will also be able to speak with some of the other folks with whom my author has been engaged with in their own slice of “the grand discussion.”

I have spent quite a few hours and a score or two of $$ collecting, adding to Zotero, and printing the fairly sizeable output of my author, along with beginning my reading program “from the beginning,” as one might say.

Sounds just about perfect, doesn’t it? What could possibly be wrong?

Well, I am a CAS student, which means I have to do an 8 semester hour “project” as a capstone to my degree. I had always been hoping to do something a tad (or lot) more projecty than a large paper. The large paper was always, of course, a fall back since one of those is always imminently doable.

The final eight hours are the CAS project, a substantive investigation of a problem in librarianship or information science, which is followed by a final oral examination [from the CAS program description].

When I first signed up for Bibliography this fall several months back I was hoping to know what my project was going to be so I could work on my lit review, in particular. I began the semester without a project topic (as I was fully afraid that I might).

As many of you know—from my reading lists and otherwise—I maintain several deep interests at the same time. I imagine many of you do, too. That is one of the stereotypical traits of librarians that gets far less airplay than, say, love of cats.

Back in May or so, David Bade turned me on to the Oxford linguist/philosopher Roy Harris. [Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, David!] I have since read 6 of his books and am currently reading a 7th. I also have 4 more sitting at home. I have recently ordered 3 others from Amazon (2 have arrived).

Harris is a leading figure in integrational linguistics or, simply, Integrationism.

While I have some recorded stabs at thesis or problem statements [that I'm not ready to share], it ought [it seems to me] to be abundantly clear to everyone that everything we do in libraries, librarianship, and/or information science is based upon the use of language. I have so far found no way in which to take this as completely uncontroversial.

In some ways, though, it may not be entirely self-evident. On this point, I am a bit divided. I cannot personally see how it could not be self-evident, but I am unsure whether that is the case for everyone [in LIS].

Subject description and assignment, indexing, thesauri and ontologies (controlled vocabularies of all types), information retrieval (of any kind), librarian as intermediary/gatekeeper, relevance, user query statements, query expansion, …. Really, is there anything we do which is not based upon the use of language?

Honestly, that question is a little naïve. The same could be asked about lots of arenas of life. But considering how vastly broad the domain of LIS is—both theory and practice—I can think of nothing so completely dependent on language.

So the question now becomes, “What is the LIS view(s) of language?” Once we admit to the radical dependency upon language for a field involved in the use of recorded data/information/knowledge this seems a fairly basic question. Have any of you ever asked it?

On the [what I consider to an extremely off-] chance that you’ve ever asked it of yourself, did you ever try to get outside the “metalinguistic framework” of the educated Westerner (or of orthodox linguistics, which is founded on the same)? Did you even try to try to answer it based simply on your supposedly naïve sense of being a lay user of language? Probably not, to either of those questions.

The integrational critique has serious implications for our discipline. Deeply fundamental implications. If I thought I was the person to even begin to address them I would petition to change to the Ph.D. program immediately. Unfortunately [in this case], I am not even remotely as bright as some of my friends seem to think. If I was then perhaps I could actually produce a dissertation that was one of the rare few that actually adds to scholarship. I would so love to be able to do so. But, it is not to be. I am simply not this bright.

I can easily see how wedded our field is to orthodox linguistics, I can easily find examples across every aspect of our field to show this is the case, I can (soon) produce a good overview of the integrational critique of orthodox linguistics, I can see many of the implications this critique holds for our field.

Unfortunately, I cannot see them to the depth to which they truly go. Nor can I yet even begin to see what choice we have but to act as if orthodox linguistics is “correct” in our actual practice. And while I do think this admission is a start, as it implies that we’ve acknowledged the issue of reliance on a completely bankrupt theory of language, I do not particularly want to argue for a [further?] separation of our theory from practice.

I want to be able to “see” what a full embrace of integrationism might mean for the theory and practice of LIS! And without other people paving much of the way I am simply not that person. I certainly do not know all of my limits but this is one of them.

Based on my applying for jobs before I was particularly ready to [I'd prefer to be done with this degree] the question of how exactly I would finish my CAS [time frame, mostly] arose. I have a total of 5 years [started May 2006] so the 8 hr. project could be done over an extended period. Over the last few months as this issue arose in my mind—and I read more and more Harris books—I came to think that maybe it could be addressed if I took the longer route inherent in starting a job before completion. I thought that I couldn’t possibly do it in a semester. But after my talk with my advisor the other day I have decided that, yes, I can.

So. Perhaps I have my CAS project topic.

Without going into any more detail [I hadn't intended to. Yet.] it seems to me that I ought to switch my bibliography topic to Integrationism and Harris in particular.

What to do? What to do?

I imagine that I will still be really interested in my first topic for quite a while. I even think that if there is a way to “harmonize” integrationism and LIS then this author’s views are the (currently) only beginnings.

If I change my topic then I will certainly still be able to engage with my author while visiting us (as I had fully intended before I chose the topic anyway!) and at ASIS&T. My questions will just take a broader focus than before. While the $ spent on printing would become a currently “unnecessary” expense I really have no problems with it. It is all in binders in (primarily) chronological order and will be easily accessible in the future. At hand, so to speak.

Long and perhaps rambling. But maybe now you see the context for the opening questions. It seems to be another case of too many right things to do at overlapping right times.

How is one to do the right thing at the right time when they conflict with what is actually doable?

Sure. I could put off the reading of more Harris until after the semester. Except for it isn’t happening that way. Or I could just keep on with my pleasure reading of Harris and put the more serious considerations off for spring. But unlike my current author, Harris has written both a ton of articles and a ton of books. I really need to be paying better (i.e. explicit, notated) attention to where I see connections between Harris and LIS.

What am I to do? It’s not too late but a decision needs to be made.

This morning I read a post at Nicole Engard’s blog, What I Learned Today…, about a Library Camp session. The post is titled “Library Camp – Weinberger & Cataloging.”

Before I begin, I want to make explicit that I am not picking on Nicole, the participants in this session, or anyone in particular. I may well use a few straw man arguments. I am not claiming that anyone is making these specific arguments, or that they might not nuance things a bit more if pressed.

My concern, though, is that they are making assumptions about language, language use, human behavior, and transferable benefits for which they have nothing but anecdotal evidence. By allowing these (usually) unstated assumptions to stand, they are, at best, collapsing some very important distinctions and, at worst, are, in effect, making the arguments I am suggesting.

This is one of those things that has been niggling away at me for a while which I have been unable to formulate coherently. Again, I am not claiming that anyone is overtly making these arguments; only that they are assuming too much. Nicole’s post and some of those cited in it are only “guilty” of helping me finally sort out my thinking some on this. There is much of value reported in Nicole’s post and it sounds like it was an interesting discussion. Thank you, Nicole.

I want to state from the start that I am for tagging. I tag. In many places. For several reasons. I am not advocating an either/or position. I want formal cataloging for resources that require that level (I should say, those levels) of description, and I want tagging for pretty much all resources.

A few quotes in particular that are useful to my concerns:

• - Our users don’t think in subject headings (Kate)
• - People tag for personal reasons – allowing them to build meaningful collections for themselves. (John Blyberg)
• - Will patrons really come in and tag items? The power users who are passionate about something will come in and tag. Those casual users may not be tagging, but they’re benefiting from the tags. While it’s just power users tagging – they’re still not librarians – they’ll use the lingo that most people understand – the tags are not just geared toward them like subject headings are just understandable by librarians.

Minor issues first:

I am fairly certain that the vast majority of catalogers do not think in subject headings, either. The same holds for most librarians. Are we more adept in using them than the typical patron? Certainly. Can we employ them—perhaps even, “think in them”—when it is a good tactic for us to do so? Certainly.

Actually, this statement is so removed from the context in which it was uttered that I probably shouldn’t say anything. But my point—admittedly purely anecdotal—is that likely no one “thinks” in subject headings. We think about subject headings, when and as appropriate. And maybe (most?) of our users do not. Maybe the distinction that I am trying to draw is “pure semantics” in some folks’ book. OK. I am talking about meaning; I’m perfectly happy with it being a semantic distinction.

Based on some of the research that is beginning to come out (E.g., M. Kipp, J. Abbas), and on anecdote, people tag for a variety of reasons. Some of these are personal and some are social. I am overjoyed to see the realization that tagging is not only social as many seemed to think initially. But let’s please not go too far the other direction. There are multiple reasons that people tag, and they are not all personal. Various reasons are often employed synchronously and they will often be hard to pull apart. Again, this is minor.

My major concerns are about the assumptions contained in the last quoted bullet point.

(Some of the) Assumptions:

• Librarians and all others constitute some sort of natural and distinct classes.
• Librarians are of a different language use community than others.
• Powers users/taggers and casual users are of the same language use community.
• Non-tagging users benefit from the tagging of others.
• Non-tagging users (and power users) do not benefit from traditional subject cataloging.
• Subject headings are understandable only by librarians. (Explicitly stated here.)

Keep in mind that I am critiquing many “arguments” that I have seen along these lines. I am sure that I have failed to extrapolate a few from this example and that—if I wasn’t too lazy to go find them—I could obtain more assumptions from other examples. I’m fairly sure that we’ve all seen a few examples like this one, though. [And I am generally using the language used in the post. I do not necessarily equate power users with taggers.]

I do not think that any of these assumptions can stand without real empirical data. I am more than willing to accept that (some) non-tagging users benefit from the tagging of others, but only if folks are also willing to accept that (some) users also benefit from traditional subject cataloging. The amount(s) and type(s) of benefit from each and for certain users in specific contexts is certainly an open empirical question, or set of questions more likely.

But my concern is the unstated AND between those two assumptions as I listed them.

As for the assumption (outright statement in this example) that subject headings are understandable only by librarians … well, that is simply ludicrous

Yes. There are certainly problems with various forms of subject headings, although I imagine the main issue is with LCSH. You will not find me doing a lot of defense of LCSH in its current instantiation. You will find me defending using controlled vocabularies (and other means) as appropriate for subject indexing. LCSH has many problems, as will any controlled vocabulary, especially one attempting to cover such a broad spectrum of topics. But uncontrolled vocabularies also have problems. They generally have other problems, which is one reason why we need both.

But to say that only librarians understand subject headings goes completely against the experiences of many library users of the last 100 years! Yes, they can be difficult. Especially in this day and age when we are all agreeing that people only want to dump one or two keywords into Google and be done.

But see. I don’t agree with that. And if I could learn to use the card catalog at the age of 5 then so can others who are not librarians. And please do not tell me that I must have used the Author file because you would generally be wrong. I was 5 years old! How familiar could I have been with “the literature.” Perhaps I could look up Syd Hoff, Dr. Seuss (See …), and a few others, but they certainly did not exhaust the topics I was interested in. Yes, topics. Displayed (and searched!) in a card catalog by subject headings and subject strings. No keyword searching allowed. So I must have “understood” subject headings, or at least how they worked. As do many others!

As for this binary division of the language community:

First off, to assume that there is one homogeneous community of language use within librarianship is simply laughable. Many of my good librarian friends and I would do better talking about TV shows (which I do not watch) than trying to communicate about our respective areas of librarianship. There are many communities of language use within librarianship!

By the way, please do not assume that I would be happy with a division of librarianship into catalogers and others. I would not! Take a 5-minute glance at AUTOCATs recent archives, for example, to see how vastly many communities there are even within catalogers. We are not all the same either!

To assume that there is a division of language use between librarians and all others is also fairly laughable. Two primary reasons. First, see two paragraphs above. Second, we ARE the others. We all belong to many different communities of interest and practice. We all belong to multiple language communities.

Yes. I fully realize that there seems to be some sort of difference between librarians and users. Call it professionalization or something else. We do—sometimes—speak differently. Just as I would speak differently if I was to discuss role-playing games than would someone who does not. There are good reasons for this. And, yes, it often gets in the way. But I am more than willing to totally ignore this with anyone who is willing to assume that this difference is greater than any of the other language differences between ourselves, our users, and our users and us.

Even if, and especially if, you disagree with me about the importance and location of these differences in language use then the burden is on you to show that the power user/tagger and casual user (non-tagging tag user) are in the same language use community. In fact, I maintain that this is one of the most critical points that needs to be shown by research in tagging.

Language in use (overt behavior) is pretty much all we have to go on regarding the study of people’s use of language. It seems pretty clear to me that the null hypothesis in this situation ought to be that these are (at least) two different language using communities based on the overt display of their use of language.

Taggers tag. They apply language to describe and otherwise label information resources. Whatever kind(s) of analysis employed, whatever reason(s) they do so, whatever benefit(s) they perceive for themselves or others … they use language to assign, attribute, credit, impute, associate, link, relate, classify, et. al. things with words. (These words may well be concepts, but that is a whole ‘nuther ball game.)

Non-tagging users of others’ tags do none of that. They use the labels, categories, links, etc. that others have assigned. No matter whether they use others’ tag or others’ formal subject analysis they are using decontextualized language. I would argue, though, that use of tagging (by others) is more decontextualized than, say, LCSH.*

This seems to me to be two vastly different (overt, demonstrated) ways of using language. On what basis can we even begin to say that they are the same (“they’re still not librarians – they’ll use the lingo that most people understand”) language using community? Please. Can anyone actually support this contention?

Also. Many taggers are librarians. I have no idea what percentage of taggers are librarians, nor do I have any idea what percentage of librarians are taggers. But until someone who wants to make these assumptions that I am critiquing proves otherwise, I am going to assume that the percentage of librarians who tag is higher than that of taggers in the general population.

Some of us taggers are even catalogers. You know, those people who think in subject headings. This seems to me to put those folks (me, for instance) in the same language using community as the taggers, but not that of the non-taggers. “Dang, what happened to my black and white divisions?,” you should be asking about now.

My point is not that there is nothing at all valid in these assumptions. There may well be, and probably is. But they are also highly flawed, and when they remain unstated and more importantly, unquestioned, they are dangerous. They blind us towards other ways of looking at the situation because we have already (unquestioningly) assumed that the situation is some way it may not, in fact, be. They are, to put it simply, simplistic.

The main point is that the world is not this simple. You cannot simply divide it into “us and them.” Language use, religious belief, sexual preference, whatever. Binary divisions rarely exist, except as unquestioned beliefs in individual minds.

• All librarians do not speak the same language.
• Nor are those languages always and completely different than that of users.
• I maintain that anyone making the assumption that taggers and non-tagging tag users are of the same language community while librarians are not is making a major mistake.
• People tag for lots of reasons. Some are personal, some are social. Pulling these apart will be hard, and often impossible.
• I am not arguing for a solipsistic view of language. I believe that we generally do manage to communicate. But whether you call them communities, sub-communities, jargons, argots, or whatever, we all belong to multiple language use communities.

So can we please stop with all the anecdotes and, in particular, those founded on faulty assumptions? A simple perusal of an article such as “Folksonomies: Tidying Up Tags?” by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin ought to persuade anyone that even considering the power users/taggers as a single, coherent language community is a non-starter.

Again, I’d like to thank Nicole and those she cited for helping me clarify my thinking.

* This is due to the fact that—with a little work—some context can be retrieved from working with a group of resources that have been assigned LCSH. Some tagging systems also allow for some retrieval of context with a bit of work, but many do not. This could change as our systems—both formal and informal—evolve. My point is simply that none of this is simple.