Archive for the “Future of Bibliographic Control” Category

In a short post on his web log yesterday, Lorcan Dempsey remarked on how few discussions on bibliographic data and cataloging contain any appeals to evidence, especially on matters of cost and value.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking for exactly the same material lately, and my experience of CSI:LIS has been equally frustrating.

The most useful articles on estimating a value for a bibliographic record I’ve found so far were [Mat00] and [Mat01]. Even these articles used a model of value that I’m not entirely comfortable with – I was looking for a more marginal approach that could be used to estimate the economic effect of rule changes in terms of deltas to recall, precision, and cost of indexing.

I asked Don King if he could suggest any recent papers on the topic, and he looked sad too.

In other areas of the disciple there does seem to be more support for the practice of Evidence Based Librarianship (EBL); indeed the field now has its own journal – Evidence Based Library and Information Practice [EBLIP].

There is also an annual conference (called unimaginatively The International Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference). The 4th conference in the series was hosted by UNC Chapel Hill this past May; the conference web site and full papers are available at http://www.eblip4.unc.edu/. The next conference is not scheduled until 2009.

There is an EBL wiki at http://eblibrarianship.pbwiki.com.

Despite it’s genesis from the field of Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), EBL has yet to spawn its own musical genre. Would Front 245 be a good band name?

Simon

[EBLIP] Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, available at http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP
[Mat00] Joe Matthews, The value of information in library catalogs., Information Outlook 4 (2000), 18.
[Mat01] _____, The value of information: The case of the library catalog., Technical Services Quarterly, 19 (2001), no. 2, 1–16.

Comments No Comments »

Treat headings as concepts, not strings

  1. Treating the authorized form of a heading as just one kind of label for a concept allows for the use of other kinds of labels without requiring any changes to bibliographic records.
  2. Translations of the headings into foreign languages allows non-native English speakers to browse more easily.
  3. Bermanization of the headings into regular English allows native speakers to do likewise.

Improve the syndetic structure of the headings

  1. Assign broader terms to all non top-level terms.
  2. Convert BT references that do not correspond to genuine broader terms to plain RT. Where such a change would leave a term orphaned, add a broader reference to a true parent.
  3. Support more types of semantic relationships between terms.

Establish name-like headings using name-like procedures

  1. It is far more expensive to establish entries as Subjects than it is to add entries that are Names.
  2. Names can be established without direct LC intervention, whereas subjects require much more centralizedevaluation.
  3. Examples of name-like headings include(a) Fictitious characters.(b) Famous animals.(c) Models of calculators.

Establish patterns, rather than instances of patterns

  1. Creating explicit patterns in a machine processable form can greatly reduce the number of headings that need to be separately established.
  2. Common relationships implied by patterns can be automatically inferred, rather than having to be explicitly enumerated in each case- thus avoiding many inconsistencies in the current headings.
  3. As the syndetic structure of the headings is repaired, constraints upon the types of concepts to which patterns can be applied can automatically be enforced, and implicit patterns embedded in currently established headings detected.

Separate out domain specific vocabularies

  1. If domain specific vocabularies are separated from the general headings, their administration can be distributed to other committees or bodies.
  2. By delegating these vocabularies to domain experts, the headings can be made more specific and better adapted to the needs of communities of practice.
  3. As the syndetic structure is repaired, delegated vocabularies can be anchored to specified broader terms within the general headings, allowing systems that only wish to deal with such general headings to collapse the delegated subtrees to the anchoring term.

Create a wiki-like system for heading maintenance

  1. A social approach to heading maintenance enables a distributed approach to building relationships between terms.
  2. By simplifying the creation of new headings, such a system can encourage the use of specific, narrow headings.
  3. As long as these proposed headings are linked to established broader terms, they can be treated by systems only wishing to deal with established terms as if they were the broader terms.
  4. If subject headings are stored as links, rather than strings, rejected headings can be converted to those which achieve currency.
  5. Any social system for headings must track the provenance of proposed headings, and clearly distinguish between established and non-established terms.

Comments Comments Off

Support standards that scale beyond the catalog

  1. Move away from library-specific formats.
  2. Move towards general standards, such as Dublin Core, CIDOC, RDF, SKOS, and OWL.
  3. Design standards to allow ordinary people to create basic records for web sites, articles, etc.
  4. Specify standards in a modular fashion, so that intricacies that only apply to specialized formats such as sheet music do not complicate the description of simpler items, such as novels.

Develop tools to support metadata creation

  1. Automate as much of the task of metadata creation as possible, allowing humans to concentrate on tasks that require deeper semantic understanding.
  2. Develop tools to assist naive users to create valid records.
  3. Develop tools to assist expert users to create better records faster.
  4. Develop algorithmic and heuristic validation routines for as all metadata fields.
  5. Whenever possible, check data against authority files automatically.

Support linked and networked bibliographic data

  1. Support incremental change records.
  2. Maintain references to authorized fields as links rather than strings.
  3. Support multi-leveled compound works, and generalized work clusters.

Comments Comments Off

Support open access to bibliographic data

  1. Bibliographic data are “mere facts”, and thus cannot be copyrighted within the United States.
  2. No financial model predicated on ownership of such records is sustainable.
  3. Claiming ownership of bibliographic records removes them from the realm of the social.
  4. Providing open access to catalog and authority records will encourage their use on the wider Internet.
  5. The Library of Congress is required to charge for its cataloging distribution on a cost recovery basis, even though this cost model is not efficient and harmful to the Library’s larger mission.
  6. Congress should permit the Library to distribute bibliographic records free of charge.

Open cataloging is social cataloging

  1. Under current models of shared cataloging, fees are paid to download copies of individual records.
  2. When errors are detected in these downloaded records, they are typically corrected in the local system only.
  3. Because a fee has been paid to access these records, there is no social obligation felt to contribute corrections back to the source.
  4. Locally changed records are much more expensive to maintain than those which are retained unchanged.
  5. Just as the open source model allows ordinary users to fix and enhance the software they use, open cataloging allows changes to be contributed back to the community, improving the quality of records for all.
  6. Because open cataloging takes place in a social environment, social conventions can be used to solicit improvements in existing records.
  7. As an example, a social catalog can periodically ask a user who is requesting a record, and who has the described item in hand, to cross-check a few select fields.

Metadata should be created at the most appropriate point in the life of its data

  1. Records for books should be created by publishers.
  2. Records for journals should be created by the sponsors.
  3. Records for articles should be created by authors and their institutions.Name authority records should be created as early in an author’s career as possible, for example, on publication of their first article in a peer-reviewed journal.
  4. Authors should be able to update their own authority records.

Comments Comments Off

  1. The purpose of cataloguing is to guide a reader to his book.
  2. Any aspect of cataloguing that does not support this task is superfluous.
  3. Any aspect of cataloguing that inhibits this task is harmful.
  4. A catalogue is a biologically enhanced information retrieval system.
  5. Readers are familiar with other information retrieval systems, and will use the tools which, based on past experience, they believe to be most effective for their needs.
  6. A library may not injure a reader, or through inaction allow a reader to come to harm.

Prologomena :- AI,LIS.

Update:

Oops – I messed up the opening pun, turning the obscure into the totally incomprehensible:

Prolog (AI Language) + Prolegomena (to cataloging and classification) = Prologomena, not Prologema

Comments 1 Comment »