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Little Feat, Dixie Chicken video

Is cataloging

even necessary?

Melting point of sulphur

Macbeth study guide

I'm assuming...

From Container to Context

"Buddism" introduction

How cataloguers can drive a fundamental and

necessary change in resource description

  • You're passionate about libraries and facilitating public access to information and culture

  • You're wondering how libraries will survive as access to information and culture is increasingly commercialised

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/google-autocomplete-fails.html

I need to keep track of

information about the ongoing disease restistance of genetically modifed canola -

what's the best way to do this?

Kent Fitch

National Library of Australia

Australian Committee on Cataloguing Seminar October 2010

railways society mid west nineteenth century

I want to study critical analysis of the

tactics used by Whitlam in his response

to the supply crisis of 1975 -

where should I start?

My 10 year old is very keen

on Egyptian art - how can I find resources to inspire her to keep exploring?

Why catalogue?

Traditionally...

FRBR, 1998

Eversberg, 2002

Cutter, 1876

Find

Produce reliable results

Find

knowing author, title, subject or category

meeting search criteria

"known-item" search, consistent description

using well defined attributes

Identify

Show what's available

Clearly display differences,

present meaningful choices

confirm found entity is the entity sought, or distinguish between similar entities

by given author, subject or kind of literature

Select

succinct yet precise description, differentiate

versions

Assist in the choice

an appropriate entity

Bring together what belongs together

as to edition or literay or topical character

Obtain

works by author, editions of a work,

parts of a whole, related resources,

works about a person or another work

access by purchase, loan, electronically

Google Magic...

I'm interested in the social impacts of

railways in the mid-west of America

during the 19th Century.

What are useful ways of investigating this?

What should I read first?

What should I read next?

  • distributed, page popularity contest, voted for by you (everyone)

  • sophisticated natural language processing

  • secret and very clever algorithms

  • tens of thousands of servers

... all paid for by AdWords

AdWord revenue increase 08->09: $US1.8bn

Total spend on public libraries in Aus 2006: $A0.76bn

Total spend on CAUL (AUS) libraries 2008 : $A0.58bn

Metacrap

Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia

Cory Doctorow, 2001

null0: http://www.flickr.com/photos/null0/271977303/in/photostream/

1. People lie

5. Schemas aren't neutral

Your mailbox is full of spam with subject lines like

"Re: The information you requested."

The conceit that competing interests can come to easy accord

on a common vocabulary totally ignores the power of

organizing principles in a marketplace.

2. People are lazy

  • your clueless aunt sends you email with no subject line

  • half the pages on Geocities are called "Please title this page"

  • your boss stores all of his files on his desktop with helpful titles like "UNTITLED.DOC."

6. Metrics influence results

This laziness is bottomless.

No amount of ease-of-use will end it

It's wishful thinking to believe that a group of people

competing to advance their agendas will be universally

pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge.

The best that we can hope for is a detente in which

everyone is equally miserable.

3. People are stupid

You can almost always get a bargain on a Plam Pilot at eBay

4. Mission: Impossible -- know thyself

7. There's more than one way

to describe something

When Nielsen used log-books to gather information on the viewing habits of their sample families, the results were heavily skewed to Masterpiece Theater and Sesame Street.

Replacing the journals with set-top boxes that reported what the set was actually tuned to showed what the average American family was really watching...

Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something.

Arguably, your Self is the collection of associations and descriptors you ascribe to ideas.

Requiring everyone to use the same vocabulary to

describe their material denudes the cognitive landscape,

enforces homogeneity in ideas.

  • naked midget wrestling

  • America's Funniest Botched Cosmetic Surgeries

  • Jerry Springer presents: "My daughter dresses like a slut!"

And that's just not right.

A pattern language : towns, buildings, construction

Christopher Alexander ...

cindiann: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trucolorsfly/2970326939/

Context

NBD subjects:

  • FRBR - editions/versions
  • Series - author, publisher
  • Lists
  • Subject trails
  • Citation trails
  • Related
  • Reviews
  • Annotations
  • Ratings

Symbolism in architecture

Semiotics

City planning.

Design.

  • Scope
  • Provenance

From: Tim Spalding <tim@librarything.com>

Date: Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 3:44 AM

Subject: Re: [ol-discuss] Series titles: include individual ID or not?

To: Open Library -- general discussion <ol-discuss@archive.org>

FWIW, the matter has been discussed for years on LibraryThing's

"Combiners!" and Series groups, in excruciating depth. The options are

more complex than seems at first sight, because—like so much

library-related metadata—getting it right requires taking account of:

1. Degrees of truth

2. Differences of opinion

3. Awareness of different levels of hierarchy

4. Understanding who says something as an element of the something

5. Understanding that metadata for an item continues to change AFTER

the item is cataloged.

Examples of the concepts in practice:

  • In what sense are Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the same series? When did they become so?
  • Are all those Bond books, including the recent ones, in the same series? How about sequels to Jane Eyre? Does it change when a publisher packages the book and its faux-sequals together as a sequel?
  • What is the order of the Narnia books?
  • Does the Harvard Classics include the Odyssey? Yes. Is the Odyssey part of the series "Harvard Classics." Not so much.

Tags derived from Wikipedia

Design methods

Design paradigm

Design pattern

Design pattern (computer science)

Pattern (architecture)

Pattern language

Sense of place

LibraryThing's tags

Amazon's tags

expertise(2)

patterns architecture(2)

urban planning(2)

arch bk(1)

book(1)

building construction(1)

city design(1)

community affairs(1)

comprehensive plans(1)

history(1)

interior design(1)

lifestyles(1)

organization(1)

paradigm shifting(1)

pattern languages(1)

planning and zoning(1)

school(1)

structure(1)

sustainable development(1)

architecture(36)

design(23)

home design(14)

christopher alexander(13)

patterns(12)

reference(11)

ideas(10)

city planning(6)

nonfic(4)

etech07(2)

Amazon's reviews

Amazon's cites & cited by

26 very relevat results with a subject of * constitutional crisis 1975; but..

Computers and intractability : a guide to the theory of NP-completeness / Michael R. Garey, David S. Johnson

Google Scholar's cited by:

widely held (31 libs -a classic "cited by 29338")

NBD subjects

Dervived wikipedia tags

Amazon tags

LibraryThing tags

Computer programming.

Computer algorithms.

Computational complexity

computer science

complexity

algorithms

mathematics

computation

computational complexity

np-complete

book

combinatorial algorithms

cse200

graph algorithms

intractability

np complete

np-hard

ai (1)

algorithms (6)

annotated (1)

college (1)

complexity (7)

complexity theory (4)

computability (2)

computational complexity (1)

computer (1)

computer science (35)

computers (1)

computing (5)

cs(3)

cstheory (1)

essential (1)

informatica (1)

intractability (2)

jensen-msr-2007 (1)

kontoret (1)

logic (3)

mathematics (20)

non-fiction (6)

np stuff (1)

np-complete (8)

textbook (4)

theoretical computer science (3)

theory (3)

theory of computability (1)

theory of computation (2)

wishlist (1)

3-partition problem

Bin packing problem

Boolean satisfiability problem

Bottleneck traveling salesman

problem

Clique cover

Clique problem

Complete coloring

Cook–Levin theorem

Cut (graph theory)

David S. Johnson

Degree-constrained spanning tree

Dominating set problem

Edge cover

Edge dominating set

Exact cover

Feedback arc set

Feedback vertex set

Graph coloring

Graph isomorphism

Graph isomorphism problem

Hamiltonian path problem

Independent set problem

Knapsack problem

L (complexity)

Linear programming

List of important publications in theoretical computer science

List of multiple discoveries

List of NP-complete problems

List of PSPACE-complete problems

Longest common subsequence problem

Matching (graph theory)

Maximum common subgraph isomorphism problem

Maximum cut

Metric dimension (graph theory)

Monochromatic triangle

NP-complete

NP-hard

Polynomial hierarchy

Post correspondence problem

PSPACE-complete

Quadratic assignment problem

Quadratic programming

Quadratic residue

Set packing

Set splitting problem

Shortest common supersequence,

Spanning tree

Subgraph isomorphism problem

Subset sum problem,

Travelling salesman problem

True quantified Boolean formula

Vertexcover

Two problems...

Doctorow: Schema aren't neutral

There's more than one way..

Weinburger: Control doesn't scale

650 _0 $aAustralian constitutional crisis, 1975

651_0$aAustralia $xPolitics and government $y1974-1976.

653 __ $aAustralia - Politics and government - 1972-1975

653 __$aConstitutional Crisis 1975

650_7$aAustralia. Political events, October 1975- November 1975. Personal observations $2precis

[ind2=7 means "Source specified in subfield $2 "]

The choice for libraries

? Adapt and grow

Business as usual ?

constituinal crissis search misses:

The Australian constitutional crisis of 1975 : facts and law/Institute of Public Affairs (N.S.W.),

Labor and the constitution, 1972-1975 : essays and commentaries on the constitutional controversies of the Whitlam years / edited by Gareth Evans

The Whitlam government 1972-1975 [Gough Whitlam]

The facts and the law : a summary of important documents including a copy of the Australian Constitution relating to the political crisis of 11th November, 1975

The Whitlam years : Australia's Labor legislation, 1972-1975 / with foreword by Malcolm Mackerras

The Whitlam venture / Alan Reid

The leader : a political biography of Gough Whitlam / James Walter

The rise and fall of Gough Whitlam / Pat Farmer

Readings : the Whitlam dismissal / [(ed) Jacqualine Hollingworth.]

Stick with AACR2/RDA/LCSH

Remain a tiny, closed ecosystem

Don't try to scale

Ignore most content

LCSH

Adopt new approaches

Open to the web

Build scalable descriptive frameworks

Describe everything

Add context to everything

Help everyone participate

LCSH

Kelley McGrath, Cataloging & Metadata Services Librarian, Ball State University, chair of Online Audiovisual Cataloguers Cataloging Policy Committee

"Facet-Based Search and Navigation with LCSH: Problems and Opportunities" CODE4Lib issue 1, Dec 2007,

Not a thesaurus:

  • Too many top level terms
  • Compound headings break facets & hierarchical navigation

  • and makes it difficult to search for:

"Art, Buddhist"; "Cookery, Japanese" ; "Adult children of alcoholics, Writings of,"

  • Broadening and narrowing search is very unreliable

  • Hard to use (for cataloguers and searchers)

communicable diseases (broad) in Kenya (narrow), or AIDS (narrow) in Africa (broad)

Find and acquire are library goals,

not the goals of users

Commerce is taking over bibliographic description, discovery and delivery

Google

Amazon

Apple

Eric Lease Morgan

Shelfari (now owned by Amazon)

LibraryThing (1.2m users, 40% Amazon)

GoodReads (3m users)

Paul Hagon: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulhagon/2965862244/

The fundamental processes of librarianship (collection, preservation, organization, and dissemination) need to be expanded to fit the current digital environment.

...

The next “next generation library catalog” is not about find, instead it is about use.

Eric Lease Morgan

"The Next Next-Generation Library Catalog"

http://infomotions.com/blog/2010/06/the-next-next-generation-library-catalog/

What can cataloguers do?

Harriet Rubin

Specify, build, promote, maintain environments/systems which:

Freedom is actually a bigger game than power.

Power is about what you can control.

Freedom is about what you can unleash.

Facilitate

Thrive on a diversity of description

Encourage and combine the

expertise of the community

Only a tiny percentage of information

will ever be described in AACR2/RDA/

MARC/LCSH

  • librarians
  • subject experts
  • the general public
  • Description using a real thesaurus
  • Description using tags
  • Lists
  • Related resources
  • Reviews
  • Annotations
  • Collection and organisation of snippets
  • Link out, link in

Without librarians and what librarians understand, what we build would likely be less usable, less reliable, less diverse, less provocative.

What we build without librarians would unnecessarily constrict our understanding and imagination, rather than exuberantly expanding them.

This is especially true given that the system is being designed to a large degree by commercial entities.

Are open

Support metadata services

Automatically perform

David Weinberger

  • open to reuse
  • open to arbitrary extension
  • commercially disinterested

Knowledge As a Network

ALCTS Midwinter Symposium

January 15, 2010

  • versioning
  • subsets/views/layers
  • scopes
  • attribution/provenance
  • rating
  • Reading level characterisation
  • Identification of characteristic text
  • Citation chaining
  • Related resources
  • "People who accessed this also accessed..."
  • Textual analysis
  • Link out

Joi Ito: http://www.flickr.com/people/joi/

Are easy to use

Help create an (inter)national

public digital library

Join the Open Knowledge Foundation

Working Group on Open

Bibliographic Data

A better cooperative cataloguing environment?

Visit OpenLibrary http://openlibrary.org

"A Library Without Walls"

Robert Darnton,

Director of the Harvard University Library

http://openbiblio.net/

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/oct/04/library-without-walls/

architecture(36)

design(23)

home design(14)

christopher alexander(13)

patterns(12)

reference(11)

ideas(10)

city planning(6)

nonfic(4)

etech07(2)

expertise(2)

patterns architecture(2)

urban planning(2)

arch bk(1)

book(1)

building construction(1)

city design(1)

community affairs(1)

comprehensive plans(1)

history(1)

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