Little Feat, Dixie Chicken video
Is cataloging
even necessary?
Melting point of sulphur
Macbeth study guide
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?
FRBR, 1998
Eversberg, 2002
Cutter, 1876
Find
Produce reliable results
Find
knowing author, title, subject or category
"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
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.
- 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.
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,
- 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://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)