Week 7... Déjà Vu

This last week we had a lecture about "information organization." This lecture was pretty familiar, because I am currently taking a course on information organization, IST 616. It's my favorite course so far, besides the wonderful IST 511 of course. But Prof. Lankes managed to put a unique spin on it and fit it into the big picture.

I first learned that I should really stop calling my 616 course "cataloging," as it's really not the same thing as information organization. Oops, my bad.

But a big part of the organization is wading into the sea of acronyms and trying not to drown. It's not that there's just a lot of acronyms, either, but that there's lots of layers of different concepts, each housing lots of different acronyms. I have a sense of what FRBR is and does, but where does it fit in? It's not a schema or encoding language/format, but I know it has certain rules, and I know it has a role to play in MARC. But it's not a cataloging standard, like AACR2(R2). Wikipedia calls it a "conceptual entity-relationship model." See what I mean?

A more coherent part of the subject is that the end goal is facilitating intellectual access to anything. That "anything" can be a book, an article, a paragraph within an article, etc. Of course, the rub here is that librarians use controlled vocabulary, and users of the library use natural (every day) language. This can create problems with users getting access, since we're using two different languages. This is why attention to users and natural language is a big deal when we are talking about how to classify documents or document-like objects.

Another important goal is collocation. We've all had collocation events, where we go to the library thinking we want a certain book on a certain subject. We go to the stacks, and we find out the book we thought was great turns out to be a dud. But then we check the book next to it, and suddenly we see this new book is perfect. This experience is hard to replicate in an online catalog. The whole point of the catalog is to find an exact match. It can't read your mind or just throw books at you to recreate the collocation experience. I've had some ideas about how to make collocation possible in an online environment. The best one involves virtual mapping of a digital or physical collection. So what we're talking about here is when a user pulls up that specific book, he/she will be presented with an interface that is a virtual bookshelf. The specific book that was searched for will be highlighted, but the other titles' spines will be on display next to it, just like a normal bookshelf. The user can highlight the other books to get summaries or what have you. That way, collocation has the same sort of feel as a traditional walk through the stacks.