[Sigia-l] About bloody time?
Troy Winfrey
twinfrey at gmail.com
Tue Jul 17 05:39:18 EDT 2007
For those with more interest than time, I highly recommend Elaine
Svenovius's Intellectual Foundations of Information Organization. Not only
does it provide a pretty comprehensive overview of the problems involved
with cataloging (and bibliographic) systems, but it does so in an
unusually clear and approachable way for this field. Any good designer will
also find it a gold mine of Stuff to Think About.
Debates over the nature of records, documents, and works, some of them
actually philosophical in the formal sense, turn out to be far more
significant than one might think. When you get down to it, these systems are
probably the best example in the world of the working tradeoffs one must
make to accomodate users. After all, library patrons are a hugely important
audience...but so is the organization, which must be able to know what it
has and where that is, and organization staff, which must perform complex
manipulations of system and collection in order to insure support for the
other two constituencies. For the nonspecialist, Svenovius's exposure of the
significant problems caused by machine cataloging will also be interesting
and surprising. Just as the tinny, fragile, expensive cellphone has largely
supplanted the reliable, bulletproof handset (as Norman points out), so the
modern machine-based catalog has wrought significant damage on the
hierarchical power of the old card catalog.
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