To tag or not to tag: that is the question.
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous folksonomy,
Or to take arms against the wisdom of crowds;
And by opposing classify them. To tag; to catalogue;
No more; and by a taxonomy to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That comprehension is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
Early last year the (US) Library of Congress established a Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. The Working Group released a draft report for public comment late in 2007. The final report was released in January 2008.
Library of Congress reference librarian Thomas Mann has now published a review of the Working Group’s report (PDF), criticising its findings. Among the review’s main arguments:
- The Working Group ignores “the very real and important differences between the research needs of scholars and those of ‘quick information’ seekers”
- The existing Library of Congress Subject Headings system (LSCH) provides “crucial overviews of relevant literature across multiple languages”
- The Working Group assumes that “the capacity to search across multiple environments is more important than the capacity to search efficiently and comprehensively within any of them individually”
- The Working Group ignores “the importance to scholars of maintaining browsable, onsite book collections arranged in Library of Congress Classification (LCC) subject categorizations” [sic]
Mann’s review also identifies potential problems with the Working Group’s proposed model for search interfaces based on Library of Congress catalogues. This part of the critique will mainly be of interest to information architects, data managers, designers of search systems and of course librarians (particularly those who work in cataloguing, metadata and search).
Australian academic libraries generally use the Dewey system rather than the Library of Congress system for cataloguing and shelving their collections. Why should we care about a stoush among employees of a US parliamentary library?
Consider the example Mann provides of using the LSCH system to gain an overview of topics related to Afghanistan. He asserts that other taxonomy systems, and the search engines that query them, cannot provide the same depth and breadth of understanding to a scholar.
It’s not so much the taxonomy itself, nor the IT systems that support it, that is of particular interest in this case study. Rather, it’s the quality of experience for the end-user. If a scholar cannot find the information she needs, then the library and its systems have failed.
At the VALA 2008 conference, Andy Powell spent a large chunk of his keynote address talking about user experience — and about the fact that, thus far, librarians and their superdooper library systems have notably failed to provide an easy, accessible, helpful experience for their users.
As Richard Katz remarked recently, we are getting to the stage where “technology is almost good enough for me to use.”
Can we say the same about the taxonomies that are emerging for online materials?
[Tip o' the hat to David Weinberger for the Mann link. And apologies to Will for the riff on his Hamlet soliloquy.]
Tags: cataloguing, katz, strategy, powell, vala, search systems
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