LIS510 lecture 9

Thomas Krichel

2005-03-23

Organization of information

• Libraries organize information. Otherwise nothing that is an library could ever be found.

• Traditional method of doing this have been labor intensive. They can not cope with the exploding amount of information.

• But the theoretical approaches and the tools developed by librarians remain very important for any attempt at organizing information by computer.

approaching knowledge

• There are things we want to know about. These are called subject.

• And there are ways of looking at things. Rubin calls them “disciplines”

• Example: subject sex, way of looking at it through biology, gender studies, pornography.

classification

• It is the act of organizing the universe of knowledge into some systematic order.

• Classification provides a descriptive and explanatory framework for ideas and a structure of the relationship among the ideas.

• Example: Science > Chemistry > Organic Chemistry

Classification schemes

• Generally schemes to classify subjects are discipline oriented, rather than subject oriented.

• Example– Sports > Racing > Horse Racing– Science > Biology > Zoology > Horses > Horse

Racing

• The same thing can be viewed form different disciplines.

use of classification schemes

• As a way to arrange items in a library. Things with same classification are next to each other. This encourages the patron to discover similar items.

• But sometimes, serials are kept apart. Individual articles in serials are not classified.

• Once a system is chosen, a library sticks with it.

• There are two common ones:– Dewey Decimal Classification

– Library of Congress

Dewey Decimal Classification

• Introduced by Melvil Dewey in 1876.• Ten top classes

– 000 Generalites – 200 Religion– 100 Philosophy, parapsychology occultism,

psychology– 300 Social Sciences – 400 Language– 500 Natural Sciences & Mathematics– 600 Technology (Applied Sciences)– 700 Arts – 800 Literature & Rhetoric– 900 Geography, history and auxiliary disciplines

Subclasses

• Rubin has a good examples– 640 is home economics– 641 food and drink

• another– 795 games of chance– 795.4 card games– 795.41 card games where skill is involved– 975.412 poker

comments on DDC

• Mainly used in public libraries.• Like any scheme, it needs updating. Such

updates a cumbersome.• Like any scheme there is a significant

cultural bias in it. • Owned by OCLC and sold very dearly.

OCLC sued the library hotel for using the scheme. This limits the uptake of the scheme and therefore it usefulness.

Library of Congress Classification

• Has twenty top letter as classes.

• Many looks at the world from an academic perspective.

• Therefore used in universities.

• Owned and maintained by the library of congress, problems with restricted access are similar to DDC.

controlled vocabulary

• Many words can be used to describe the same thing– US, U.S., United States of America, США

• One approach to deal with this problem is to use only one term, consistently.

• Example: the yellow pages provide a consistent vocabulary for all professions.

NISO definition of authority control

Vocabulary control is the process of organizing a list of terms– to indicate which two or more synonymous

terms is authorized for use– to distinguish between homographs– to indicate hierarchical and associate

relationships between term

LoC authority control

• LoC maintain authority files. They are not free but you can consult them on the web.

• Let us try this out now, see http://authorities.loc.gov/

• Look at the personal authority file and search for someone reasonable famous that you like.

Thesauri• A thesaurus is list of words. For each word,

there is a list of related words and the type of relationship that the word has with each related work. Examples

• LIBRARIES – Narrower Terms

• Academic Libraries [+]• Branch Libraries

– Related Terms• Information Centers

• Thesauri are search tools.

subject headings

• These are controlled vocabularies of subjects that can be added to a record.

• They may also contain similar relationships between terms.

• But unlike thesauri, they are used when creating the bibliographic records. Thus they are indexing tools.

type of subject headings

• LoC subject headings are very complete, but are not easy to use.

• Smaller libraries use Sears subject headings– less compete– easier to use– very expensive to buy on paper.

Catalogs• Catalogs are collection of records about a

library’s holdings.

• In olden days, they were organized by author only.

• In more modern days you can approach by various “access points” such as title, author, subject.

aims of catalog

• Cutter’s 1904 work still pertinent here

• Catalogs– enable person to find a book of which either

author, title, subject is known– to show what the library has for a given author,

on a given subject, in a given type– to assist with the choice of the book by edition

or by its character (literary or topical)

catalog

• Cutter’s vision is more from the user’s point of view, but from the library’s point of view it is also important to know:– location– physical characteristics (e.g. oversize)– circulation properties

bibliographic record

• This is a record that describes an item in the library.

• Anglo-American Cataloguing rules are a set of standardized rules for creating such record.

• These rules go back to the 19th century, but are being revised.

• Currently AARC2 is in use, last revised 2002.

fields• Parts of a record are called fields. A record

can contain many fields. A field has a name, and a value. Example– Title: Homepage of Thomas Krichel– Author: Thomas Krichel– URL: http://wotan.liu.edu/home/krichel

• is a record with three fields. The first field is named “Title”, and its value is “Homepage of Thomas Krichel”

MARC

• MARC is a record with field name that are numbers and some sub field. The same example as previously (basically)– 100 Thomas Krichel– 245 Homepage of Thomas Krichel / Thomas

Krichel– 865 http://wotan.liu.edu/home/krichel

• There are gazillions of rules to learn before you can write a correct MARC record.

other tools: index

• forget about NISO’s definition as quoted by Rubin.

• An index is a list of terms and for each term a list of locations where it can be found. Example, for these slides– catalog: 17,18,19,20– subject: 3,5,15,16,17,18

• They have a crucial role in information retrieval.

types of indexing

• precoordinate indexing: an indexer (usually a person) selects all the indexing terms and decided how they are combined.

• postcoordinate: searchers can use indexing terms they like. for example they can ask if there are slides that have “subject” and “catalog”.

other tools: abstract• an abstract is pretty much a description of

something else without a rigid structure. Homepage of Thomas Krichel

written by Thomas Krichel,

last updated March 2005

at http://openlib.org/home/krichel

• would be an example of an abstract.

• There are many abstracting and indexing databases that hold a lot of abstracts and have indexed them.

other tool: bibliography

• This is basically a collection of abstracts on a certain topic.

• It can be a large like DBLP, see http://dblp.uni-tier.de or a small one like the one you may want to create for your essay.

http://openlib.org/home/krichel

Thank you for your attention!

Please switch off the computers.