What we organize(and why)

LIS 551Dorothea Salo

Svenonius on prerequisites• To create a system of organizing

information, you need:• Ideology: the “why” of organization• Formalized praxis: the “how it’s done”• Theory: the “how it SHOULD be done”• Problems: the “er, does this really work the way we

thought it did?”

• So let’s talk about the systems that got us where we are today.• Keep this list in hand! What is each system we’re

talking about addressing?

Key people in 19th c. info-org history

• Panizzi: “Let’s organize the British Library!”• Dui and the alphabet-soup avalanche

• Dewey Decimal (DDC), UDC, LCSH, LCC, AACR

• Cutter the Systematizer: objectives and principles of organization• lives on in the “Cutter number”

What’s YOUR Cutter number?

! !

Bibliographic objectives, per Cutter

• Find a book if you know its author/title/subject. • “Known item” search. (Svenonius: “finding objective”)• Access point: Hooks chosen for searching. (More later.)

• Find every book the library has with a given author/title/subject.• Svenonius: “collocation objective”• COLLOCATION: Put like things together, along a given axis

of “likeness.” (Fiction vs. non-fiction?)• THIS is the organizing principle aimed at browsers.

• Be sure you have the book you were looking for.

Lubetsky the nitpicker

• Added “find the right edition” to the mix.• How often does this matter? Seriously? In practice,

for a very few works and a very few users.• Is this really a primary objective? Really? See what

you think when we get to AACR2 and FRBR.

• One important distinction: “work” versus “edition.”• Think about the Bible.

• Paris Principles: 1961.

IFLA 1997

• FIND entities corresponding to search criteria.

• IDENTIFY entity, or distinguish it from closely-similar entity

• SELECT entity matching a need, or reject it as inappropriate

• OBTAIN/ACCESS desired object.• this one’s new! but the Web made it salient.

Classification

• The operationalization of collocation!• Bring like things together, with respect to

one or more attributes• in an economic, extant-record-minded, and

technologically up-to-date fashion.

• Distinguish what is exactly alike from what is almost alike.• Even if it’s just “c. 1” vs. “c. 2”

• Underlying assumption: an information package can only be in one place.

Navigation• Author, title, and subject aren’t the only

possible breadcrumbs!• Adaptations• Associations (e.g. genre)• Mentions• Series and sequels

• “Mapping” the bibliographic universe• Given one information package, find another one

“like” it based on associational criteria.• Again, the Web forced acknowledgement of this

objective, but this isn’t quite “web navigation.”• Svenonius says “random associational criteria aren’t

economic.” Do you agree?

What is this “information” stuff anyway?

• Lots of definitions out there!• info theory: “The information in a message is how

improbable it is compared to all other messages.” Um.• Svenonius: “the content of a message created by humans,

recorded, and deemed worthy of preservation.”• Not synonymous with “fact” or “true belief!” Fiction counts

as information.• Not synonymous with “data” or “sense impression!” Can’t

reduce Homer to data. (Also consider Linear B. We can look at it, but we can’t extract information from it.)

• “Worthy of preservation” begs a LOT of questions.

So what’s a document, then?

So what?Seriously, so what?

So what?

• So we understand the boundaries of what we are and aren’t organizing.• If we don’t, we build systems that either don’t

handle everything we need to organize, or pay much too much attention to unimportant edge cases (Lubetsky!).

• So we understand and exploit the essential characteristics of what we organize.

So what’s a document?

• “a piece of information” Really? (Think about a photograph.)

• “A writing... conveying information.” Really?• Ranganathan thought so!

• “A material having... a representation of the thoughts of men.”• Photographs, petroglyphs, cave paintings, the Sistine

Chapel... it’s all documents. Documents don’t have to be textual! You just have to be informed by them. (Otlet)

Suzanne Briet

• “any physical or symbolic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon.”

• What’s the key word in that definition, for you?

Consider the

Ian Burt, “Kudu Antelope - Botswana” http://www.flickr.com/photos/oddsock/264868235/ CC-BY

Iain Wanless, “Antelope” http://www.flickr.com/photos/reemul/5605641902/ CC-BY

What IS a document?

• Key Otlet/Briet insight: it’s not anything inherent in the thing we’re considering.• Least of all the physical form!

• It’s how WE treat it. We grant something document-ness.• Partly by organizing it the way(s) we organize

documents!

So, come on, really, antelopes?

• Fair enough.• But let’s take that a little further. How are

libraries and archives similar to and different from:• Zoos (why not?)• Museums• Herbaria and similar kinds of research collections.

• Think about WHAT gets organized, HOW, WHY, and FOR WHOSE BENEFIT.

A good word to know: REALIA

• Quoth Wikipedia: “three-dimensional objects from real life such as coins, tools, and textiles, that do not easily fit into the orderly categories of printed material.”

• Do we have these? Sure we do.

http://www.good.is/post/at-toronto-s-human-library-you-check-out-people-not-books/

And then there’s...

• (UWRF realia in UWDCC)• (photo can’t be reproduced per rights

statement, so I’m not reproducing it)

Another question

• Can documents become realia? Where is the line? What happens to the information value of the item?

CONTENT

vs.

CARRIER

Lots of content carriers!

• List a few.• What does that mean for organization

systems?• What difference does it make when the

carrier is digital?• Think about information surrogates such as catalog

records while you answer.

Thanks!

• Copyright 2011 by Dorothea Salo.• This lecture and slide deck are licensed

under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.