Correction:
for example, with "linguistics" in LC's catalog, I can find books also
about "World politics--1989-", "ontology", "English language--Old
English, ca....
should be:
for example, with "linguistics" in LC's catalog, I can find books *THAT
ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY ABOUT* about "World politics--1989-", "ontology",
"English language--Old English, ca....
As I read it again, there's other little things I'd change, but I'll
spare everyone...
Nathan Rinne
Media Cataloging Technician
ISD 279 - Educational Service Center (ESC)
11200 93rd Ave. North
Maple Grove, MN. 55369
Work phone: 763-391-7183
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Rinne, Nathan (ESC)
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2007 9:02 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Purposes of classification (was Re: [NGC4LIB]
Aristotle, "Everything is Miscellaneous", and the lib's "educative
function" )
Jonathan:
Jonathan said:
"but in fact, we want and NEED a classification (NOT just tagging, but
a:
_controlled_ vocabulary; of subject, disciplinary, and genre
characteristics; with relations between terms of hiearchy, association,
and possibly other relation types---that is, a classification)--for
reasons other than shelf order. These reasons include but are not
limited to:
* Bringing like things together in multiple ways in a interface that is
not the shelf.
* Allowing people to understand what is in a large corpus, or large
result set, by categorizing it in sets--to get a 'lay of the land'.
* To find more things like a thing already found
* To narrow or broaden one's search when one realizes that one needs
more focused or more general materials."
Jonathan, of course all the good points that you make here are already
things that LCSH allows researchers looking for substantial materials to
do (with non-fiction *books*, not individual articles). It may not
allow them to do this to the extent that we want (i.e. all at once on
the screen) and many researchers may not know how to do it - but all of
this can already be done using good library catalogs:
* LCSH allows things to be explored (by clicking from here, to there, to
there) in multiple ways in an interface that is not the shelf. There is
a holistic matrix of interconnectivity and interdisciplinarity that
already exists
(for example, with "linguistics" in LC's catalog, I can find books also
about "World politics--1989-", "ontology", "English language--Old
English, ca. 450-1100", "Home and school", "Arabic language--Social
aspects", "Oral tradition", "Science", "Antiquities", "Truthfulness and
falsehood", "Literature--History and criticism", "African languages",
"Language and culture", "Aesthetics", "Metamathematics", "Logic,
Symbolic and mathematical", "Archaeology", "Physical anthropology",
"Chomsky, Noam", etc.)
* LCSH browse displays alphabetically categorize subject headings and
allow people to see what is available in a certain disciplinary area,
subject, or topic - to get a "lay of the land"
(Highlights I was able to quickly get from LC browse list:
Linguistics
Linguistics Bibliography. (78 hits)
Linguistics China. (30 hits)
Linguistics Congresses. (410 hits)
Linguistics Dictionaries. (57 hits)
Linguistics Dictionaries Arabic. (7 hits)
Linguistics, Experimental (10 hits)
Linguistics Field work (11 hits)
Linguistics Germany History (7 hits)
Linguistics Handbooks, manuals, etc. (12 hits)
Linguistics Historiography. (19 hits)
Linguistics History (166 hits)
Linguistics History 19th century (32 hits)
Linguistics History 20th century (51 hits)
Linguistics Methodology (104 hits)
Linguistics Methodology Handbooks, manuals, etc. (10 hits)
Linguistics Periodicals. (310 hits)
Linguistics Philosophy. (43 hits)
Linguistics Problems, exercises, etc. (15 hits)
Linguistics Research Hungary History. (5 hits)
Linguistics Research Soviet Union (15 hits)
Linguistics Statistical methods (51 hits)
Linguistics Terminology. (50 hits)
Note: Google might be interested in "Linguistics Statistical methods",
you think? Also, as Thomas Mann has noted, it would not be hard to put
popular and substantial web resources [or things like blogs even] in
this list)
* obviously, LCSH allow a person to find more things like a thing
already found - and tags and user recommendations would only *increase*
the possibilities - even for research work, increasingly
interdisciplinary as it is.
* In a good catalog, the search can be narrowed by clicking on the
subject headings in the browse list.
(For example, click on "linguistics" in the LC's catalog and you get the
following narrower terms:
Acceptability (Linguistics)
Analogy (Linguistics)
Anaphora (Linguistics)
Anthropological linguistics
Applied linguistics
Archaisms (Linguistics)
Areal linguistics
Asymmetry (Linguistics)
Binary principle (Linguistics)
Biolinguistics
Classification Books Linguistics
Classifiers (Linguistics)
Code switching (Linguistics)
Communism and linguistics
Componential analysis (Linguistics)
Connotation (Linguistics)
Context (Linguistics)
Contrastive linguistics
Creativity (Linguistics)
Deep structure (Linguistics)
Diglossia (Linguistics)
Distinctive features (Linguistics)
Economy (Linguistics)
Emphasis (Linguistics)
Field theory (Linguistics)
Formalization (Linguistics)
Functionalism (Linguistics)
Grammar, Comparative and general
Grammaticality (Linguistics)
Graphemics
Hesitation form (Linguistics)
Hierarchy (Linguistics)
Historical linguistics
Idioms
Juncture (Linguistics)
Linguistic models
Markedness (Linguistics)
Mathematical linguistics
Minimal pair (Linguistics)
Modality (Linguistics)
Neurolinguistics
Neutralization (Linguistics)
Paralinguistics
Parallelism (Linguistics)
Phonetics
Prosodic analysis (Linguistics)
Psycholinguistics
Redundancy (Linguistics)
Reference (Linguistics)
Register (Linguistics)
Sociolinguistics
Speech acts (Linguistics)
Structural linguistics
Substratum (Linguistics)
Surface structure (Linguistics)
Transmutation (Linguistics)
Typology (Linguistics)
Universals (Linguistics)
Word (Linguistics)
Government-binding theory (Linguistics)
Cohesion (Linguistics)
Autosegmental theory (Linguistics)
Definiteness (Linguistics)
Naturalness (Linguistics)
Pejoration (Linguistics)
Paradigm (Linguistics)
Genericalness (Linguistics)
Forensic linguistics
Iconicity (Linguistics)
Scope (Linguistics)
Ecolinguistics
Sequence (Linguistics)
Perspective (Linguistics)
Fossilization (Linguistics)
Motion in language
Direction in language
Politeness (Linguistics)
Subjectivity (Linguistics)
Opacity (Linguistics)
Gradience (Linguistics)
The "broader term", Language and Languages, is currently unavailable
[needs more funding]...)
Obviously, picking linguistics also helps me show the importance of
having some highly trained people doing cataloging work for this or that
disciplinary niche. Certainly, there are many subjects that have more
"popular" narrower terms, for example, as well!
Therefore, these incredible services are all available, to some extent,
now. As it stands though, perhaps it takes curious people who are
former detectives (like Thomas Mann at the LOC) - and perhaps those with
a solid liberal arts education - to really utilize them to their fullest
extent. Things can almost certainly be made much easier, as Andrew Pace
and Eric Hatcher have shown. Perhaps also with changes to MARC format.
Of course, in order to make this work, I think we need more quality
tagging not just from users, but catalogers (LCSH) as well.
Nathan Rinne
Media Cataloging Technician
ISD 279 - Educational Service Center (ESC)
11200 93rd Ave. North
Maple Grove, MN. 55369
Work phone: 763-391-7183
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2007 9:42 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: [NGC4LIB] Purposes of classification (was Re: [NGC4LIB]
Aristotle, "Everything is Miscellaneous", and the lib's "educative
function" )
What are the points of a classification? I submit that there are
several. And only ONE of them requires the kind of compact notation that
Bernhard assumes--shelf order. Certainly, as long as we need to put
books on shelves (and I think this will be for a long long time) we will
need a shelf order. and so long as we need a shelf order, it serves us
well to put like books together (recognizing that books can be like and
unlike in many differnet ways, along many differnet axes--but we still
need to pick just one for a shelf order. Just because that's the way the
physical world works, no problem).
This is all true, and just the way it is.
but in fact, we want and NEED a classification (NOT just tagging, but a:
_controlled_ vocabulary; of subject, disciplinary, and genre
characteristics; with relations between terms of hiearchy, association,
and possibly other relation types---that is, a classification)--for
reasons other than shelf order. These reasons include but are not
limited to:
* Bringing like things together in multiple ways in a interface that is
not the shelf.
* Allowing people to understand what is in a large corpus, or large
result set, by categorizing it in sets--to get a 'lay of the land'.
* To find more things like a thing already found
* To narrow or broaden one's search when one realizes that one needs
more focused or more general materials.
None of these purposes, in and of themselves, in fact require a
notation suitable for shelf ordering. What DO they require, especially
when we are trying to fulfill these purposes in a digital interface?
What sorts of interfaces might we want to present to users, and what
_formal features_ of a classificatory controlled vocabulary assist or
get in the way of providing them?
This is what we need to discover, by emperical research as well as
intellecutal analysis.
LCC or Dewey (or LCSH) are not the end of hte road. They are the
beginning. They were designed for an environment we are no longer
constrained to. We can do more. What can we do that's more with these
existing systems? What might we WISH to do, but these existing systems
wont' let us do in a reasonable systmetic way (becuase if you aren't
oging ot be systematic and reasonagbly consistent--then you might as
well just be using tagging, indeed)? This is what we need to discover.
Jonathan
Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
> Tim Spalding wrote:
>>
>> 1. The organization into tens is arbitrary and limiting. The "tree of
>> knowledge" (if there is a tree) is on no better terms with ten than
>> time is with twelve. These are arbitrary; Dewey uses tens to make
>> numbers shorter and nothing else. Every level has a choice,
>> Procrustean hilarity.
>>
> So, what might be a good number for the first level of a new
> classification? If we agree, that is, that we need a new one.
> Under 25? Then we might use a letter for a code.
> More, up to 100 perhaps? Then a 2-digit-number might be appropriate.
> (In the Netherlands and in Germany, the Dutch "Basisclassificatie"
> is widely used. It has 89 main classes, each with less than 100
> subclasses. Notations thus look like this:
> 54.72 Artificial Intelligence (54 = Computer Science)
> (The level of detail is of course much less than Dewey, but its aim
> is not to replace Dewey but to provide a broad categorization. It
> can be useful to refine keyword searches or to arrange large
> result sets into manageable chapters. The aim is not to sort the
> world out but to arrange sets of documents.)
>
> With this question sorted out, then what headlines (broad subject
> categories) might be appropriate for our time and age?
>
>
> I mean, why not take this on now and make an attempt to define
> at least the top level of a new classification - if all existing
> systems are as deficient as they appear to be. There must be
> some approaches somewhere already - maybe even a good one.
> Below the top level, there may be existing subject classifications
> that could be re-used here. At least in some subjects, like
> mathematics or physics.
>
> B. Eversberg
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Thu Jun 07 2007 - 08:48:30 EDT