Boy, Tim makes it really hard (for me) to stay away.
In what I would call Clay-Shirkean fashion, Tim has dropped the d-word! I am beginning to wonder when someone here is going to rather seriously post something I'd consider slightly bombastic (though not worth disengaging, to be sure!) - like "librarian fundamentalism". After all, I looked up "dogmatism, definition" on Google, and found out that it can mean "bigotry: the intolerance and prejudice of a bigot" (from Princeton.edu)! Yikes.
But given the great insights Clay Shirkey and Tim have demonstrated - which is that yes, there certainly is *a sense* in which "Ontology is Overrated", one can understand his use of the word here.
Hmmm... so now we are talking measurements, probabilities, percentages, etc. I think this is a step in the right direction. However, in the long run this too might not work so well if we are convinced that anyone saying that they think something really is about this and *not* that is being dogmatic... :) (Tim, I insist Moby Dick is about penguins!). If we don't think some people think this way, I submit you have been sleeping the past 30 years or so.
In any case, some more observations from Mann are appropriate here. In one of his recent papers ("More on what is going on at the Library of Congress" - available online), he talks about "misreading the evidence on indexer consistency" (see p. 9 and 10 of this article or the article "'Cataloging Must Change!' and Indexer Consistency Studies: Misreading the Evidence at Our Peril" in Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3/4 (1997), 3-45) and points out the glaring lack of real evidence for the claim that catalogers only have 10-20% consistency for their headings for the same book. Mann asserts that 80% consistency among properly trained catalogers who are using LCSH is a reasonable expectation - and I think that is probably quite accurate. Of course unless someone is going to do a costly, careful, detailed study...
Now, a deeper philosophical excursis follows (I insist you *stop reading now* if you find my philosophical stuff getting to you :) )
Given Tim's words elsewhere, I think it is reasonable to say that he is a hard-core postmodernist-type. :) In all seriousness though, I believe Tim, may be using the word "dogmatism" in a more Kantian sense, i.e. "the dogmatic manner of thinking...is a blind trust in the ability of reason to expand a priori through mere concepts without critique, simply because of the seeming success of this expansion" - therefore, "dogmatism" in the sense of something opposite to skepticism which is also concerned about evidence as well as the power of rational thinking.
Wikipedia, interestingly, offers this 3rd way (hallelujah!): "Dogma... is belief or doctrine held by a religion *or any kind of organization to be authoritative*. *Evidence, analysis, or established fact* *may or may not be adduced*, depending upon usage."
I opt for this 3rd definition, though I would put as asterisk by "authoritative", as of course, the LC catalogers, for example, do not have a corner on the truth re: this or that book. Still, for the most part, we should be able to trust them as authoritative, as we should regularly be able to trust experienced doctors (still, get a second opinion! - including "user-taggish" opinion).
That said, in my quest to talk reasonably and cordially with my fellow (wo)man, I've been doing some thinking about *things I am not terribly skeptical about*. I thought this was an important exercise because there seems to me a lot of sloppy, uncritical, unreflective thinking out there today, and I think this makes it hard to talk with one another. Therefore, I submit that the following 10 statements make explicit that which most of us (?) often simply presume (much of this is influenced by Michael Polanyi, who I think is probably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century - even more so than Wittgenstein):
* We share a world out there
* Despite all the chaos, there is some order out there, particularly in the minds of other persons
* It makes sense to try to learn about this world
* Words are not only tools we use to manipulate our environment or others, but are far more deeply significant, *often having rather discernible meaning*, and often related to the mystery of love and life itself
* Our "epistemological equipment" (senses and reason) also "makes sense", so we can rely on it to learn about the world out there
* Not only the highly evidential, successful [and tactile] hard sciences (which depend on the scientific method) but other disciplines have treated the world itself "as if" it "made sense".
* Expertise exists not only in "degreed" persons, and there is interdisciplinary overlap - with the real corresponding possibility of knowledge building on knowledge
* I exist. You exist. (Like I'm OK. You're OK).
* In truth, all of us our "ideologues" to some extent - but what *kind* of ideologues are we?
* Undistorted communication within free and open encounters in which one may argue one's case are desirable.
(Modern Western philosophy has often started with DesCarte's "I think therefore I am", which Hume, Kant, and others showed to be very weak - though I am very concerned with the dignity of the human person, I prefer to downplay Descartes focus on the individual's thought/existence as the starting point, as I think is appropriate)
It seems to me that as we think about what would be a dream catalog for this or that group - or all groups, these are important assumptions about the realities we face that perhaps we should become more aware of - and remind ourselves of.
I would be interested if any of the above sounds like "dogmatism" to people. If it does, I *might* reasonably agree to drop one of these assumptions for example, for the purposes of being able to continue discussion according to other's own stated premises.
I have a hard time seeing however, how these tacit assumptions I have listed above have not been grounded in - part and parcel with - librarianship from the beginning. I submit if you get rid of some of these assumptions above, one ought to strongly consider that they just might also be sawing off the branch that one sits, ultimately unintentionally undermining the classic, core tools of the profession itself. In which case, librarianship on a wide scale could very well just fade away... and become something only the elites are able to value (on a large scale) and afford.
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: Monday, August 06, 2007 1:25 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Elitism - and Aristotle again! - in libraries (was "Elitism in libraries")
Hopefully using some kind of coded and machine-actionable format.
Not "touches on King's Evil" in narrative form, but:
LCSH: King's Evil
how-much-about: 15%
[Maybe 'touches upon' is by convention 15% or something. This is not an
exact science, and doesn't need to be! Just a rough estimate providing
more information than we currently have.].
Then, we can write relevancy ranking algorithms which take this into
account, or the 'power user' (such as a librarian) could even conduct
searches like "King's Evil at subject-aboutness of at least 30%" or
something.
If you just have free-form narrative descriptions of "how much about", I
think the value added is much more limited than it could be.
Jonathan
Tim Spalding wrote:
> Personally, I'd favor putting some sort of qualitative or quantitative
> assessment by each subject heading, so you could put "25% King's Evil"
> or "touches on [no pun intended] King's Evil" into the record. Then
> you could put in as many headings as any reasonable person might use
> to locate an item, and allow relevancy ranking within a subject to
> boot.
>
> You could do this gradually, perhaps only on new stuff, without
> upsetting the apple cart. It think it's the sort of new-old mashup
> that could save LCSH. Insisting that books are about three or any
> fixed or suggested number subjects, and about them to the same degree,
> is just dogmatism.
>
> Tim
>
> On 8/5/07, Ted P Gemberling <tgemberl_at_uab.edu> wrote:
>
>> Nathan,
>> I think you put the issues real well. Here's a couple of examples of
>> where I think inconsistency is okay. Or generally assigning headings
>> that are not entirely according to rules.
>>
>> I work in a medical library, and a couple of days ago I cataloged a book
>> on a physician in the 17th century, "Serjeant [sic] Surgeon John
>> Knight." Naturally, the basic headings for the book are for John Knight
>> (600) and the MeSH headings (650's) "Military
>> Medicine--history--England" and "Surgery--England--Biography." However,
>> there's also a chapter on something that I found quite historically
>> interesting, King's Evil. It was a kind of tuberculosis that
>> traditionally was thought to be healed by the touch of a king. Knight
>> was close to the king, so he was involved in setting up the "touch"
>> appointments.
>>
>> Now, when I first started out as a cataloger, I remember being told that
>> you shouldn't put a heading on unless at least a third of the book is
>> about that topic. And in this case, it's only one chapter. So that is
>> probably contrary to that rule. But this subject was interesting to me,
>> and I noticed it's a heading ("King's Evil") that was established by the
>> National Library of Medicine pretty recently. Also, this is the first
>> time it's been used in our database.
>>
>> Here's where the inconsistency comes in. There are most likely other
>> books in our collection that touch on King's Evil to as great an extent
>> as this book. We have an extensive history of medicine collection. So a
>> user or reference person will not be able to say that the use of this
>> heading coincides with the actual presence of the subject in our
>> collection. But my point is that if someone comes to the library looking
>> for materials on King's Evil, the heading on that one book will help
>> her. She'll find the book, and it will most likely have bibliographical
>> references pointing her to others on the topic.
>>
>> Another cataloging rule that I've sometimes violated is one that says
>> you shouldn't put more than 3 subjects on a bib. Actually, I don't think
>> this is strictly a rule today, but I think it may have been at one
>> point. Another aspect of it was that if you had more than 3, you were
>> supposed to find a more general one that covered them or some of them,
>> to bring them to three or fewer. I'm pretty sure this was at least
>> partly a labor-saving rule. Management didn't want people to spend much
>> time assigning subject headings. I'm assuming it's also partly about
>> respecting the role of broader terms. You shouldn't have a series of
>> narrower terms together that all add up to one broader term. I think I
>> agree with that, but there are also times when you need both broader and
>> narrower terms, as when a book is mostly about a narrower term, but some
>> parts of it are about that term's BT. Also, I think we have to realize
>> that subject headings need to support keyword searching, and the more
>> subject vocabulary there is on a record, the more likely it will be
>> retrieved that way.
>>
>> I'm not saying there shouldn't be practical limits on the number of
>> subject headings we use. But I just don't think I can live with the
>> 3-subject rule all the time.
>>
>> Nathan, I appreciate your discussion of philosophy. It sounds like
>> you're a philosophical "realist," as I am. Not "realist" in the sense of
>> being a "hard-headed realist," but in the sense of believing there is a
>> real natural order in the universe, and part of our task in the world is
>> to find that order, not just imagine it. Of course that doesn't mean
>> it's easy to find, or that people who think they've found it (or bits of
>> it) have a right to be arrogant to those who don't see it their way. We
>> need to be both "realist" and humble, and I think you exemplify that.
>>
>> Ted Gemberling
>> UAB Lister Hill Library
>> (205)934-2461
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
>> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Rinne, Nathan (ESC)
>> Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 4:10 PM
>> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
>> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Elitism - and Aristotle again! - in libraries
>> (was "Elitism in libraries")
>>
>> Ted,
>>
>> Good grief. Thanks. Not sure if it will help me get a job though (did
>> you see my "contrarian", philosophical (well, *I* think I'm practical :)
>> ) posts on NGC4Lib?
>>
>> Ted: I guess I'm kind of Weinbergian in thinking that a certain amount
>> of inconsistency is okay. Part of the burden of research belongs to the
>> user, and complexities of ideas are such that you probably can't expect
>> indexers to assign all headings consistently. The user needs to figure
>> that out to some extent, with the help of reference people. (end)
>>
>> I too think it is impossible to expect indexers to assign all headings
>> consistently. And yet - if the person cataloging knows the topic
>> they're cataloging about relatively well; and if they try very hard to
>> accurately represent (with an eye towards creating detailed subject
>> headings) the ideas / representations of the author in terms the
>> intended audience can understand; and if they do so following accepted,
>> agreed-upon conventions, doing so consistently - then this situation is
>> much better than if just a couple uncontrolled vocabulary keywords are
>> attached to an item (extreme statement - straw man - I know...). Again,
>> to me, this seems like love (paying attention to something...
>> "listening" to it... trying to represent it as accurately as possible...
>> sharing it with others in a way that it can readily be found... doing so
>> in the context of other things like it, etc.). It also is putting a
>> real value on hard work, curiosity, "leather-foot journalism", etc., of
>> the other. !
>> Will this be perfect, proven, 100%, beyond probabilities, etc. (a la
>> Plato and his ideals)? No. But - *if together we share a world out
>> there* - and if the people who write the books - with all of their
>> particular biases / hated "isms" (some who no doubt recognize them
>> better than others) - share the same world and have taken it upon
>> themselves to look closely at this or that and to communicate to us some
>> aspect of it they find important or interesting (let's assume for a
>> minute its *not all about* self-interested power plays)... then to me,
>> at least, it seems more reasonable to believe that we can - and should
>> try - to make *some* overall sense of reality than not (or you can go
>> ahead and just get real cynical about those "selfish genes" you got :)).
>> If some want to call that a particular philosophy, or faith, I
>> understand - some, after all, many would say that it is irrational to
>> even try this. I imagine most [naïve?] regular folks would call that
>> some "good sense" t!
>> hough. And I would argue that if some rather intellectual person, for
>> example, says they believe otherwise, in their actions they often
>> tacitly betray those stated beliefs. Most people would "popularize"
>> their heady stuff *if they could*.
>>
>> Otherwise - if there is *nothing* orderly about the world (remember, not
>> even David says this) and we can't discover *anything* (here - I'm not
>> sure in what sense David thinks things can be discovered) - why are we
>> talking anyways? :) And what *in the world* are those crazy librarians
>> talking about? But if we think it's a good thing to think we can learn
>> about the whole wide world out there - and not just what interests us at
>> the moment, can we even teach a child this, for instance, without trying
>> to meaningfully categorize the people, places, things, influential
>> ideas, etc. that are out there?
>>
>> I don't think so - but don't you put me in any boxes now... :)
>>
>> 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 Ted P Gemberling
>> Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 12:53 PM
>> To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
>> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Elitism - and Aristotle again! - in libraries
>> (was Elitism in libraries)
>>
>> Blanka,
>> Yes, Nathan's posts are wonderful. So gracious and thought provoking.
>> He's a lot better exponent of library values than I am (when I logged
>> onto my e-mail last night, I did with trepidation, expecting some angry
>> responses to my rant on Wednesday about library literature. And I may
>> still get them.)
>>
>> Nathan, you confirmed something I'd been thinking for awhile. I also
>> figured Mann was real pro-computer until a certain point, not at all
>> reactionary. In fact, I bet that when the online catalog came along, he
>> thought it was the greatest thing ever for library users. I think the
>> tipping point may have come with the 1991 article by Dorothy Gregor and
>> Carol Mandel, "Cataloging must change!" Or perhaps a bit later, since I
>> think that article did not begin to be real influential right away. At
>> any rate, it wasn't until 1997 that he wrote his response to it, which I
>> think is a classic. Here are a few lines from it:
>>
>> "A few years ago, I was surprised to hear a speaker at an ALA convention
>> assert that it was 'known' that subject catalogers cannot agree on which
>> headings to assign to books; the speaker referred to a 1991 Library
>> Journal article as, apparently, validating that belief ... A few months
>> ago I heard it once more from a graduate student at one of the local
>> library schools. Her cataloging class, it seems, was debating whether or
>> not LC Subject Headings were even necessary any more, and the same 1991
>> LJ article was being offered as "evidence" in the discussion. The gist
>> of one of the major arguments presented in the article, 'Cataloging must
>> change!' ... is that fine distinctions in subject cataloging simply do
>> not matter because there is so little consistency in the assignment of
>> LC subject headings anyway."
>>
>> Suddenly the online catalog and keyword searching, things which had
>> given users more access, were being used as an excuse to dismantle our
>> system of subject cataloging.
>>
>> It's significant that Karen Calhoun cited Gregor and Mandel's article as
>> an inspiration for her work when she made her Report on the future of
>> bibliographic control over the last couple of years. Mann's article in
>> Cataloging & Classification Quarterly can be found in v. 23 (3/4), 1997.
>>
>>
>> Now, I will say, as I have before, that I don't think consistency is
>> quite as important as Mann or Gregor and Mandel think. I side with Mann
>> on the value of assigning subject headings and do think consistency is a
>> good goal, but I guess I'm kind of Weinbergian in thinking that a
>> certain amount of inconsistency is okay. Part of the burden of research
>> belongs to the user, and complexities of ideas are such that you
>> probably can't expect indexers to assign all headings consistently. The
>> user needs to figure that out to some extent, with the help of reference
>> people.
>>
>> Ted Gemberling
>> UAB Lister Hill Library
>> (205)934-2461
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
>> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Bajankova, Blanka (KCEL)
>> Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 10:32 AM
>> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
>> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Elitism - and Aristotle again! - in libraries
>> (was Elitism in libraries)
>>
>> It is a joy to read your thoughts, Nathan Rinne.
>> Blanka
>>
>> Blanka Bajankova, Librarian
>> FAO UN
>> David Lubin M. Library
>> CDP-Monographs Cataloguing Unit
>> 00153 Rome, Italy
>>
>>
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Tue Aug 07 2007 - 05:59:07 EDT