Tim Spalding wrote:
> A quibble and an invitation to lynch me.
>
>
>> * identification of the authoritativeness of sources,
>>
>
> I'm not so sure how important this is for *scholars*. Put bluntly,
> authoritativeness is a chumps' game. It's what undergrads substitute
> for knowledge, training and judgment. It's a sometimes dangerous
> shortcut to knowledge, not the road itself.
>
I'll try to summarize Burke's view (which didn't get covered in the
snippet I posted). As a historian, he often moves into areas beyond his
expertise. As he takes up something new, as he encounters new
scholarship, he wants guidance for that first step. As he moves into a
new area, he wants to know: what are the main "schools of thought" in
this area? (who is fighting with whom over 'truth'); what are the
seminal works that one needs to read to understand what's being written
today? etc.
It makes me rue the day that Berkeley had to close its undergraduate
library (lack of $$). You could go to any place on the shelf and see
what the traditional academic view was of a subject, with the works
you'd have to read to know what they were saying. It was like reading
Will Durant to get the classic Western ruling class view of history (and
I'm sure you can cite the precedents from older times). It doesn't mean
it's the best, or the one you want to stop with, but it's a quick way to
know what a certain dominant paradigm is thinking.
> It strikes me that librarians are so interested in "authority"
> because, excepting topic-specialists at an academic library, they are
> perpetually in the position of the undergraduate.
snip
>
> Ultimately, I think we have two models here. A librarian—and librarian
> tools—are good at knowing how to find something out. That is always
> and forever different from *knowing something*.
>
And this is why I think librarians get so defensive about their tools
and their concept of authority. I think there's value to the kind of
authority they try to provide (especially name authority), but what is
weird is that they won't let the actual scholars play a direct role.
Whenever I hear a librarian say: "We can't let the USERS add tags to the
catalog -- they don't know anything," I have to remind them that in some
cases their users are the AUTHORS of the books in the library and surely
know more about the book than the librarians do. Subject cataloging is
notorious for getting things wrong (not always, but sometimes) because
the cataloger isn't given the time to read the book and even if he/she
were, might not know enough to get the subtleties.
> Google has a closer relationship to that latter goal. By considering
> data over metadata, and looking at the relationships between data in
> ways that match the "pedigree," it digs past the "finding" into the
> "knowing." But it does it very imperfectly and imprecisely.
>
>
And getting at these relationships is why it would be interesting to put
our data out on the Web for linking and data mining. Right now the only
one who can do data mining at a level even near that of google is OCLC.
I think that WorldCat Identities is an example of how much information
we have hidden in our catalogs, and we really must un-hide it.
kc
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Tue Mar 03 2009 - 13:18:34 EST