Shawne,
Thanks for this analysis. I confess candidly that I didn't think about it all that much since it pretty much agreed with my preconceived notions. This is not a good thing, and I'll try to keep my skepticism toward everything I read.
One consideration though:
<snip>
Another interesting point---the researchers emphasized up front that "Some directors in the survey express firm beliefs that the future is with keyword searching rather then controlled vocabularies, but the NLA’s experiments are showing that perhaps the best answer lies in clever combinations of the two." (pg. 3) but then didn't put that together in the same paragraph with the finding that 80% of respondents felt that "subject cataloguing is needed for clustering related content, and that subject analysis is better than relying on keyword alone." (pg. 12).
</snip>
I often see this sort of finding, but it always leaves me a bit confused. When they discuss "controlled vocabulary" and "clustering" I wonder what they mean. There are two primary purposes and functions of subjects and you can see them especially clearly in LC subject headings: there is the collation function, which brings together metadata records for resources with similar subjects, and then there is the "labelling" function, which provides an authorized term that describes the items that have been collated. The purpose of the labelling function is to make the items collated together findable by humans.
To visualize this, I think it is best to imagine a card catalog, which brings "all the books in the library" on WWII air battles under the subject:
World War, 1939-1945--Aerial operations
with all of the associated subdivisions.
My feeling is that people very much want the groupings that the catalogs provide, i.e. the cards collated under this topic, but the controlled vocabulary here is almost impossible to find today and this is a consequence of going from a card(browsing) environment to an online(keyword) environment. Non-librarians rarely understand the collating function of the catalog, and foryoung people who do not remember the card catalog at all, it is especially strange. When you begin to explain it, you discover that the entire concept is especially abstract when relating it to computerized catalogs, and it may be very difficult for someone to understand. And yet, if and when they do understand it, they like it a lot and they begin to see how the catalog *can be* more powerful and can save them lots of time compared to full-text keyword. It has also been my experience that younger librarians also do not fully grasp these notions. I really believe that in the new information world, the col!
lating function potentially can gain tremendously in importance, but the labels of these points of collation will become even less useful and increasingly strange.
I'm not sure if the report meant any of this when they mentioned "clustering related content" and "controlled vocabulary."
Jim
Received on Tue Dec 08 2009 - 12:39:58 EST