On Jan 19, 2010, at 6:47 AM, Weinheimer Jim wrote:
> In my experience, I think a fundamental idea is being lost among the populace: that a well-organized catalog truly allows searching for *concepts*".... When people type in e.g., "wwi" into a box, it doesn't follow that they realize that they are searching the *text* "wwi" and not the *concept* of that war that took place from 1914-1918. So, when I have pointed this out to people, they are shocked that by typing "wwi" into the box, they miss-by definition-anything before 1938, because nobody called it WWI until there was WWII.
Especially in our globally networked environment, where the numbers of people is so much greater than size of a college or university, the idea of creating a catalog of concepts is, IMHO, untenable.
The history of philosophy and the history of science are full of attempts to classify the world around us -- to turn the apparent chaos of observation into a cosmos of reality. We look at our surroundings and seek out patterns. From these patterns we draw conclusions. And from these conclusions we make generalizations. The generalizations work, for a while, but there are always exceptions. Mammals have hair, are warm-blooded, and do not lay eggs. But what how do we classify the platypus? Hmm... Invariably, social revolutions, technological discoveries, or natural catastrophes take place and the fragile cosmos comes tumbling down. Consider the notion of leadership. Kings. Queens. Divine rights. Compare that with the American Revolution and the birth of a republic of states. Consider a geo-centric universe. Upon initial observation it makes perfect sense, but as Galileo turned is magnifying glass towards the stars he saw things in a different light, literally. Consider the use!
of mathematics to objectively describe phenomenon compared with social doctrine to set norms. Consider the earthquake in Haiti and how it is changing their view of the proper way to bury people, or not.
The cosmoses we create are not necessarily right or wrong. They serve useful ends. They make life easier, provide us with foundations and a sense of order, but they are not permanent and more importantly, they do not scale. It is easy to create such apparent order when your group is relatively small, but as the amount of data grows, as the numbers of people with individual perceptions and tools of their own increases the cosmos breaks down. I do not think it is feasible for us -- the library profession -- to classify the world of data, information, and knowledge into a set of concepts that is useful for audiences on a global scale. There are too many cosmoses to choose from. I also think such an idea is a bit presumptuous. Who are we to say that this thing (book, journal, journal article, video, butterfly, Internet resource, etc.) is best classified with this concept, that concept, or the other concept? The Internet and the flattening of hierarchies is changing the role of c!
ontrolled vocabularies -- the embodiment of our concepts. We need to think differently in this regard.
I think "'next-generation' library catalogs" ought to enable the user to create their own cosmos from its included content, not the other way around.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
University of Notre Dame
(574) 631-8604
Received on Tue Jan 19 2010 - 10:35:41 EST