Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
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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.
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Perhaps it's because I am in Rome that I get concerned about losing knowledge. There was so much knowledge lost when Rome fell, and these things that survived, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and so on were considered by the people of the Middle Ages to be almost miraculous created by a race of gods. It was centuries before something similar could be built again. While you may be right, my own opinion is that it is far too early to give up completely on the attempt of conceptual cataloging. People have been able to organize resources for access by concept for millennia now, using far less sophisticated tools than we have, and we must keep this in mind. Take a look at the wonderful "The Day the Universe Changed" by James Burke, now at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZC-abOGRug where he discusses how an index works. I wonder how many people know this today? Here's another where he discusses problems of cataloging, still quite valid. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lumD7rzBGVM
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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.
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Perhaps I'm crazy, but I still think we can do both. In my experience, while people do not want to be dictated to, they want and need help, and instead of looking at it as "our way is the BEST way," ("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?") we should look at the task more as one of experts at organization of knowledge (which we are) helping others to find things in a reliable way.
After all, don't we want people to find things about World War I that were published before 1938?
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258
fax-011 39 06 58330992
Received on Tue Jan 19 2010 - 11:01:19 EST