Well, actually, there is work going on that I would suggest is pretty
close to mapping knowledge. Take a look at Jolande Goldberg's handout
for a presentation last year on her work on the LCC schedule for the law
of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas:
http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/annualmeeting/2009/handouts/indigenous2009-goldberg-handout.pdf
A description of the project shows where this goes past our traditional
notion of classification:
"Because so much of the important current primary and secondary
literature in this field exists only in the “deep Web,” a
classification schedule that meets current needs must address the
gap between availability and accessibility of information. For the
first time, Web resources are being used for content formulation and
the terminology of the schedule. The goal is to make the online
classification a direct tool or “portal” for content search on the
Web." *http://www.llmc.com/Newsletter/Issue40_March_2010.pdf
I've seen demos of what Jolande is doing with this and it's very
exciting, and from a recent conversation with her I gleaned that this
approach is being considered for revisions of other schedules. Given
that much of our older material is already classified using LCC, we
already have a head start. The sad thing is that most digital items are
not being classified in most libraries as a 'cost saving'
measure--something I've long thought was a terrible idea.
Diane
On 12/24/10 10:32 AM, Karen Coyle wrote:
> Quoting Alexander Johannesen<alexander.johannesen_at_GMAIL.COM>:
>
>
>> So, here's the thing. Why aren't you mapping knowledge?
> This is something that frustrates me greatly, but it also seems to be
> a huge problem of communication within our profession. Library
> cataloging, although it calls itself "description and access" is about
> describing "things" (books, CDs, DVDs) and making it possible to find
> those things. But there is very little action in libraries around
> helping users get to information, or to discover the informational
> relationships that those things represent. It's like we've stopped at
> the inventory level of the catalog, and haven't gone on to the
> knowledge level. We spend more time trying to figure out what the
> proper title is than creating knowledge organization. Look at all of
> the energy going to RDA -- and how little is going to replacing LCSH,
> or to investigating new ways to provide information discovery.
>
> It seems so obvious to me that we are still primarily working on 19th
> century problems ("What books does my library have?") when we should
> be serving 21st century users.
>
> kc
>
>
Received on Fri Dec 24 2010 - 11:17:43 EST