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I just returned from a quick visit to a local bookstore. Actually, I've been to several bookstores in the last week and am surprised about some of the shelving decisions that were made. Here are two.
The Day-Glo Brothers, written by Chris Barton and illustrated by Tony Persani - You could put this one in biography or even science and I'd be really happy with that decision. I finally found it in the ART section.
The Monsterologist: A Memoir in Rhyme, written by Bobbi Katz and illustrated by Adam McCauley - This one is pure poetry and a perfect read for Halloween, yet I didn't find it in the Halloween displays or the poetry section. I found it shelved with books on dragons and other -ologies, like Wizardology, Spyology, etc..
I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones that stood out. How about you? Have you found books shelved/displayed in odd places lately?
1 Comments on Shelving Decisions I'll Never Understand, last added: 10/30/2009
The Monsterologist is also in the Cybils as a YA SFF... and having not read it, I can't say it's utterly wrong, but the more reviews I hear? The more I'm sure of it. It should b in either poetry or MG SFF, at the very least...
Data junkie? Obsessive compulsive? Come to the Freebase hack day on July 11, 2009 here in SF. There’s food, drinks, an excellent network, plenty of powercords, and a nice room full of geeks to chat with.
It’s a fun way to dive a bit deeper into making cooldatamashups, relationally documenting your brain contents, and getting your questions answered by actually standing in front of Metaweb developers and staring at them until they make go.
Drop me a note if you are going. :)
-Erica
0 Comments on Freebase Hack Day II: The Return of Hack Day as of 6/23/2009 7:12:00 PM
I have an information science degree. I’ve been working for fourteen years, my entire adult life. Most of my jobs have been in libraries.
I am a librarian. I am not a librarian.
photo by emdot
As a student at Michigan State University, I learned Library of Congress serials cataloging.
I walked through secluded aisles surrounded by rare books, incunabulum, alternative newspapers, and gay pornography.
I cataloged comic books in the world’s largest archive of comic art, radicalism, and popular culture.
In the course of my work, I learned that Spiderman serials change their volume as often as many Spiderman readers change their underwear. By graduation, I could walk into any comic shop in the country and pick a fight about whether X-Men film adaptations should be considered canon.
When I went to graduate school (Michigan ‘02), my program had recently transitioned from “Library Science” to “Information Science.” In the process, they picked up a bunch of renegade computer science professors and expanded to include information architecture, information economics, archival theory, and a bunch of crazyass dot com bubble refugees like myself.
photo by sh0dan
We discovered that the term Digital Library can be used to describe an entire array of cool shit, including the Internet itself.
One of my professors, Sue Davidson, tells the story of how Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang called to ask about the subject guide to the web she had created for the Michigan Electronic Library. Sue answered: “that’s what librarians do, we organize information.”
Librarianship, defined as the act of organizing information, is a broad and inclusive field. Librarianship as a profession, is not. There are strict professional guidelines determining who is and is not technically a “Librarian,” but there is also a strong case to be made for the authenticity of self-identification.
There are librarians who work in libraries, and there are librarians who just Are.
It’s the difference between being a Jew by Religion, and being a Jew by Ethnicity. Both groups contribute to the cultural whole.
While a Librarian by Profession is inherently a Librarian by Ethnicity, the opposite may not be true. A trained librarian can sport a different job title, but her clarity and understanding will still contribute to her work.
photo by Syntopia
I’m a librarian by ethnicity.
Right now, I work as a user experience designer on a software team. I wrestle with ship dates, dependencies, conflicting user requirements, and engineering constraints. I design interfaces and help identify how the software should behave.
But somewhere, deep in my soul, I am doing the work of the Library.
I’m a librarian by ethnicity, regardless of the job I take. I don’t make my living as an ALA going, patron-helping organizer of resources, but I’ll be damned if I don’t use Librarian skills to battle confusing groupings of information.
Librarians bring order to chaos, and so, with a little luck, do I.
1 Comments on Ethnically Librarian, last added: 1/17/2009
Bolster your collection with recent and high-quality books and increase visibility with paperback copies. On top of our usual collection development based on new book reviews, we purchased a number of backlist titles to round out our collection, especially in the junior high paperback section.
Make a recommended reading list of GLBTQ books. Our "Gay and Lesbian Books for Young People" list is now available in the library and on our website.
Make queer books visible in a non-stigmatizing way. In addition to making more of an effort to include GLBTQ books in our junior high fiction displays, we made two special displays highlighting our offerings: "Different Families/Same Love" and "Just Be Yourself."
Improve access through the library catalog. That's what we're starting to work on now, in what I'm calling My Big Fat Queer Cataloging Project.
In my original post, I described some of the problems with current catalog subject headings for GLBTQ materials. I won't rehash them now, but instead I'll describe the basic steps I'm following.
Print out the catalog records for all books on the GLBTQ list.
Study current Library of Congress queer subject headings, identifying those most applicable to the books in our collection. I found two very helpful lists of headings, a (slightly older) alphabetical list from Dartmouth and a (more recent) topical list from Emory.*
Identify specific headings that apply to each book and would improve access through library catalog searches.
When in doubt, read the book to make that determination.
Suggest additions to our cataloging staff.
Parsimony is a huge deal in cataloging, sometimes to the point of stinginess, in part because time was you could only assign a set number of subject headings to an item. This is no longer the case, fortunately, so we can add subject headings without taking any of the current ones away.
Still, you don't want to dump a bunch of headings on an item. At least, I don't. Which means you need to try and pick the best headings, the ones that are just the right level of generality or specificness, the ones that best match what patrons are searching for with what they actually want. The additional headings I've most frequently suggested so far are "gay youth," "lesbian youth," and "children of gay parents."
My assumption is that patrons looking for these books are more likely to search for "gay" than "gays" (yes, the catalog search engine really is that picky) or "homosexuality," which is how most of these items are currently cataloged. A subject search for "gay" will turn up a crapload of books, including those about "gay youth," "gay teenagers," "gay high school students," "gay parents," and gay everything else. But at least the books won't totally fall through the cracks.
I'm less sure about "lesbian youth," and I would love people's opinions on this one. Should a book about "lesbian youth" also get a "lesbians" subject heading (same picky search engine problem)? Should it get a "gay youth" heading as well?
*For those of you who don't know much about cataloging, the Library of Congress is continually creating new official subject headings. If a new book comes along that doesn't fit the current subject headings, they'll create a new heading that does. (It's not quite that simple, but that's the general idea.)
Anyway, sometimes you'll be frustrated that there isn't that "perfect" subject heading for the book at hand. Other times you wonder what-the-heck book prompted the need for such a weird and specific subject heading. Some examples I turned up today:
Astrology and homosexuality
Gay labor union members
Lesbian Girl Scouts
Lesbians on postage stamps (also Gay men on postage stamps)
and, near and dear to me, Bisexual librarians.
0 Comments on My Big Fat Queer Cataloging Project as of 12/10/2008 6:41:00 PM
While cataloging today, I came across an old copy of Time Magazine from November 19, 1945. This ad amuses me to no end. And now you can enjoy it too.
Moral of this blog: Happy National Coming out day. (even thought that's not today, but soon enough)
0 Comments on Entendre, Double as of 10/3/2008 7:10:00 PM
I’ve always thought that one of the troubles with librarianship was that there are always more great ideas and projects than anyone has time for or can get funding for. As a result we outsource projects to the people who have time and money and thus lose control over the end product. I have no idea if Library Thing’s open source Open Shelves Classification Project is going to wind up looking like a library product or a vendor product, but I’m curious to find out. As Tim Spalding says “You won’t be paid anything, but, hey, there’s probably a paper or two in it, right?” I haven’t seen much chatter, blog or otherwise, about this just yet but I’ll be keeping my eyes open. Whether or not this project it ultimately successful, I think it’s an interesting grass rootsy way of looking at ideas of authority and rejecting the top down let-us-have-you-contribute-and-then-sell-it-back-to-you models we’ve been working under.
15 Comments on open shelves classification - a project in search of a leader, last added: 7/10/2008
» open shelves classification - a project in sear said, on 7/9/2008 2:14:00 PM
[…] can read the rest of this blog post by going to the original source, here […]
Dawn Loomis said, on 7/9/2008 6:30:00 PM
If you want chatter look at autocat archives, as they have been talking non-stop about it.
Tim said, on 7/9/2008 10:45:00 PM
And mostly with hostility. Meanwhile, on LibraryThing or, say, among the Open Library people, almost ever one is in favor of it. There’s some sort of sad lesson there. What you hear is too much about where you’re hanging out…
Scot Colford said, on 7/9/2008 11:16:00 PM
And there is another wonderful lesson in there, Tim. You need to completely define the problem you are trying to solve before you pose it.
And I say that out of love. Really.
Scot Colford said, on 7/9/2008 11:18:00 PM
Oh, that went through! Well, anyway, I’m glad to share more thoughts with you if you want to get a hold of me, Tim. (Passive-agressive, I know, but I’m doing 4 jobs at the present.)
Tim said, on 7/9/2008 11:35:00 PM
Bullshit.
Wikipedia. PHP. Perl. Democracy.
Ryan Deschamps said, on 7/9/2008 11:38:00 PM
Deschamps’s First Law of Innovation:
If an idea is on the right track, the problems will begin to proclaim their existence.
Deschamps’s Second Law of Innovation:
All problems are people problems.
Scot Colford said, on 7/10/2008 12:13:00 AM
Um, whoa. Thanks for working toward a consensus. Eek.
Tim said, on 7/10/2008 1:20:00 AM
Sorry, but this carping is just pathetic. Yes I started a project without knowing fully what it was for and how it should work. I thought it might be useful to see what other people thought.
I’m not speaking of OSC. I’m speaking of LibraryThing, and it’s currently employing nine people—three of them librarians. We figured it out as we went along. And that was *good*.
You do NOT need to “completely define the problem you are trying to solve before you pose it.” That is an excuse to do nothing. It is, in a word, bullshit.
Scot Colford said, on 7/10/2008 9:14:00 AM
Tim, I’m not sure why you call my comment “carping”. Perhaps you’ve confused it with other comments you’ve read elsewhere.
My point is that your call for action confuses classification schemes, subject thesauri, and folksonomies. It’s not clear which you’re trying to build and they are distinctly different.
But calling another’s well-meant criticism “bullshit” won’t make you any friends. Good luck with the project.
K.G. Schneider said, on 7/10/2008 9:40:00 AM
Hey… Tim… ouch… these are people on your page. I had to say when I read it I thought, this is a fly-by idea. You have many of these and I don’t mind reading them; sometimes they’re quite interesting. But you’re lashing out at people who are now doing what you want them to do: turn the ideas over in their head, run ‘em up the flagpole and see who salutes ‘em, etc.
Tim said, on 7/10/2008 10:41:00 AM
Karen,
The sentence I was responding to was: “You need to completely define the problem you are trying to solve before you pose it.”
It would follow that I should not have posed this topic—that I should have shut up and that asking people to develop an idea “in the open” shouldn’t be attempted. That is the opposite of running things up the flagpole, or turning ideas over, and therefore the opposite of both reasoned discussion and what libraries need.
My general opinion - I love projects that develop organically like this. Experiment, explore, discuss, change things mid-stream until they work, then change them again when you discover another way they can work. It’s exciting and creative and will shake things up. Will it be a success? Dunno yet. But it will definitely be a fun trip!
Scot can speak for himself here, but I believe we have patched this over. Apparently I misunderstood what he was saying. Although I’m not quite sure how, I’m sure this was a misunderstanding.
I do apologize for the language. I have been getting it rather hard from various quarters. This would be fine if it were about ideas, but I am offended by constant necessity to imply I am an ignoramus—that I don’t know the difference between tagging and classification, and have never looked into the history of the field. Having spent two years obsessed with these issues, this line of attack just ticks me off. Good grief, I’ve personally interviewed the catalogers at the Athenaeum and Forbes Library, and a scholar of dead classifications, to understand the Cutter Classification better. Give me some credit, at least until there is some solid evidence.
I also liked the suggestion that I take the time to read David Weinberger The latter ticked me off something fierce. I not only had one of the first ARCs, but I’ve read it three times, have two separately underlined copies, ordered a case of the book and gave them out at librarians at conferences and have had extensive online and off with David. He even sent me draft articles to comment on.
But sometimes I should try humor instead of sleen. My wife suggested “I got his numbah. How do you like them apples?”
Chris said, on 7/10/2008 3:58:00 PM
It seems to me that the ongoing RDA process (I almost said “death spiral”) is a fine example of what happens when you try to anticipate all of the implications of a major change before you start working on it. It satisfies neither traditionalists nor the Web 2.0 crowd, which probably means it qualifies as a successful negotiation…but doesn’t answer to anyone’s aspirations.
took a stab at writing a Wikipedia stub on one of my favorite Second Life locations, Caledon, the steampunk/Victorian sim. I’m a Wikipedia n00b, and my stub got flagged for deletion (rightly) due to a lack of notable references.
Any of you SL-lovin’ librarians out there wanna take a crack at improving it?
Someone asked me during one of my talks if I knew of any projects that were actually trying to open source cataloging records and the idea of authority records. I said I didn’t, not really. It’s a weird juxtaposition, the idea of authority and the idea of a collaborative project that anyone can work on and modify. I knew there were some folks at the Internet Archive working on something along those lines, but the project was under wraps for quite some time. Now, it’s not. Its called Open Library and it’s in demo mode. You can examine it and I encourage you to do that and give lots of feedback to the developers. Make sure to check the “about the librarianship” page
Imagine a library that collected all the world’s information about all the world’s books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We’re building that library.
How cool! I just sent an e-mail offering up our unique local history records, and would encourage other out-of-the-way libraries with special collections to do the same. What a wonderful alternative to WorldCat!
You know it’s true. I’ve known Eli Jacobowitz since before he was born and now he’s a smartie techie type with a newish blog about technology and education. Though he admits “IANAL”, he has written a nice post about why cataloging both sucks and rules and talks about the future of cataloging in a world where there is much much more information than there is “trained professionals” to help people make sense of it. Ultimately, the answer lies in standards, and this librarians already know.
Eventually, robots might catalog for us. (Librarians shudder.) What we now know is just how far away that is - bot catalogers will need much better AI than currently exists. But in order for this project to even be possible, we have to make our data bot-readable. That means implementing some of the cataloging technologies invented and refined by librarians over the centuries.
We need to standardize meta-data format and content. Digital resources need not only meta-data but also meta-meta-data describing the standards they conform with. Catalog and search solutions need to read this information and pass it on when communicating with other systems.
I read a lot of blogs, but I don’t always follow through and read their links. I appreciate it when people whose opinions I trust can summarize long things for me. Sometimes I sumarize those things for other people. Tonight I am reading the twenty-four page report More on What is Going on at the Library of Congress prepared for AFSCME 2910 by Thomas Mann. You can find it linked off of this page, if you really like reading these sorts of things.
He makes a lot of interesting points that other scholarly types have been trying to make in more clunky fashion for quite some time. In short, libraries that still exist for the purpose of furthering scholarship are having a harder time doing it, both because of the shift towards electronic reources and the “it’s all on Google” mentality but also because our own institutions (LoC I am looking in your direction) seem to want to actively dismantle some of the better tools we have for organizing and accessing knowledge. I’m just pulling out a small part of this, but really you should go read the whole thing. Some peopel might take umbrage, but one of my favorite things about this particular presentation of the issues is that Mann really seems to have a well-researched opinion that he wants to get across without insulting anyone, having a hissyfit, or saying that other people are losers or idiots. It’s clear that he has a take on things, one that others would disagree with, but he lets his metaphors and ideas speak for themselves, even as he’s responding to people who I assume were disagreeing with his last paper on the subject.
The Continuing Need for Reference Librarians
What catalogs and portals cannot do, however, what classified bookstacks cannot do, what Internet search engines cannot do, what federated searching cannot do–these things can be done by reference librarians who, far beyond the capacity of any “under the hood programming,” are able to provide researchers with expert guidance on the full range of options available to them for their particular topics, in an intelligent sequence of use, with the best search options and sources segregated from thousands of blind alleys, dead ends, and mountains of unwanted irrelevancies.
Reference work, in other words, is not just a nice “add on” optional service; in its dual function of providing point-of-use instruction and overview classes it is integral to the efficient use of research libraries and to the promotion of scholarship in general. It cannot be replaced by “under the hood” programming improvements in library catalogs or portals, especially when such programming dumbs down multiple complex systems to a lowest common denominator of keyword searching–and also fails to search the vast arrays of resources that are not digitized at all.
I am a member of a library lecture series committee, and we met last week to discuss topics/speakers for this year’s event. The other committee members are mostly library-friendly doctors and faculty, and one of them earnestly asked the question, “What is the future of libraries now that everything is available online? Will there be a physical library in the future? Will there be librarians?” The discussion that followed that question really opened my eyes to how those outside LibraryLand (even library-friendlies) will mistake expanded access to information via the Web with the conclusion of the mission of librarians and libraries.
VALIS » Blog Archive » Roundup: Outre said, on 1/25/2007 10:07:00 PM
[…] Jessamyn West summarises Thomas Mann’s paper More on What is Going on at the Library of Congress, including a section explaining that technology cannot replace reference librarians. Which is a relief […]
The Monsterologist is also in the Cybils as a YA SFF... and having not read it, I can't say it's utterly wrong, but the more reviews I hear? The more I'm sure of it. It should b in either poetry or MG SFF, at the very least...