Competency G
Understand the system of standards and methods used to control and create information structures and apply basic principles involved in the organization and representation of knowledge
Utilizing and understanding the underlying Information structures that form the services in our lives is important for current and future librarians. The modern world utilizes many systems and classifications of information to run more efficiently. The concepts and principles that librarians are most proficient in are in the same territory as the work of companies seeking to organize, present, and explain the vast sets of information that is at their hands. Librarians are considered the arbiter of rules about book and media cataloging.
This background in library science has allowed me to understand the principles behind many other organizational structures. Library science is about organization but it is also about the usability of that organizational style. Librarians are service workers for the public and work to allow their patrons to find the information they are looking for with ease. I believe that library science will extend to the modern tools that technology companies use and offer to the public. Databases, metadata, cataloging information, controlled vocabularies, and information management are all topics that are dominant in different technical fields. In particular I believe that the human emphasis and ethical guidelines established by the ALA presents librarians as the most well-rounded and knowledgeable in navigating the full impact of new technologies and providing them to the public.
Through organizations such as ALA and IFLA cataloging rules have developed such as the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules and the International Standard Bibliographic Description that have served to cataloging books easier. Other systems of organization exist to manage a growing repository of information. The importance of being a librarian is learning about the different rules and guides that govern information structures and developing new ideas to apply to organizing information in new ways. Librarians were the original database creators at first creating indexes of books and catalogs and moving to media.
Through my coursework especially in LIBR 248 I learned about the many rules governing kinds of media and applying the AACR2 rules to those items to create a machine readable cataloging code. The library database began with card catalogs and computers have eased development of databases with an assortment of different features make information richer. For a library catalog one must take into account when making a MARC record authority lists, controlled vocabulary lists, and the meta-data of the item. In my first example we learned the information structures that govern a MARC record and how to accurately apply our knowledge of cataloging by copy cataloging a record from one library database to another that lacked specific knowledge of other fields. It was interesting to learn that different cataloguers may decide to include meta-data from a piece of media or enter it in a different way.
While the rules of the AACR2 are specific there was still room for variety and variable data. Different cataloguers may choose to include or exclude different information or place it in different fields of the MARC record. Copy cataloging is a potential way to use the information found from other library databases and allowed me to understand how much extra information could be beneficial to a patron. The basics of information science are important not just for cataloging of books and other types of media but for building databases of all types of digital information. One modern example that librarians could use their skills is the meta-data that the Google Books project has inherited from scanning millions of books. The problem lies in the fact that Google focuses on scanning solely book content just like it does the web. However, just as much information about the books that are not included in between the sleeves. The article by Laura Miller explains that Google has an incredible content but much of the meta-data is not correct. Though Google uses multiple sources of meta-data catalogs to match up with their scanned books even still there is a great amount of mix up with this data. This is one task that an army of cataloguers and historians could work on to create the type of digital library Google could offer. In this type of task there is a mixture of copy cataloging and original cataloging as there is a gigantic backlog of books that do not have modern bibliographic control applied to their records. In my example of original cataloging of DVD entitled the Beer Hunter I learned that there is a little more uncertainty when creating an entirely new record and I believe that librarians have the eye for detail that the Google book project and many other projects could use.
The internet is another example of utilizing information structures to offer access to databases. In my LIBR 246 course on PHP and MYSQL I learned to develop a program that interacted with a database. In this case it was a calculator that would record one’s bills and calculate total expenses. The process to develop the program was similar to other classes in developing a database and thinking of the records like MARC records based on the rules laid down by the programs requirements. In the process of that class I was able to learn how to manipulate user entered information into the webpage and have PHP script connect to the database and write the records onto the server. From there the program would read the records back from the server and write it to the webpage. What I learned the most from this exercise is that skills developed by the MLIS program are transferable to not only the modern public library but many different organizations that need web applications running in conjunction with a database.
Specifically what I have learned is that I am able to adapt to learning a long list and variety of rules and apply those to a piece of work. Through working with cataloging I was able to use the tools of authority lists and controlled vocabulary to create records that were correct and easily searchable based on the audience of the database. Through the development of a web application calculator I learned the importance of how a user facing website interacts with user uploaded data and how to develop an information schema that allowed the program to work in an effective way.
Beer Hunter MARC copy cataloging
References
Miller, Laura. (2010). The trouble with Google Books. Retrieved from http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/09/09/google_books/index.html