Information organization Week 2 Lecture notes INF 380E: Perspectives on Information Spring 2015 Karen Wickett UT School of Information

A cornerstone of the library perspective “Bibliographic control is the organization of library materials to facilitate discovery, management, identification, and access.” –

Core Library Activities Identify, acquire, preserve, and provide access to the world's published knowledge Promote equity of access to information Promote intellectual freedom Support education and continuous learning and research Support the development of information literacy in society Serve as focal points for communities and promote community interests

Information Organization (Svenonius) “Organizing information would seem to be no different from organizing anything else.... But there are important differences. One that is particularly important, because it is at the root of many of the complexities unique to organizing information, is that two distinct entities need to be organized in tandem and with respect to each other: works and the documents that embody them. – from The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization by E. Svenonius

Svenonius ‘The essential and defining objective of a system for organizing information, then, is to bring essentially like information together and to differentiate what is not exactly alike.’ – Sometimes referred to as “collocation”.

What is information organization? The creation of a system – that lets people do things find, manage, select, locate, obtain – with things that carry information an intellectual or creative work a text in a specific language a file with a specific format a physical item

What kind of system? A system that represents things that carry information In a way that lets us meet our objectives for accessing information

Bibliographic systems The library solution to information organization is the catalog Catalogs have increased in complexity over time in response to changes in – technology for making catalogs book lists to card catalogs to machine readable cards to databases to … – technology for making and accessing information resources printed books to microforms to electronic resources – expectations for the genres a library will hold reference and classics to fiction … to comic books, video games, movies sheet music to recordings

Bibliographic Records A bibliographic record represents an information resource in a library catalog – sometimes referred to as a surrogate A record consists of a number of fields that are used to describe a resource – this kind of record is a container for information about a resource

Resource Description Activity

Types of Data Standards: structure Data structure standards – metadata element sets, schemas. “categories” or “containers” of data that make up a record or other information object. Examples – The set of MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging format) fields – Encoded Archival Description (EAD), – Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), – Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA)

MARC 21 record format A standardized record format for bibliographic data – a list of fields and subfields – including header fields that describe the record – a container for data a data encoding syntax example MARC Record in UT catalog

Types of data standards: value Data value standards – controlled vocabularies, thesauri, controlled lists. the terms, names, and other values that are used to populate data structure standards or metadata element sets. Examples – Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) – Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) – Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), – Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), – Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)

Vocabulary control “A controlled vocabulary is an organized arrangement of words and phrases used to index content and/or to retrieve content through browsing or searching. It typically includes preferred and variant terms and has a defined scope or describes a specific domain.” – Values for certain fields in a bibliographic record will come from a controlled vocabulary – Subject headings – Authors

Authority files and authority records “a set of established names or headings and cross-references to the preferred form from variant of alternate forms.” –Getty “An authority record is a tool used by librarians to establish forms of names (for persons, places, meetings, and organizations), titles, and subjects used on bibliographic records. Authority records enable librarians to provide uniform access to materials in library catalogs and to provide clear identification of authors and subject headings. For example, works about "movies," "motion pictures," "cinema," and "films" are all entered under the established subject heading "Motion pictures.” –

Types of data standards: content Data content standards – cataloging rules and codes. guidelines for the format and syntax of the data values that are used to populate metadata elements. examples – Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), Resource Description and Access (RDA), – International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) – Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO) – Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS)

Cataloging Rules MARC is a record format, a container for bibliographic data (roughly, data syntax) But it doesn’t say how to get the values that go into the fields of a record (data semantics) This comes from a content standard for bibliographic data – i.e. a set of cataloging rules – Resource Description and Access (RDA) is the current standard, and was informed by the FRBR model – Much current catalog data was created with AACR2

Types of data standards: format/technical interchange Data format/technical interchange standards (metadata standards expressed in machine-readable form). often a manifestation of a particular data structure standard encoded or marked up for machine processing. examples – MARC21, MARCXML – EAD XML DTD – CDWA Lite XML schema, – Simple Dublin Core XML schema – VRA Core 4.0 XML schema

Principles of Description Cataloging content standards (like AACR2 and RDA) are based on directives that guide the construction of the representations that make up a bibliographic system. These principles are based on the perceived objectives for bibliographic systems.

Principles of description (Svenonius) Principle of user convenience – Design decisions should be made with the user in mind. – Includes the Principle of common usage vocabulary used in descriptions should accord with that of a majority of users Principle of representation – Descriptions should be based on the way an information entity describes itself – Includes Principle of accuracy Descriptions should faithfully portray the entity described.

Principles of description (con’t) Principle of sufficiency and necessity – Descriptions should be sufficient to achieve stated objectives and not include elements not required for those purposes. – Includes Principle of significance Descriptions should include only those elements that are bibliographically significant. Principle of standardization – Descriptions should be standardized, to the extent and level possible Principle of integration – Descriptions for all types of materials should be based on a common set of rules, to the extent possible

Discuss in groups of 2 or 3 Svenonius states "The content contained in ephemeral messages—such as the casual "Have a nice day!"—lies outside the domain of information systems. Do you agree? Can you think of counterexamples? What are some advantages and disadvantages on either side of this question?

Discuss in groups of 2 or 3 Are user-generated or crowdsourced metadata good solutions to constraints on creating information organization systems? – What are some potential problems? How could they be addressed? – Are their certain genres where this might work better or worse?