Readings for Week 4, Part II

Michael Buckland, Information as Thing

I found Buckland’s discussion of documents interesting. We talked about the difference between a document and a record in another of my classes recently, and concluded that “document” is the broader term, but we didn’t extend it so far as to include three-dimensional objects… or at least our discussion didn’t bring us that far. I’m a little uncomfortable with the quote from Otlet (the “founder of the documentation movement”) in which even people are included as documents. Buckland settles on the antelope as a better example, and I agree with him that it’s a tricky (and humorous) situation. In the end, I’m inclined to take a narrower view of information. I’d prefer not to classify lumber or stovewood as information (page 356). If the definition of information is somewhat blurry, and all seem to agree that it is, maybe it’s okay (and expected) that its contents are also ill-defined.

Hope Olson, The Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs

I honestly hadn’t given any thought to controlled vocabulary and subject headings and how it influences the way we search for (or, more accurately, find) books. I agree with Olson that there are some things we should be doing, but I don’t know that I agree with just how strongly she states her position. It seems to me, in my very limited library knowledge, that controlled vocabulary is a useful tool and one that we shouldn’t dispense with (I don’t think she’s arguing with me yet) and that it’s an unfortunate, inherent side effect of using it that books are necessarily grouped and simplified. Not only books about black feminist theater, but any book that straddles several topics (a Wisconsin knitter’s cookbook, for example—I’m sure somebody’s writing one). A librarian has to choose whether to shelve the book with Wisconsin or with knitting or with cooking (or with books on black people or feminism or theater) and some sort of hierarchy has to be established. We all hope that the conscious librarian will choose to highlight the book some other way, if possible, maybe by including it on a reading list or in a special display in the library. In an ideal world without budget or space constraints, we’d put copies on all of the shelves whose topics the book covers.

The physical problem seems to me to be a necessary evil, but it seems to me that we could be doing more to make electronic catalogs more accurate and more searchable. I do agree that we need to be more liberal in adding new headings to the collection. There’s no reason why we can’t have a “Voice--Self-Expression” heading, or one for Representation. I particularly liked Olson’s idea of skipping the intervening instruction (USE ______) and allowing more than one authoritative heading for a subject.