025.431: The Dewey blog

CENDI/NKOS Workshop 2009

Last week, Juli Beall and I attended an all-day workshop on “Knowledge Organization Systems:  Managing to the Future,” sponsored jointly by CENDI and the NKOS (Networked Knowledge Organization Systems) Working Group.  (See the blog entry from last year’s workshop for background information on CENDI and NKOS.)  This year’s workshop was hosted by the National Agricultural Library.

The program was organized into three sections, with emphasis on different facets of  knowledge organization system (KOS) management:  (1) toward shared development, (2) toward interoperability, and (3) toward ontologies and the semantic web.  (Note how the inclusion of “toward” in the title of each section echoes the workshop subtitle—managing to the future—and indicates that each of these ventures is a “work in progress.”) 

One aspect of shared development is making information about knowledge organization systems widely available.  This subject was addressed in the presentation by Marjorie Hlava on Taxonomy ShareSpace, a terminology registry for controlled vocabularies.   Only a limited number of terminologies are currently documented in the registry; developers of thesauri, subject heading lists, taxonomies, ontologies, etc., are invited to contribute information. 

Interoperability was the theme receiving the most attention during the workshop.  Marcia Lei Zeng's presentation reported on ISO standard 25964.  Part 1 of the standard, currently in Draft International Standard stage, will replace standards from the mid-1980s on monolingual and multilingual thesauri; part 2 of the standard addresses interoperability of thesauri with other vocabularies and began development over the summer.  Especial attention was given to the issue of “nonsymmetrical multilingual thesauri.”  Lack of symmetry is not limited, of course, to knowledge organization systems in different languages.  Any mapping project we engage in runs up against this same problem:  there are different ways of organizing our perceptions of the world of recorded knowledge.  Indeed, a constant concern of the editorial team is to make sure we ferret out, on the one hand, and do not introduce, on the other hand, asymmetries within the DDC itself (except that a subject may be developed more deeply in one discipline than another, or in one language than another; the expressive notation used in the DDC renders this kind of asymmetry quite manageable).  (Asymmetry between knowledge organization systems was also a key reason why Willem Robert van Hage’s presentation, given as part of the ontologies and semantic web section, emphasized the benefits of aligning, rather than merging, ontologies.) The presentation by Thomas Baker focused on a set of levels of interoperability, geared toward the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, but also applicable in other contexts.  Study of his characterization of these levels should productively inform decisions on the degree of interoperability to be sought in specific situations. 

We should also note how gratified we were that Ed Summers’ presentation [8] on the use of SKOS in id.loc.gov, a web service that makes Library of Congress Subject Headings available as linked data, also highlighted dewey.info.

What is Knowledge Organization?

A special double issue of Knowledge Organization devoted to the question “What is Knowledge Organization?” has just been published as v. 35, nos. 2/3, of the journal—I co-edited it with Ia McIlwaine (former editor in chief of the Universal Decimal Classification [UDC]).  Six internationally known researchers contributed to the special issue, including our own Rebecca Green.  Topics addressed include the nature of the field of KO; epistemology, theory, and methodology in KO; relationships in KO; short- and long-term KO research questions; and KO systems.  The issue also features an interview with Ingetraut Dahlberg, founder of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) and the journal Knowledge Organization.  The table of contents and preface are available here.

ISKO will hold its 10th International Conference, “Culture and Identity in Knowledge Organization,” 5-8 August 2008, at the Université de Montréal.  Immediately preceding the conference in the same venue on 5 August, ISKO NA (the North American chapter of ISKO) and OCLC are co-sponsoring a workshop on terminologies, “Everything Need Not Be Miscellaneous: Controlled Vocabularies and Classification in a Web World.”  The detailed agenda for both meetings is available here.

Postscript: Janus views must be the rage this week—it has come to our attention that the Journal of Information Science has just published a special issue on the history of information science in the UK (v. 34, no.4).

"Be wise, standardise"

. . . is the motto of IGBIS, the Interest Group for Bibliographic Standards of the Library & Information Association of South Africa (LIASA).  The presentations from Knowledge Transfer for the Future, a one-day seminar sponsored by IGBIS and held in Durban on 24 August 2007, are available on the IGBIS web site. Speakers from South Africa, Switzerland, and the U.S. addressed standards, international cooperation, and emerging issues in description and access, name and subject authorities, the Dewey Decimal Classification, metadata, and digital imaging.

Resource Description and Access: A Cataloging Code for the Future (and related IFLA initiatives: FRBR, FRAD, IME ICC)  Dr. Barbara Tillett (Library of Congress)

South Africa Needs You: Why Your Library Should Become a NACO Member  Dr. Hester Marais (Unisa)

Viewpoint, Locality, and Universality in the DDC  Joan S. Mitchell (OCLC)

The Re-use of Subject Headings in Interoperability Projects: How to Add Value to Subject Headings  Patrice Landry (Swiss National Library)

Recent Developments in the DDC Joan S. Mitchell (OCLC)

SACO (Subject Authority Cooperative Program): What about a Follow Up of the “Kwaito” Success Story?  Welna van Eeden (Unisa)

Metadata . . . Where Are We Going?  Pat Liebetrau (Digital Imaging South Africa)

A side note: I made a last-minute addition to my first talk in response to something Justice Albie Sachs (Constitutional Court of South Africa) said earlier that week in his opening session address at the World Library and Information Congress (see here for a report on that conference). He talked about problems in finding materials on customary law, including the lack of a methodology to record customary law and the absence of forms of classification for customary law. I started thinking about how we treat the customary (traditional) law of South Africa in the DDC. We have a general number for comprehensive works on the traditional law of South Africa 340.5268 (340.52 from 340.524-340.529 Law of traditional societies in the modern world + T2—68 Republic of South Africa). Traditional law on a specific subject, e.g., inheritance and succession, is classed in the same number as the general law of South Africa on inheritance and succession, 346.68052 (built with 346 Private law + T2—68 Republic of South Africa + 052 from 346.052 Inheritance and succession, following the instructions under 342-347 Branches of law)—there is no way to show the “traditional law” aspect. I asked South African librarians to advise us on ways we might improve access to specific topics in traditional law in South Africa and elsewhere.

IFLA 2007 Highlights

Joan and I attended the World Library and Information Congress (73rd IFLA General Conference and Council), Durban, South Africa, 17-24 August 2007.  In addition to individual meetings with DDC translation teams and other DDC users, we attended a number of committee meetings and conference sessions.  The first two days of the conference were devoted to board and committee meetings; the conference program itself started on Sunday, 26 August, with an opening session that explored South African culture through several lenses.  The highlight of the opening session was the talk by Justice Albie Sachs of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.  We were both in awe of being in the presence of someone who risked so much for the cause of human rights—in addition to being imprisoned in South Africa, Justice Sachs also lost an arm and eye to a bomb planted by South African agents when he was living in exile in Mozambique.  Joan was struck by a side comment he made concerning the treatment of customary (traditional) law in libraries.  She will have more to say about this when she returns from vacation next week.

There were hundreds of presentations during the conference—we’ve selected a few that might be of interest to readers of this blog.  The Web 2.0 / Library 2.0 movement was definitely a hot topic.  Patrick Danowski (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) characterized the movement as linking people and information with interactive and open services that promote user contributions and feedback.  He described the linking of personal names in the German Wikipedia with the German name authority file, and challenged the usefulness of existing library classification schemes for Web 2.0 applications (we didn’t agree with him!). He has also started a new special interest group within IFLA to discuss Web 2.0 / Library 2.0 concerns.  In "Don’t Turn Off the Lights, Yet!" Caroline Brazier (British Library) discussed the opportunities for libraries in Web 2.0, and gave some examples of how the British Library is taking library services to the users, and harnessing user knowledge and experience to shape library services. 

In the session sponsored by the Section on Classification and Indexing, two of the papers were also relevant to the Library 2.0 discussion in that they focused on tagging.  Jonathan Furner (UCLA and our former colleague proposed a taxonomy of user tagging systems and a framework for evaluating the impact of tagging.  Sarah Hayman (education.au) reviewed experiences with tagging and controlled vocabularies within Education Network Australia (edna.edu.au).  She noted that "tags may over-represent the dominant view." 

The two other talks in the same session might also be of interest to blog readers.  James Turner (Université de Montréal) discussed the use of audio description text for indexing films.  L. Sulistyo-Basuki (Universitas Indonesia) made a plea for better representation of Indonesia’s geographic areas, historical periods, and languages in the DDC.  He had missed our new development for Indonesia in August 2006; he has agreed to work with us on future improvements.

At the program sponsored by the Division of Bibliographic Control, Ina Fourie (University of Pretoria) discussed bibliographic control in South Africa from an interesting perspective—instead of detailing the current status of use of various standards in South Africa (see here for a review from two years ago by Welna van Eeden on that topic), Dr. Fourie noted the drop off in the journal literature on the topic and wondered if discussions were happening outside of the professional literature and therefore might be undocumented and lost to future researchers.

There were two excellent sessions on national bibliographies.  In the one sponsored by the Section on Bibliography, Amadou Békaye Sidibé (Bibliothèque nationale du Mali) outlined the status of national bibliographies across Africa. According to his study, four use the Universal Decimal Classification; the rest are organized using the DDC (see comment below about South Africa).  Some issues affecting the production of national bibliographies in Africa include the status as ISBN/ISSN agency, absence or insufficient application of legal deposit laws, acquisitions budgets, equipment, and recruitment and training of staff.  Susan Battison (National Library of South Africa) reviewed the history of the South Africa National Bibliography (SANB) from 1993 to the present day.  Dewey was used to organize SANB from 1958 through mid-2006, at which time a decision was made to scale back on subject access and discontinue assignment of DDC to records (in a private conversation with Joan, Susan noted that this decision may be reconsidered at a later date).  Paul Zulu (National Library of Namibia) described the history of the national bibliography in Namibia and current challenges.  He echoed the earlier speakers in noting issues related to qualified staff, legal deposit, and ISBN/ISSN status (the national library is an ISBN agency but not an ISSN agency).

Another program on national bibliographies was sponsored by three IFLA sections: Bibliography, National Libraries, and Classification and Indexing.  Ingrid Parent (Library and Archives Canada) discussed the importance of and challenges to national bibliographies in the digital age—the continuing importance of national bibliographies as a permanent record of the publishing output of a country and the challenges of providing authoritative descriptions for the large quantities of digital materials being acquired.  Should national bibliographies seek partners in the spirit of Web 2.0?  Maja Žumer (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) spoke of the "Guidelines for National Bibliographies in the Digital Age" (new name) being developed by the Working Group on Guidelines for (Electronic) National Bibliographies (previous name).  The working group hopes to have a document available for world-wide review by the end of 2007.  Patrice Landry (Swiss National Library) described the complementary Working Group on Guidelines for Subject Access by National Bibliographic Agencies, which is currently considering the elements that should be included in a comprehensive indexing policy and which hopes to have recommendations in 2008.

Metadata registries

The 10^th International Forum on Metadata Registries met in New York City, July 9-11, 2007. The conference was based on relationships among four phenomena applicable to metadata: interoperability, standards, registration, and terminology. In order for organizations to use data that have been shared with them, the data must first be described. The data become interoperable through those descriptions, which constitute the metadata. Interoperability is facilitated by the existence of standards the metadata conform to. For example, integrated library systems (ILS) typically use proprietary storage formats; their compatibility with and conversion to the MARC formats enable the sharing of bibliographic data worldwide. Data sharing is also facilitated by the development of registries—catalogs—that help others discover the existence of relevant data elsewhere, as well as by terminology control over the metadata.

Using the library and information science (LIS) world to exemplify interoperability and standards is somewhat misleading. In the world at large, data are commonly maintained in locally designed databases. Indeed, it is not uncommon for an organization to maintain conceptually the same data in multiple databases, using different (and perhaps incompatible) structures and different terminology. Standards designed to achieve interoperability usually are not imposed on the underlying databases, but only on how the databases are described. Contrast this with the sharing of bibliographic data between two institutions, even where only one uses MARC-encoded data:  The functionality supported by the two bibliographic databases would probably still be very similar, such that a mapping between the two database structures could probably be readily developed. (A crosswalk between Dublin Core and MARC is a salient example.)

The underlying difference between the bibliographic and non-bibliographic data contexts explains why non-bibliographic metadata are not classed with bibliographic metadata in 025.3 Bibliographic analysis and control. Moreover, the Forum on Metadata Registries considers databases from the “narrowly technical” perspective of 005.74 Data files and databases (see Manual at 025.04, 025.06 vs. 005.74). Interoperability is mentioned in a class-here note at 004.6 Interfacing and data communications, which, although not directly applicable to data interoperability, shows that interoperability should be classed with the technology that enables it. That’s where the metadata registry comes in, classed in 005.742 Data dictionaries and directories (where data interoperability is also classed). Metadata standards for non-bibliographic data are classed in 005.740218 (built with 005.74 Data files and databases plus T1—0218 Standards), while terminology (which in this context refers to all of terminology science) is classed in 401.4 Language and communication, the number for interdisciplinary works on terminology.

International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO)--North American symposium

The inaugural meeting of a North American subgroup of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) took place on June 14-15 at the University of Toronto.  The theme of the symposium was “Knowledge organization research in North America:  What have we done, what are we doing, and where do we go from here?”

Brian Cantwell Smith, dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, noted that the current transformation from the print world to the digital world is on the same scale as the transformation from the aural world to the print world.  It was fitting that Richard Smiraglia, editor of ISKO’s quarterly journal, Knowledge Organization, announced that the journal would soon be published online; indeed there are plans to put up all issues of Knowledge Organization and its predecessor, International Classification, on JSTOR.

During the business meeting the assembly voted to form a North American chapter of ISKO.  A three-person steering committee (Kathryn LaBarre, Richard Smiraglia, Joe Tennis) will draft a set of by-laws for submission to the general assembly at next year’s ISKO conference and will begin planning for a 2009 conference of the North American chapter.

In addition to the business of voting to form a North American chapter, the symposium included the presentation of 13 papers and a panel discussion (James Turner, Clare Beghtol, Jens Erik Mai).   Many of the themes that were touched on have relevance for the Dewey Decimal Classification.

A recurring thread centered in the tension between traditional knowledge organization (KO) systems, such as Dewey, and the phenomenon of social tagging.   One manifestation of this thread is the question whether there is a single “right” way or multiple “right” ways to organize information resources.  Sometimes divergent classifications are compatible:  They may differ simply in the level of specificity they provide for a given domain, or they may recognize similar facets, but prefer different citation orders.  Mappings between such systems would be relatively easy to construct.  Sometimes a classification system has developed in a hodge-podge fashion and needs a thoroughgoing analysis and overhaul before its potential for compatibility with another KO system can be assessed.  But sometimes, classifications just are incompatible.  Social tagging usually doesn’t have an explicit classificatory basis, but some degree of classificatory structure may be discerned in the set of tags that a given person or a given community uses.   Although little of the requisite research needed to assess how social tagging is like or unlike traditional systems has been performed, we fear they will commonly be found to be incompatible.  If it is the case that end users classify a domain in ways that are fundamentally different from how traditional schemes classify the same domain, how should the traditional KO systems respond?  By redoubling our efforts to educate end users on how to use the tools the profession has developed for them?  By developing mappings between commonly used tags and classes/descriptors in the KO systems?  By adopting the perspective of the end user?  (Which end user[s]?)

Other insights:

1. KO systems generally need more semantics.  An important aspect of this effort is the recognition of a richer array of relationships.  (And our paradigmatic relationships need to go beyond hierarchy.)  Here the knowledge organization community shares some similar concerns with the natural language processing and Semantic Web communities, in contrast to the Web 2.0 community.
2. Facet analysis is one of the most important tools that the KO community has.  Information access and discovery might be improved by faceted search and navigation.  Are there ways of better leveraging the underlying faceted structure of legacy KO systems?
3. The KO community needs to focus its attention on using meta-analysis to build syntheses of multiple classification schemes.  In this quest for providing interoperability, one of the most difficult issues will arise from hierarchical inheritance in different systems.
4. The KO systems needed for organizing information resources may not be the same KO systems needed for organizing information.  Minimally, the latter will be at a finer level of granularity.
5. The KO community has not always succeeded in telling either itself or others what it is that we know.  Too often we have waited for others to ask us to organize information/ information resources.  With few exceptions, they didn’t ask, but often tried to develop such schemes on their own.  At best, they have rediscovered principles of knowledge organization.  The KO community needs to be proactive in developing rigorous classifications for emerging information discovery contexts.
6. The KO community may generally have more success developing smaller, local classifications than developing broader classifications.  But there is still a need for a framework to integrate such smaller classifications.
7. Conversation is often the context of learning and knowledge construction.  Can it also be the context for knowledge organization?  This point was illustrated with Wikipedia categories, the result of “conversations” among potentially many people.  It could also be illustrated with the DDC, with its circles of conversations, involving the editorial team, the Editorial Policy Committee, translation teams, user groups, professional organizations, etc.

Pictures from the conference (lots of them!) are available on flickr using the search term nasko_2007.

Success: 17th Annual SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop

"Social Classification: Panacea or Pandora?" was the theme of the 17th Annual SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, held last Saturday in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.  It was a great success, with 52 registered participants, excellent papers and posters, and lively discussions covering many aspects of "social classification, folksonomies, social tagging, social bookmarking, collaborative indexing, collaborative annotation, etc."  The workshop was co-chaired by Joseph Tennis (University of British Columbia) and Jonathan Furner, the latter a former dweller in Dewey Manor, now at UCLA.  The papers are available in PDF form on the SIG/CR web site.

The two examples of social tagging most frequently cited during the workshop were the social bookmarking site del.icio.us, where tags are used to describe bookmarks for web sites, and flickr, a site for storing, searching, sorting, and sharing photographs. 

The del.icio.us site describes tags as "one-word descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks on del.icio.us to help you organize and remember them. Tags are a little bit like keywords, but they're chosen by you, and they do not form a hierarchy. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like and rename or delete the tags later. So, tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders."

In the DDC, social tagging is classed as a form of indexing in 025.48 Subject indexing.  Social tagging of special materials is classed in 025.34 Cataloging, classification, indexing of special materials, e.g., tagging of bookmarks for web sites 025.344 Electronic resources, tagging of photographs 025.3471 Pictures and prints. 

P.S., use the tag SIGCR2006 to find photos of the workshop on flickr.

17th Annual ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop

June 1: an auspicious date, to be sure. For 'twas on such date that Madison asked Congress to declare war on the UK. Then, precisely 155 years later, Sgt. Pepper was released. And now, in 2006, June 1 is to be the deadline for the submission of abstracts of papers for this year's Classification Research Workshop. The workshop is organized annually by the Special Interest Group on Classification Research (SIG/CR) of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), as a preliminary to ASIS&T's main Annual Meeting. This year, it's taking place in Austin, TX, on November 4, and the theme is to be social classification. Y'know: tagging, folksonomies, and whatnot. So, dear Dewey blog reader, sharpen your pencil and get cracking on your 500-word masterpiece. There's only ninety days to go! Here's the full call for papers in all its glory.

SOCIAL CLASSIFICATION: PANACEA OR PANDORA?

The aims of this year’s Classification Research Workshop are to provide a forum for researchers, practitioners, and users to share their knowledge, perspectives, and opinions on social classification (SC), and (in the form of the proceedings) to make a lasting and authoritative contribution to our understanding of the benefits that SC-based systems may provide. Papers on any aspect of the conceptualization and/or evaluation of social classification are invited for presentation at the workshop and publication in the open-access, peer-reviewed proceedings.

Social classification is a convenient, generic label that may be used to refer to any of a number of broadly related processes by which the resources in a collection are categorized by multiple people over an ongoing period, with the potential result that any given resource will come to be represented by a set of labels or descriptors that have been generated by different people. The specific processes in question include indexing, tagging, bookmarking, annotation, and description of the kinds that may be characterized as collaborative, cooperative, distributed, dynamic, community-based, folksonomic, wikified, democratic, user-assigned, or user-generated. The mid-2000s have seen rapid growth in levels of interest in these kinds of technique for generating descriptions of resources for the purposes of discovery, access, and retrieval. Systems that provide automated support for social classification may be implemented at low cost, and are perceived to contribute to the democratization of classification by empowering people who might otherwise remain strictly information consumers to become information producers.

Efforts to conduct serious evaluations of the comparative effectiveness of such systems have begun, but results are scattered and piecemeal. Compared with retrieval systems based on traditional methods -- manual or automatic -- of classifying resources, how effectively are users of SC-based systems able to find the resources that they want? What is the impact on retrieval effectiveness of systems designers’ decisions to pay limited attention to traditionally important components such as vocabulary control, facet analysis, and systematic hierarchical arrangement? Current implementations of SC tend to shy away, for instance, from imposing the kind of vocabulary control on which classification schemes and thesauri are conventionally founded: proponents argue that social classifiers should be free, as far as possible, to supply precisely those class labels that they believe will be useful to searchers in the future, whether or not those labels have proven useful in the past. But do the advantages that are potentially to be gained from allowing classifiers free rein in the choice of labels outweigh those that may be obtainable by imposing some form of vocabulary and authority control, or by offering browsing-based interfaces to hierarchically structured vocabularies, by establishing and complying with policies for the specificity and exhaustivity of sets of labels, and by other devices that are designed to improve classifier--searcher consistency?

Other questions arise as a result of the reliance of SC-based systems on volunteer labor. Given the distributed nature of SC, for example, how can it be ensured that every resource attracts a critical mass of descriptors, rather than just the potentially-quirky choices of a small number of volunteers? Given the self-selection of classifiers, how can it be ensured that they are motivated to supply class labels that they would expect other searchers to use? In general, are reductions in the costs of classification (borne by information producers) achieved only at the expense of increases in the costs of resource discovery (borne by consumers)?

Abstracts (500-1000 words) of papers should be submitted to both workshop co-chairs by JUNE 1, 2006. Authors will be notified of the program committee’s decision by JULY 1, 2006. Full papers (3000-5000 words) should be submitted to both workshop co-chairs by SEPTEMBER 1, 2006. The workshop will be held on NOVEMBER 4, 2006, as part of the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) in Austin, TX. It will be the 17th in a series of annual workshops organized by ASIS&T’s Special Interest Group on Classification Research. Workshop co-chairs: Jonathan Furner, Assistant Editor, Dewey Decimal Classification, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., Washington, DC; Joseph Tennis, Assistant Professor, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC.

Rich pickings

Please allow the Dewey blog to indulge in fond memories of our Texan weekend one final time, then, with a mini-report on the ALA/ALCTS/CCS/CETRC meeting of Saturday afternoon. (You what? Oh, sorry, that's the Committee on Education, Training, and Recruitment for Cataloging [CETRC] of the Cataloging and Classification Section [CCS] of the ALA's Association for Library Collections and Technical Services [ALCTS], don'tcha know.) This meeting (chair: Christine DeZelar-Tiedman [University of Minnesota Libraries]) included a report from the CETRC's Continuing Education Subcommittee (chair: Rebecca L. Mugridge [Pennsylvania State University Libraries]) that highlighted the ongoing development of two training opportunities of potential future interest to Dewey blog readers. One is the forthcoming, four-week, web-based, distance-education course on "Fundamentals of cataloging," to be modeled on the already-successful "Fundamentals of acquisitions." The other is the two-day workshop on "Principles of controlled vocabulary and thesaurus design," one of the five Cat21 workshops administered jointly by the ALCTS and the Library of Congress's Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS), and developed as a response to the survey of existing training opportunities that was conducted by the ALCTS's Continuing Education Task Force (chair: Carol Hixson [University of Oregon]) in 2002-2003 and reported in Cataloging for the 21st century: A proposal for continuing education for cataloging professionals. This report was itself compiled as a response to action item 5.3 of Bibliographic control of web resources: A Library of Congress action plan that stemmed from the LC's Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium of November 2000. The workshops in the Cat21 series "[offer] practicing catalogers instruction in bibliographic control practices that will help them continue to play a significant role in shaping library services in the emerging digital information environment." Turns out that "Principles of controlled vocabulary and thesaurus design" will be taught for the first time (at the University of Denver, CO, on May 2-3, 2006) by Rich Gazan and Jillian Wallis. Now assistant professor in the University of Denver's Library and Information Science Program, Rich graduated with a Ph.D. from UCLA a couple of years ago. His dissertation adviser? Your trusty blogger (who isn't unacquainted with Jillian's all-round brilliance, either). Suffice to say, the competition is certainly hotting up for the Dewey blog's inaugural Two-Day Cataloging Workshop of the Year Award.

Taking FRBR further

Back to Saturday again, then, and the morning's meeting of the Cataloging and Classification Discussion Group, organized by the ALA's Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), and devoted to topics relating to IFLA's conceptual models of the kinds of data that are recorded in library catalogs -- the most well-established of these models, of course, being the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). In her paper co-authored with colleague Nancy Chaffin on "Trying FRBR out: A pragmatic evaluation of how FRBR will change our catalog," Tami Morse McGill (Colorado State University Libraries) reported on an exploratory study of the extent to which catalog data at CSU is robust enough to support FRBRization with the minimum of manual intervention. Glenn Patton (OCLC) summarized the progress of the IFLA Working Group on the Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records (FRANAR), which is in the process of extending FRBRian concepts to authority data in the form of the FRAR (Functional Requirements for Authority Records) model. And Lois Mai Chan (University of Kentucky) and Ed O'Neill (OCLC) introduced the work that has begun under the auspices of a third IFLA Working Group, on the Functional Requirements of Subject Authority Records (FRSAR), that is chaired by Marcia Lei Zeng (Kent State University). Tom Delsey had published his paper on "Modeling subject access: Extending the FRBR and FRANAR conceptual models" in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 39, no. 3-4, 2004; the FRSAR WG had formed in April 2005; Marcia Lei Zeng and colleague Athena Salaba had presented their paper, "Toward an international sharing and use of subject authority data," at OCLC's invitational workshop of May, 2005, on "FRBR in 21st century catalogues"; and Tom Delsey had presented a version of his earlier paper at a satellite meeting of IFLA 2005 in Oslo in August. The focus of FRSAR is on what FRBR calls the "Group 3" entities (i.e., concepts, objects, events, and places) that relate to the aboutness of works. The emphasis of work already undertaken has been on verbal representations of those entities (e.g., subject headings), but classification data is also an integral part of any subject access model: FRCAR, anyone? Audience reaction to the suggestion that FRAR and FRSAR should more properly be named FRAD and FRSAD (given their focus on Data that need not be tied to Records) was mixed. Meanwhile, Paul Weiss (University of California, San Diego) reminded us that FRBR/FRAR/FRSAR are conceptual models and not system architectures or even sets of principles guiding display, and that the best way of implementing a conceptual model is: to think about it. So we're thinking.