025.431: The Dewey blog

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.

Temples of thoughts

Of course you’re all desperate to know of the Dewey blog’s whereabouts at all times, and so I’m pleased to inform you that we’re back in the vicinity of the Manor, having waved goodbye to the San Antonio Riverwalk for the last time. Nobody we know actually fell in the river, despite several close calls, and I got to meet David Bigwood of Catalogablog renown, so: a resounding success. Now, going back to Friday, and the OCLC Symposium on “Extreme makeover: Rebranding an industry” ... Others have already reported on this (for detailed notes posted in real-time, for instance, check out It’s all good), but we did want to add our tuppence-ha’penny-worth in praise of this excellent session in which four experts shared their insights on the nature and future of the “library” brand, in the light of OCLC’s new report (Perceptions of libraries and information resources) on an international study of the information-seeking habits of over 3,000 information consumers. Omar Wasow (BlackPlanet.com) spoke of the transformative mission of the library as a “public park for your brain” -- a physical space comparable to a school, church, or gym, where people may reflect, think, write, learn, connect, and change. Jennifer Rice (Mantra Brand Communications), who admitted to not having used a library since leaving college, identified five trends that libraries have no option but to come to terms with if they are to appeal on the level of Google, Starbucks, Netflix, and Home Depot to consumers like herself: libraries must offer convenience, choice, means to connect with communities and to take control, and a memorable experience. Patricia Martin (LitLamp Communications Group) characterized the current generation of potential library users as the RenGen -- participants in a renaissance, “knowledge leisure” culture who perceive themselves to be inner-directed, imaginative, au courant, and expressive, and whose preferences are for informal information-delivery systems, such as gaming and web-based communities, that libraries continue to struggle to understand. Antony Brewerton (Oxford Brookes University) entertained the audience with a stream of creative ideas for marketing academic-library resources and services to undergraduate students. Were the Dewey marketing team taking notes? You bet.

ASIS&T 2005: Day 4

So the ASIS&T schedulers knew what they were doing all along, of course, by saving the best till last. In a session on the “Use of classification in information seeking” jointly sponsored by SIG/CR and SIG/USE, Barbara Kwaśnik (Syracuse University) described the variety of ways in which the effectiveness of information retrieval systems can be improved by the partitioning of collections of resources into meaningful clusters. Barbara enumerated the challenges faced by the user of retrieval systems, such as the formulation of queries in the absence of domain knowledge and the interpretation of large, undifferentiated sets of search results, and showed how the classified organization of resources can help the searcher meet each of those challenges. Barbara allowed that no single classification scheme is appropriate for all purposes, but her characterization of a “good” scheme as one that is elegant, parsimonious, expressive, complete, memorable, usable, flexible, and hospitable reminded Team Dewey of one scheme in particular. (Clue: Not Zastrau.)

Joseph Busch (Taxonomy Strategies) then treated us to an excellent overview of the role of classification in search systems that support organizational goals such as e-commerce and e-government. Joseph argued that search engine users typically only think they prefer “type-and-go”/“feeling-lucky” interfaces over those that allow browsing of faceted hierarchies of classes, mainly because designers are not being as creative as we might expect them to be in the development of browsing-based systems. Joseph referred to research by Hearst, Dumais, and others that quantifies not only the extent of user preference for faceted interfaces but also the magnitude of the benefits (in terms of cost and time) to be obtained by organizations implementing such systems. Joseph demonstrated a number of existing, web-accessible systems that offer browsing-based access to information about products, services, and documents (see, for instance, a British supermarket’s faceted interface to its database of wines), before describing a case study of the opinions of users of a system in the domain of agricultural economics which showed that users found it easier to search by non-topical facets (i.e., geographical area and commodity type) than by topic. Joseph’s conclusion that the best search interface is the one that offers faceted navigation in combination with keyword searching serves as a ringing endorsement of the approach taken by DeweyBrowser.

ASIS&T 2005: Day 3

The parallel session – indubitably the most helpful of conference traditions. What could be more sensible than to schedule at precisely the same time the only two sessions (out of more than 60) that include the keyword “ontologies” in their title? What motivation could anyone possibly have for attending both “Science ontologies and the semantic web” and “Metadata and ontologies”? None, obviously, so you can imagine Team Dewey’s jubilation at having to choose between the two. “Science ontologies …” (sponsored by ASIS&T’s Special Interest Group on Scientific and Technical Information Systems, SIG/STI) won the coin-toss, and the highlight was Ralph Hodgson’s measured (and refreshingly jargon-free) tour of meaning quadrants, OWL triples, and knowledge technology trees. Ralph (TopQuadrant, Inc.) cunningly compressed a day-long seminar into 20 minutes, teasing us with the promise of a forthcoming beer ontology (“Beer … is_a … beverage,” anyone?) that will surely revolutionize our understanding of the semantics of the brewing industry. One minor disappointment for Team Dewey was the acronym-per-slide ratio of this session: an average ApS score of 30 really doesn’t cut the mustard in the modern age, and as far we could determine very few of the acronyms used seemed to have been made up specifically for this session – a sad indictment of the current state of R&D in acronym science.

ASIS&T 2005: Day 2

With the pre-conference seminars and workshops now but fond memories, the ASIS&T conference proper got underway on Sunday, and your intrepid representative from Team Dewey decided to indulge an interest in subject access to visual resources by checking out a pair of sessions organized by SIG-VIS -- the Special Interest Group on Visualization, Images, and Sound. In the first, Paul Roy from Arius 3D demonstrated hardware and software for scanning and visualizing digital images of three-dimensional objects, and other panel members described studies of the various ways in which such technology is being used to enhance the level and quality of access to information about cultural, educational, and scientific resources. Speakers in the second session explored the roles that collections of digital representations of museum artifacts play in the lives of museum visitors. Paul Marty (Florida State University) presented the results of a survey of visitors' opinions which demonstrated that the relationship between a physical museum and its digital counterpart is typically complex, and (for instance) that visitors very strongly prefer to satisfy certain of their interests by interacting with one or the other. Ken Hamma (J. Paul Getty Trust) showed how museums can engage the attention of younger visitors by providing online access to collections through virtual communities such as Whyville; and Layna White (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and Anne Gilliland (University of California, Los Angeles) summarized what researchers working on the Museums and Online Archives Collaboration (MOAC) project have learned about educators', students', and museum professionals' use of online information about museum objects.

Two of the themes that emerged from the discussion are, first, the awareness of a convergence in the descriptive practices of librarians, archivists, and curators, such that professional staff of all three kinds of institutions are increasingly recognizing the benefits of close collaboration on projects in the field of cultural informatics -- to the extent that LAM (libraries, archives, museums) is now one of the more common acronyms in use at this conference; and second, the promise of collaborative indexing systems that allow users of digital collections to assign their own labels to representations of cultural resources. In the final talk of the second session, Hsin-liang Chen (University of Texas at Austin) asked whether the positive reception of initiatives such as the Cleveland Museum of Art's Personal Collections project was indicative of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how objects are best described. Ken Hamma followed up this point with a tantalizing reference to a new project in which the Getty Museum will be exposing its collections of digital images for harvesting by other services, with the intention that those third-party services may then choose either to provide users with access to Getty-supplied metadata or to create and offer access to new, community-specific descriptions and indexing.

ASIS&T 2005: Day 1

This year's meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) kicked off on Friday, and a delegation from Dewey Manor was there on Saturday for the 16th Workshop of ASIS&T's Special Interest Group on Classification Research (SIG/CR). Workshop chair Jack Andersen (Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark) and his committee had put together a fascinating program of talks, and participants greatly appreciated the amount of time that was built in for general discussion.

Unfortunately, scheduled keynote speaker Joacim Hansson (University College of Borås and Göteborg University, Sweden) was unable to attend, so Fernando Elichirigoity (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) got things underway with a critique (co-authored by Cheryl Knott Malone of the University of Arizona) of the North American Industry Classification System's coverage of the "new economy" that is based on open-source software production. Fernando and Cheryl argued that data on the productivity of this sector remains unrecorded due to the absence of appropriate classes in NAICS, and that this absence is partly a result of NAICS' use of copyright-holding status as a criterion when identifying productive units.

Melanie Feinberg (University of Washington) reported on her comparative study of the ways in which library collections arranged using different classification schemes express the relationship between feminism as a concept and women as a social group. Melanie's paper was followed by discussion of how researchers might distinguish in such studies between the role of the classification scheme itself and the role of individual classifiers' interpretations of the scheme; some attendees identified an urgent need for further user studies in this area.

Hans Jørn Nielsen (Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark) presented the first of the day's two papers on the indexing of imaginative literature (i.e., fiction), asking whether it is desirable or even possible to index the subject matter of such literature given that it is characterized by ambiguity and plurality of meaning. Some attendees suggested that all texts, literary or otherwise, have different meanings for different readers; does that mean that all indexing is worthless? The group briefly considered the apparently timeless question of whether manual classification remains necessary given the capabilities of automatic indexing systems, before discussing the value of a "third way": collaborative indexing, by members of particular communities of practice, using a wiki-based system to assign multiple class-labels that represent multiple points of view.

After lunch, Frank Exner, Little Bear (North Carolina Central University) gave a detailed account of the issues involved in establishing effective authority control over North American Indian names. Three challenges in particular stand out: the diversity of patterns formed by the constituent elements of American Indian names; the fact that many people retain more than one name at any given time; and the fact that many people are known by different names at different points of their life. Little Bear concluded by making specific recommendations for changes in AACR2.

In a paper co-authored with G. Craig Murray, Kara Reuter (University of Maryland, College Park) summarized four cognitive-psychological accounts of the variation observed in children's and adults' performance of tasks that involve categorization. Kara argued that such performance depends primarily on context, and that the development of categorization ability should most properly be understood as the development of cultural expertise. Kara identified the need for further study of the implications of these findings for our understanding of children's and adults' ability to use bibliographic classification systems.

In the final paper of the day, Rune Eriksson (Royal School of Library and Information Science) revisited the theme introduced earlier by Hans, focusing on the ways in which the classification of imaginative literature has historically been treated by the DDC. Rune spoke persuasively of the benefits of a faceted approach that allows for the expression of the themes, styles, narrative structures, and sub-genres of literary works (as well as language, form, period, and place), and the group identified the potential value of browsing-based systems that take advantage of the DDC's faceted structure. And then, suddenly, it was 5 o'clock. Everyone agreed that we'd done a good job, and that we should celebrate by finding the nearest bar. Cheers!

SIG / Crucially Relevant

The program for the 16th Classification Research Workshop has been announced, and participants can look forward to discussion of a range of fascinating topics, including classification of imaginative literature, authority control of North American Indian names, children's acquisition of categories, and expressions of feminism in classification schemes. This annual workshop is organized by the American Society for Information Science and Technology's Special Interest Group on Classification Research (ASIS&T SIG/CR), and is held in conjunction with ASIS&T's main Annual Meeting, which this year is to take place in Charlotte, NC, October 28 - November 2. (Note that this year's CR Workshop is once again scheduled for the Saturday -- October 29 -- rather than the Sunday that had previously been the norm. You can register for it at the main ASIS&T site here.) The workshop chair is Jack Andersen (Royal School of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen); speakers will include Joacim Hansson (University College of Borås and Göteborg University, Sweden), Fernando Elichirigoity (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Cheryl Knott Malone (University of Arizona), Melanie Feinberg (University of Washington), Hans Jørn Nielsen (Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark), Frank Exner, Little Bear (North Carolina Central University), G. Craig Murray and Kara Reuter (both University of Maryland), and Rune Eriksson (Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark).

SIG/CR is also currently seeking nominations for the SIG chair (2006-07), webmaster (2005-06), and two officers-at-large (2005-06). Please send nominations to the current SIG chair, Jack Andersen, by October 19. SIG chair in 2005-06 will be Jens-Erik Mai (University of Washington); a workshop chair for 2006 will be elected separately at a later date.

Ingeniouser and ingeniouser

Roy Tennant, user services architect at the California Digital Library, was the speaker here at the Library of Congress last Thursday. In his talk on "Life beyond MARC: The case for revolutionary change in library systems and services," Roy treated his large audience to a series of demonstrations of innovative catalog interfaces that in many cases owe more to the examples set by Google and Amazon than to traditional OPAC design. Roy's presentation provoked much discussion, and one of the questions raised (take a bow, Winton!) was about the extent to which current resource discovery systems are taking advantage of classification data, such as the DDC numbers that are assigned to works cataloged by libraries worldwide. As well as highlighting OCLC's FirstSearch and Curiouser, Roy had shown us RLG's RedLightGreen service, which automatically divides the results of any search into smaller groups of records that share the same LC subject heading, author, or language; could a similar approach be taken so that results are clustered by DDC number? Such a feature would be especially beneficial to the searcher since the clusters themselves could be arranged and browsed hierarchically rather than simply alphabetically. In fact, this is precisely the thinking behind OCLC's DeweyBrowser, which we pointed to a few weeks ago. Thom Hickey of OCLC's Office of Research took up Roy's theme in a recent blog entry -- "Why our catalogs don't work" -- and advocates further Amazonization as the key to satisfying library users' needs. Will the process of Amazonization involve the exploitation of DDC numbers? Can readers point to other examples of library search systems that use classification data in new and interesting ways?

Call for papers for ISKO 2006

The Ninth International ISKO Conference will be held in Vienna, Austria, July 4-6, 2006, with the theme of "Knowledge Organization for a Global Learning Society." ISKO -- the International Society for Knowledge Organization -- is the premier international scholarly society devoted to the theory and practice of knowledge organization. Next year's conference will be hosted by the Center for Translation Studies and the Institute for Educational Sciences at the University of Vienna. The conference chair is Dr. Gerhard Budin; the program chair is Dr. Christian Swertz. The deadline for submission of abstracts (500-1000 words) is November 4, 2005. Authors will be notified of decisions by November 29, 2005. The deadline for submission of papers for the printed conference proceedings will be January 20, 2006. All abstracts should be submitted through the submission form at the conference website, where further details of the call for papers are also provided.