Some ramdom thoughts after this week's #ist616 class

Notes: below are some of my notes in today's IST616 class (Resources Organization and Management) and a little bit of explanations of these pieces of notes: 

1. shelving can be improved anyway -- to be not so intimidating or even win the members to use the resources.

As proved by a lot of cases, by offering graphic category signs, rather than the numbers or character-number combinations, library classification can be better understood by library members. "To win the members to use the resources" as mentioned by someone in the class is a beautiful vision.

2. how classification can be beneficial to the community -- by user behavior assessment?

As mentioned in Twitter, my central interest/concern toward cataloging (and classification) is how library cataloging can be more relevant to the library members. In terms of this, you can say that graphic display of categories is a way to make cataloging more relevant; but I feel it's not "good enough". I love the idea of some school librarians to design a classification which is more consistent with the curriculum in the school. This is a perfect example that cataloging can be relevant with the local community. It may not be easy, but it's definitely worthy trying.

Someone in the class said that DDC numbers, by large, were to be used to locate resources rather than to be understood. For me, it's an assumption, and a very dubious one. "Objective users needs assessment" (as put by Marie) is important in this term. But I still doubt how people can perceive their own needs toward library catalog. When I was a cataloger in China, I used to conduct a user needs survey about the OPAC of the library. The most surprising finding was not how awful our OPAC was. It was the fact that a lot of library members did not even use our OPAC! Since we haven't offered print catalog for many years, I wonder how people can find resources (at least effectively). Sure, the library changed a much better OPAC recently, but it's extremely hard to change people's behaviors.

3. what about having the idea that library classification is just to spot the resources

Library classification are still mainly used for physical resources. And since physical resources are becoming less important in all kinds of libraries (academic much more than public though), is it OK to maintain the current usage of classification in physical libraries, and wait for its death? (Sure, classification has a bright future to be used by Internet.)

4. How people find resources in different locations, say, in google and bookstores

Library member cannot find resourced effectively in libraries, which may or may not be because of the current cataloging and classification system. However, as someone said, people cannot find information effectively in bookstores and on the Internet! So what does it need to be a good library discovery mechanism in this term?

5. There should be a way to incorporate user's classification, but is it possible? 

One random idea I have is that, library organizes a tag day (or week) in which library encourages members to make tags to library collections they think are relevant to a certain topic (for example, Halloween in this month). And libraries display all the tagged resources in a place to increase the exposure of the collections. 

Tag is a dilemma for libraries. Most of the libraries are lack of a big enough member base. However, without this member base, it's hard to form a real online community, since the rate of active members is basically the same in nearly all kinds of websites.

Some thoughts on classification after #ist511

As a cataloger, I have always been a big fan of "Killing Dewey", which doesn't mean that Dewey be eliminated from the library world, because that is both unnecessary and impossible. However, based on the local context, individual libraries should explore other possibilities other than Dewey Decimal Classification (or maybe Library of Congress Classification) or maybe find new ways to use these legacy standards. There was a great article published in the Library Journal in 2009 talking about some of the approaches US libraries had taken to deal with DDC and accompanying discussions. In some of the cases mentioned in the article, DDC was not killed, rather, it was reinforced or mixed with bookstore classification to become more user-friendly.

However, after that, the discussion of replacing/augmenting DDC has not been as active as I expected. Not until recently, did I read another article on the Digital Shift about how an elementary school library gave up Dewey Decimal Classification this summer. The big change in the library was because the librarians realized that "classification is really just a series of compromises that inevitably results in a less than perfect solution". As a result, the library adopted a much broader classification scheme, moreover, the new classification system "group books by how subjects are taught". Kudos to these librarians!

That is definitely one of the examples about "how library catalog can support learning" after this week's 511 class, in which Professor Lankes talked about theories of knowledge creation. I do think philosophical rethinking of classification as what he did is interesting. Though some level of reductionism and objectivism is inevitable and necessary for anyone to understand the world, approaching toward constructionism is good for both the libraries and the members. (Sorry for all these "-ism" words.)

Being flexible and user-friendly (or even user-generated) is always a solution here. Arranging resources by the actual use of these resources, rather than by the classification system is an idea worthy exploring. Just like the "virtue shelves" idea proposed in Professor Lankes' book, maybe a library can form subject groups (like tourism, cooking in public libraries, and anthropology, history in academic libraries), and letting these library members/experts to organize all the resources relevant to this area.

On the other hand, some of the great ideas mentioned in "Everything is Miscellaneous" written by David Weinberger may work here. With more and more virtual resources are subscribed or bought by libraries (Bookless library!), the order for libraries to organize physical resources (aka, library classification) will no longer be relevant in the future. It's not hard to notice the huge differences between the physical library shelves and online catalogs.

I was trying hard not to cross the line of cataloging and classification when I wrote this post. However, I was reminded of the "putting lipstick on pigs" discussion several years ago about whether OPAC 2.0 was necessary. In this term, I do feel that some of the "OPAC 2.0" solutions are awesome. (In case you don't know about the whole "OPAC 2.0" thing, you can see this presentation given by Mr. Dave Pattern. But on the other hand, even if you have never heard about "Library 2.0", I think it's totally fine, because people no longer talk about it. And people are talking about "discovery platform" rather than "OPAC X.0", which for me is basically the same thing.) But I totally agree that pigs with lipstick are still pigs. Like library website ("No one started their information search on a library Web site" as stated by the famous "Library Perception 2010" report), we should try to deliver our metadata in other platform that people actually are using. (Every time I thought about this issue, I was reminded of this blog post written by David Lee King.)

One revolutionary movement in the classification area is the linked data movement.  With more and more institutions publishing their subject headings/classification systems as linked data (like Library of Congress' Subject Heading and classification, OCLC's FAST and even Dewey Decimal Classification!), these former library-centered data can be used by a bigger community, especially by the Internet community to truly organize not only resources owned by the libraries, but actually all the resources in the world.

This vision is awesome, though much more works need to be done before we arrive there. One thing that I recommend everyone to pay attention to is the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group. This program suggests that libraries can play a really important role in tomorrow's Internet world. Libraries are no longer the only knowledge center in the world, but we can use our expertise and metadata to become one node in the new knowledge landscape, which is an important one and can make major contributions to everyone.

To borrow the famous sentence: library classification will be dead, long live information organization!