Page 169 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Knowledge Organization: Classification and Cataloguing Theory

Notes
held favourable views of this new form of the catalogue. The decade and a half beginning
in the early 1980s was the golden age of the online catalogue, because library users depended
on it almost exclusively for finding information on the topics that interested them. The
online catalogue was and still is an appropriate place for people to start their search for
information because books synthesize human knowledge about particular phenomena in
and across disciplines. They span large intellectual spaces, tackle mammoth problems,
make more intensive cases than all other literary genres, and undergo rigorous editorial
review.

Paradise Lost
From the start, users wanted subject searching improved in online catalogues, they told us
subject searching was difficult, and they wanted tables of contents and journal articles
added to the catalogue’s database. Through its Bibliographic Service Development Program,
the Council on Library Resources sponsored a long list of researchers to demonstrate
subject access improvements to online catalogues. By the early 1990s, researchers
recommended these solutions:

Make subject searching in online catalogues easier using post-Boolean probabilistic
searching with automatic spelling correction, term weighting, intelligent stemming,
relevance feedback, and output ranking
Streamline users’ book selection decisions at the catalogue by adding tables of
contents and back-of-the-book indexes to cataloguing (i.e., metadata) records
Reduce the many failed subject searches by expanding the online catalogue with full
texts—journal and newspaper articles, encyclopaedias, dissertations, government
documents, etc.
Increase finding strategies in online catalogues through the library classification
The reasons why these solutions were not applied to online library catalogues to transform
the user experience are subtle, nuanced, and varied: (1) the library profession’s long-time
obsession with descriptive cataloguing, (2) the focus of the technical services department
on other priorities, e.g., retrospective conversion, cataloguing backlogs, authority control,
etc., (3) the profession’s conscious shift away from supporting technical services in favour
of public services, (4) the ever increasing per-item cataloguing cost, (5) the failure of the
research community to arrive at a consensus about the most pressing needs for online
catalogue system improvement and to field cost-conscious solutions, (6) failure of the
library staff issuing the Requests for Proposals (RFPs) to act in concert about needed
system improvements, (7) lower-than-inflation funding allocations for libraries, (8) the
costs of building collections and licensing resources pushing well beyond the rate of
inflation giving rise to the open-access movement, (9) the high cost of Integrated Library
System (ILS) technology generally, and (10) the failure of ILS vendors to monitor shifts in
information-retrieval technology and respond accordingly with system improvements.
In the end, widely disconnected organizations and market forces failed to converge in a
direction that kept users queuing at the online catalogue.
The Reign of Google
In the late 1990s, the World-Wide Web grew exponentially. For-profit software vendors
deployed search engines such as Alta Vista, Excite, and Hotbot to showcase full-text
searching to prospective software purchasers specifically and to Internet searchers generally.
Ironically these systems embraced post-Boolean searching, the very technology that online
catalogue vendors eschewed. By the early 2000s, Google, a for-profit company with the
objective of “organizing the world’s knowledge”, registered 700 times more searches on
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