Page 170 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Unit 8: Library Cataloguing

Notes
a daily basis than the online library catalogue for the state-wide campuses of the University
of California served on a monthly basis.
Google now reigns. Given the company’s tremendous investment in digitization projects,
Google has every intention of keeping its exalted position for some time to come. The
company has deep pockets, innovative leadership, high-level technical talent, and a proven
track record on delivering successful products to the marketplace.
Domain Expertise – It’s All about Knowing What You Want and Where to Look
Domain experts – scholars, scientists, and experienced researchers who have expert
knowledge of their discipline as a whole and in-depth knowledge about a couple of ideas
that ranks them amongst the world’s experts – know the unanswered research questions,
sticky controversies, and active scholars in their discipline. Rarely, if ever, do they need to
conduct the brute-force subject searches that characterize the searches of domain novices.
When they are stumped, their standing in the field gives them carte blanche to contact the
world’s experts to get answers to questions about who is doing research or has published
on a topic. Primary sources are truly the intellectual playground of domain experts: they
use primary sources to make new discoveries, and the by-products of their research are
the creation of new primary sources.

Most people are domain novices about their topics of interest. Undergraduate students
especially are just beginning to learn the summary knowledge of a discipline. They have
no depth, do not know the discipline’s influential authors, important questions, cutting-
edge research, or research methodologies. Building a catalogue of the future that is biased
toward primary sources does not serve the interests of domain novices. Imagine a future
University of Michigan co-ed whose professor assigns her a term paper on Kukulcan.
Before cracking open her textbook to learn the absolute basics about Kukulcan, she searches
Calhoun’s online library catalogue of the future and retrieves images of Kukulcan
sculptures from the University’s Kelsey Museum. Because she has no knowledge of
Kukulcan nor the Mesoamerican culture from which Kukulcan derives, she would not
understand what the sculptures mean, how to make sense of the minimal metadata usually
associated with museum objects such as these, and how the images now figure into her on-
going search for information or the term paper her instructor has assigned her to write.
Diverting our existing online library catalogues away from books to primary sources will
drive this co-ed and her peers back to the simplicity of Google as quickly as one can say
“Kukulcan.”
Building the Future Online Catalogue Now
Before mass digitization projects make significant headway, the library community must
act on building the future online catalogue joining forces with researchers, practitioners,
and system designers in related and allied fields to: (1) gather relevant information,
(2) test prototype post-digitization-era catalogues, (3) evaluate results and make decisions,
(4) assign tasks to willing parties, and (5) execute them.

The information-gathering phase must include definitions of the future online library
catalogue. Will books dominate or will future catalogues feature the full gamut of scholarly
products and by-products? To get us started is with her extensive research on the future of
scholarly communication. With regard to subject access in the catalogue of the future, we
should consider all options, e.g., continuing the status quo, enlisting human indexers to
apply faceting, restricting faceting to computer-based approaches, assessing automatic

Contd....

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