LIS510 lecture 10

1
LIS510 lecture 10

• Thomas Krichel
• 2006-11-29

2
library policy

• Rubin says, quite rightly that library policy is
  a part of information policy.
• He spends the majority of the chapter talking
  about intellectual freedom. This is a topic that
  is a bit overrated, IMHO.
• Before that so important topic he has some
  others.
• He waffles about policies.

3
Organization of materials policy

• Most libraries organize their materials according
  to subject classification schemes.
• In the United States, the most widely used are
• Dewey Decimal Classification
• Library of Congress Classification System
• This part of activity will be covered later.

4
collection policy

• It answers questions such as
• what subjects should be collected
• in what depth should each subject be collected
• what types of formats and what balance between
  them
• what cooperative agreements should be formed
• it does not answer questions such as
• who are the library users
• what is the mission of the library

5
collection policy use

• As a planning tool for allocating
• staff
• money
• As a guide for the selection process
• As a tool to try to insure consistency of the
  collection across time and staff
• As a means to train new staff
• As a statement to the public
• As a defense if challenged

6
selection criteria

• authority
• appropriateness
• timeliness
• physical characteristics
• collection fit
• demand
• content
• special characteristics (e.g. indexes, teachers
  guide, translations)

7
selection for electronic resources

• If they are available in open access, they do not
  need to be collected.
• If they are not, much the same criteria as before
  apply. Special criteria such as the ones advised
  by Rubin do not appear to useful.
• There is an important issue with archiving online
  access material.

8
circulation policies

• These policies govern the circulation of
  material. Topics include
• short loan
• renewal
• what materials do not circulate
• fines

9
reference policies

• There can be restrictions on reference
• time limit
• type of question asked
• no homework
• no contest answers
• There can be an emphasis on instructional
  reference, away from looking for the answer on
  behalf of the patron.

10
preservation policy

• This is technically very difficult.
• Acid paper crumbles.
• Paper can burn.
• Microfilm is old fashion and not convenient to
  access.
• Digital preservation is difficult.
• Massive digitization remains costly.

11
intellectual freedom

• There has been an enormous fuss made about this.
• There have been isolated attempts to bar a whole
  host of materials from libraries.
• Librarians have generally tried to promote the
  free circulation of ideas, whatever these ideas
  may be and whoever is holding them.
• However there are some moral dilemmas.

12
obligations to restrict access

• obligation to act with respect to ones values.
  example incitement of husbands to philander.
• obligation to preserve, protect and maintain
  values of the local community. example pictures
  of bare-faced women.
• obligation to protect children form harm
• obligation to protect the library from harm

13
obligation to open access

• obligation to protect the right of patrons to
  free access to ideas
• democratic society is based on informed and
  educated citizens.
• This supposedly comes from the first amendment.
  Rubin claims that there is a corollary right to
  receive expressions. I doubt that this is the
  case. You will only get those expressions you
  and/or your community have paid for, or that are
  freely available.

14
first amendment text

• Congress shall make no law respecting an
  establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
  free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom
  of speech, or of the press or the right of the
  people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the
  Government for a redress of grievances.

15
obligations to increase access

• obligation to educate children
• an important battle, Island Trees v. Pico,
  happened right here on Long Island. Island Trees
  School Board ordered the removal of nine books
  from junior high and high school libraries which
  were considered anti-American, anti-Christian,
  anti-Semitic and filthy. Students at the schools
  sued claiming a denial of their First Amendment
  rights. The Supreme Court ruled that school
  boards could not just remove books from libraries
  simply because they didn't like the ideas in
  them.
• Palmer School hosts events celebrating the
  judgment

16
other obligations to provide access

• Obligation to preserve the values of the
  profession. ALA orchestrates campaigns on that
  matter.
• But in reality it is quite hard for the
  individual librarian. They can only provide the
  best stuff, and by deciding what the best is,
  they implicitly limit the non-best material.
• Most think that pornographic, violence-inciting
  and foul language dont belong into the library.

17
Web filtering

• This is a more recent topic under the umbrella of
  freedom of information.
• Libraries that have provided Internet access are
  under pressure children dont use it with the
  result of exposure to pornographic material.
• Self-regulation of the contents industry has not
  worked up to now.
• Much of this has been done with dedicated
  filtering software.

18
filtering software

• There are two approaches
• text-based prohibit access to sites containing
  certain words
• URL-based blocks access to addresses that are
  known to given URL
• Overall, both methods work poorly.
• Methods and lists are secret, which is one reason
  why they work so poorly.

19
ALA information policies

• ALA wrote a library bill of rights in 1939,
  changed last in 1980.
• Point 5 age is particularly controversial, but
  reaffirmed in 1996.
• There are freedom to read (1953) and a freedom
  to view (1979) statements.
• As explained by Rubin these positions are fairly
  extremist.

20
ALA positions

• free access to minors, including the adult
  material
• opposition to charging for library services
• oppose filtering
• protect the privacy of the patron
• confidentiality of circulation records

21
Organization of information

• Libraries organize information. Otherwise nothing
  that is an library could ever be found.
• Traditional method of doing this have been labor
  intensive. They can not cope with the exploding
  amount of information.
• But the theoretical approaches and the tools
  developed by librarians remain very important for
  any attempt at organizing information by computer.

22
approaching knowledge

• There are things we want to know about. These are
  called subjects.
• And there are ways of looking at things. Rubin
  calls them disciplines
• Example subject sex, way of looking at it
  through biology, gender studies, pornography.

23
classification

• It is the act of organizing the universe of
  knowledge into some systematic order.
• Classification provides a descriptive and
  explanatory framework for ideas and a structure
  of the relationship among the ideas.
• Example Science gt Chemistry gt Organic Chemistry

24
Classification schemes

• Generally schemes to classify subjects are
  discipline oriented, rather than subject
  oriented.
• Example
• Sports gt Racing gt Horse Racing
• Science gt Biology gt Zoology gt Horses gt Horse
  Racing
• The same thing can be viewed form different
  disciplines.

25
use of classification schemes

• As a way to arrange items in a library. Things
  with same classification are next to each other.
  This encourages the patron to discover similar
  items.
• But sometimes, serials are kept apart. Individual
  articles in serials are not classified.
• Once a system is chosen, a library sticks with
  it.
• There are two common ones
• Dewey Decimal Classification
• Library of Congress

26
Dewey Decimal Classification

• Introduced by Melvil Dewey in 1876.
• Ten top classes
• 000 Generalites 200 Religion
• 100 Philosophy, parapsychology occultism,
  psychology
• 300 Social Sciences 400 Language
• 500 Natural Sciences Mathematics
• 600 Technology (Applied Sciences)
• 700 Arts 800 Literature Rhetoric
• 900 Geography, history and auxiliary disciplines

27
Subclasses

• Rubin has a good examples
• 640 is home economics
• 641 food and drink
• another
• 795 games of chance
• 795.4 card games
• 795.41 card games where skill is involved
• 975.412 poker

28
comments on DDC

• Mainly used in public libraries.
• Like any scheme, it needs updating. Such updates
  a cumbersome.
• Like any scheme there is a significant cultural
  bias in it.
• Owned by OCLC and sold very dearly. OCLC sued the
  library hotel for using the scheme. This limits
  the uptake of the scheme and therefore it
  usefulness.

29
Library of Congress Classification

• Has twenty top letter as classes.
• Many looks at the world from an academic
  perspective.
• Therefore used in universities.
• Owned and maintained by the library of congress,
  problems with restricted access are similar to
  DDC.

30
controlled vocabulary

• Many words can be used to describe the same thing
• US, U.S., United States of America, ???
• One approach to deal with this problem is to use
  only one term, consistently.
• Example the yellow pages provide a consistent
  vocabulary for all professions.

31
NISO definition of authority control

• Vocabulary control is the process of organizing
  a list of terms
• to indicate which two or more synonymous terms is
  authorized for use
• to distinguish between homographs
• to indicate hierarchical and associate
  relationships between term

32
LoC authority control

• LoC maintain authority files. They are not free
  but you can consult them on the web.
• Let us try this out now, see http//authorities.lo
  c.gov/
• Look at the personal authority file and search
  for someone reasonable famous that you like.

33
Thesauri

• A thesaurus is list of words. For each word,
  there is a list of related words and the type of
  relationship that the word has with each related
  work. Examples
• LIBRARIES
• Narrower Terms
• Academic Libraries
• Branch Libraries
• Related Terms
• Information Centers
• Thesauri are search tools.

34
subject headings

• These are controlled vocabularies of subjects
  that can be added to a record.
• They may also contain similar relationships
  between terms.
• But unlike thesauri, they are used when creating
  the bibliographic records. Thus they are indexing
  tools.

35
type of subject headings

• LoC subject headings are very complete, but are
  not easy to use.
• Smaller libraries use Sears subject headings
• less compete
• easier to use
• very expensive to buy on paper.

36
Catalogs

• Catalogs are collection of records about a
  librarys holdings.
• In olden days, they were organized by author
  only.
• In more modern days you can approach by various
  access points such as title, author, subject.

37
aims of catalog

• Cutters 1904 work still pertinent here.
• Catalogs
• enable person to find a book of which either
  author, title, subject is known
• to show what the library has for a given author,
  on a given subject, in a given type
• to assist with the choice of the book by edition
  or by its character (literary or topical)

38
catalog

• Cutters vision is more from the users point of
  view, but from the librarys point of view it is
  also important to know
• location
• physical characteristics (e.g. oversize)
• circulation properties

39
bibliographic record

• This is a record that describes an item in the
  library.
• Anglo-American Cataloguing rules are a set of
  standardized rules for creating such record.
• These rules go back to the 19th century, but are
  being revised.
• Currently AARC2 is in use, last revised 2002.

40
fields

• Parts of a record are called fields. A record can
  contain many fields. A field has a name, and a
  value. Example
• Title Homepage of Thomas Krichel
• Author Thomas Krichel
• URL http//wotan.liu.edu/home/krichel
• is a record with three fields. The first field is
  named Title, and its value is Homepage of
  Thomas Krichel

41
MARC

• MARC is a record with field name that are numbers
  and some sub field. The same example as
  previously (basically)
• 100 Thomas Krichel
• 245 Homepage of Thomas Krichel / Thomas Krichel
• 865 http//wotan.liu.edu/home/krichel
• There are gazillions of rules to learn before you
  can write a correct MARC record.

42
other tools index

• forget about NISOs definition as quoted by
  Rubin.
• An index is a list of terms and for each term a
  list of locations where it can be found. Example,
  for these slides
• catalog 17,18,19,20
• subject 3,5,15,16,17,18
• They have a crucial role in information retrieval.

43
types of indexing

• precoordinate indexing an indexer (usually a
  person) selects all the indexing terms and
  decided how they are combined.
• postcoordinate searchers can use indexing terms
  they like. for example they can ask if there are
  slides that have subject and catalog.

44
other tools abstract

• an abstract is pretty much a description of
  something else without a rigid structure.
• Homepage of Thomas Krichel
• written by Thomas Krichel,
• last updated March 2005
• at http//openlib.org/home/krichel
• would be an example of an abstract.
• There are many abstracting and indexing databases
  that hold a lot of abstracts and have indexed
  them.

45
other tool bibliography

• This is basically a collection of abstracts on a
  certain topic.
• It can be a large like DBLP, see
  http//dblp.uni-tier.de or a small one like the
  one you may want to create for your essay.

46
http//openlib.org/home/krichel

• Thank you for your attention!
• Please switch off the computers.