LIS510 lecture 10

Thomas Krichel

2006-11-29

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.

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.

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

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

selection criteria

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

teacher’s guide, translations)

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.

circulation policies

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

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.

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.

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.

obligations to restrict access

• obligation to act with respect to one’s 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

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.

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.

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

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 don’t belong into the library.

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 don’t 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 > Chemistry > Organic Chemistry

Classification schemes

• Generally schemes to classify subjects are discipline oriented, rather than subject oriented.

• Example– Sports > Racing > Horse Racing– Science > Biology > Zoology > Horses > Horse

Racing

• The same thing can be viewed form different disciplines.

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

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

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

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.

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.

controlled vocabulary

• Many words can be used to describe the same thing– US, U.S., United States of America, США

• 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.

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

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.loc.gov/

• Look at the personal authority file and search for someone reasonable famous that you like.

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.

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.

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.

Catalogs• Catalogs are collection of records about a

library’s 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.

aims of catalog

• Cutter’s 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)

catalog

• Cutter’s vision is more from the user’s point of view, but from the library’s point of view it is also important to know:– location– physical characteristics (e.g. oversize)– circulation properties

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.

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”

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.

other tools: index

• forget about NISO’s 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.

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”.

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.

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.

http://openlib.org/home/krichel

Thank you for your attention!

Please switch off the computers.