Competency G
Cataloging
Cataloging
Demonstrate understanding of basic principles and standards involved in organizing information such as classification and controlled vocabulary systems, cataloging systems, metadata schemas or other systems for making information accessible to a particular clientele.
Introduction
One of the tenets of information science is that information that cannot be found might as well not exist. I understand Competency G to mean that in order for an individual to find the information they want or need, that information must be properly organized. Furthermore, the competency tells me that I can achieve this proper organization by adhering to certain principles and by implementing established schemes, systems, and standards.
When it comes to formulating standards, Bolin (2018) identified three key principles: The first covers both location, which is the ability to find a record by its author or subject, and colocation, or grouping things together by author or subject. The second principle, interoperability, says that different cataloging systems using the same standard must be able to share records. The third is metadata, which is data that describes records through a defined set of attributes such as title, subject, and author.
Cataloging and Classification
The above principles underpin a wide variety of standards used in cataloging and classification. Cataloging is the primary method of organization in the information profession. It involves describing a record by defining certain attributes, with the goal of making that record findable and accessible. Classification systems give structure to those attributes and descriptions, and improve searching by making it easier for users to browse related resources. Creating standards for cataloging and classification systems reduces work by eliminating the need to come up with a new system for every project. It also promotes record consistency across organizations and industries, enables interoperability, and improves search experiences for users.
One of the most widespread cataloging systems is Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC), which was established by the Library of Congress the 1960s to standardize the organization of books via fields and subfields. It also sets standards for structuring and encoding records. Many online public access catalogs (OPACs), the WorldCat database, and the Dublin Core classification scheme are based upon MARC (Bolin, 2018, pp. 143–144).
The Dublin Core was designed in the 1990s to aid in cataloging digital assets and content. It consists of 15 core elements, or fields, that can be filled out to define a record. Its creators wanted to keep the number of core elements limited in order to make the system straightforward and flexible enough for non-catalogers, such as authors, to use (National Information Standards Organization, 2004). In my coursework I learned how the elements of Dublin Core and other similar classifications schemes provide a framework for applying metadata to records, further encouraging standardization through structures such as controlled vocabularies.
Other classification standards include Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), still used at many public libraries in the United States, and the Library of Congress Classification (LCC), popular in academic libraries. Both of these are used primarily for physical records and are organized by the record’s subject.
Rather than being based on record subjects, the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR2) and its digital-era successor, the Resource Description and Access (RDA), take a descriptive approach to cataloging, providing sets of rules for cataloging library materials by bibliographic information such as title and author.
Metadata and Controlled Vocabularies
Metadata is data that describes different aspects of records. There are several types of metadata. Descriptive metadata covers the record’s bibliographic information, such as title, date, and author. This is different than subject metadata, which describes the topic of the record’s content—what the record is about. Technical data, meanwhile, tells the user about technical aspects of a digital file, such as the file size and perhaps information about the scanner used to digitize the physical original. My coursework showed me that the type of metadata to include as well as the actual metadata fields to fill out will depend upon the intended audience for the records.
Filling out metadata fields can be as much art as science. One indexer might think to give a record a subject metadata field of “car,” whereas another might fill in “automobile,” and a third might say “sedan”—all for the same record. This type of inconsistency can create confusion for indexer and user alike. This is where the particular type of standard called a controlled vocabulary can be immensely helpful. Limiting the terms an indexer can enter or a user can search for can provide an easier and more consistent search experience within that system and across all systems that share that vocabulary.
One of the most popular controlled vocabularies is the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) is very useful for place names. I learned in my coursework, however, that large controlled vocabularies can slow down databases, so it is often better to build smaller, project-specific lists based on these larger standards. This ad hoc approach also allows for building local controlled vocabularies that contain audience-specific yet standardized terms that the end user is most likely to search for.
Evidence
Evidence 1: INFO 284 Archives and Research Management: Digitization and Digital Preservation – ContentDM Online Collection
Building this online collection in the ContentDM web-based content management application gave me the chance to put many of the principles of information organization and standardization into practice. For this group project, my teammates and I digitized postcards and letters sent to one individual during the COVID-19 pandemic. We defined the main target audience as sociologists and others researching life during the pandemic, and we identified some secondary audiences as well. Based on these audiences, we organized and indexed the records to make them both easy to browse by topic or author, and to explore via full-text searching. When it comes to indexing, we based metadata fields on Dublin Core terms.
The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH, 2003) recommended striving for “consistent application of widely accepted standards in metadata recording” (p. 53) when indexing documents. This exercise shows that I am able to follow that guidance and apply standards such as LCSH (for our Subject field), entries from TGN (for our Coverage field), the ISO 8601 date and time format (for our Date field), and custom local vocabularies (for other fields such as Contributors and Record Creator) in order to help promote information discovery and accessibility for a particular user group.
Evidence 2: INFO 294 Professional Experience: Internships – Internship Final Report
During my MLIS program I participated in a for-credit internship at American Film Institute (AFI), within the non-profit’s Louis B. Mayer Library. This final report for the internship explains the duties I performed during the 16-week engagement, most of which centered on indexing records for the library’s database of audio and video recordings of AFI seminars with guest speakers from the movie and TV industry.
The audience for this database is researchers interested in TV and film history, and aspiring filmmakers. My internship supervisor provided the insights about these users I needed to better decide how to index the documents, including how in depth a topic must be discussed in the recording before I was to index for it, based on what a user would expect to see in the record when searching for that term.
Furthermore, on the weekly meetings with the supervisor and other interns, we discussed content and indexing challenges and solutions, resulting in clarification of organization and standards and, when necessary, the tweaking or addition of metadata fields and vocabulary terms. In all, this internship provided me with an invaluable opportunity to show that I can work in a real-world archive setting, entering metadata for digital records (most based on physical originals) that would be used by actual end users.
Evidence 3: INFO 284 Archives and Research Management: Digitization and Digital Preservation – Metadata
For this assignment I had to evaluate the metadata for an archival document—in this case, a digital file for a map in California State University, Chico’s Historical Map Collection. Properly evaluating the record meant I had to be aware of the general principles of metadata, organization, and controlled vocabularies.
This assignment shows that I can understand and assess factors in information organization such as the thoroughness of the metadata structure and the way particular fields included in the record can better serve the intended audience. For example, whereas most cataloging systems would just include location as a subject if that’s what the record were “about,” a catalog of maps and aimed at a geographically-inclined audience benefits from having a separate field for location.
Conclusion
I did not learn many of the aforementioned cataloging systems, classification standards, metadata schema, or other systems of organization and standardization in depth. What I did learn, however, and what is more salient, is that such systems do exist, and it is important to be well versed in whichever ones my institution and industry use. It’s important for promoting consistency in the way records are organized, for making information discoverable and accessible, and for sharing data across institutions.
Some institutions even create their own systems of classification, cataloging, etc. It might take time to learn an institution’s systems when starting a new job, but my classes gave me a solid foundation to understand the principles behind all of them, which will allow me to understand them better and ramp up on them quicker.
References
Bolin, M. K. (2018). Metadata, cataloging, linked data, and the evolving ILS. In S. Hirsh (Ed.), Information services today: An introduction (pp. 143–155). https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=5295158
National Information Standards Organization. (2014). Understanding metadata. NISO Press.
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage. (2003, February). The NINCH guide to good practice in the digital representation and management of cultural heritage materials. http://www.ninch.org/guide.pdf