Candy@GSLIS

Ted Gemberling posted this response in AUTOCAT as part of a long discussion about the future, generated by Thomas Mann's reaction to the final report of the LC Working Group on Bibliographic Control (read Mann's report here). Ted's post addresses James Weinheimer's response to Mann (here). I thought Ted's comments were wonderful, especially the last one on books.

Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:00:35 -0500
From: Ted P Gemberling
Subject: Re: LC Working Group - Thomas Mann review

James, here are some comments on points in your "open reply" to Thomas Mann. The paragraph numbers correspond with the numbers in your paper.

1. You say, "It is practically impossible for a non-specialist to know such subject heading intricacies." But Mann always emphasizes that a certain amount of bibliographic instruction and, often, one-on-one consultation with a reference person is needed to learn the vocabulary. That is inherent in its status as a "controlled" vocabulary. The question is, can we ever create a search system that obviates the need for any "expert" help? I doubt it.

2. You mention that there's no place in the authority files for Weltanschauung. As I'm sure you know, Weltanschauung is a German word, occasionally used in English, and the researcher has to get a sense of how it relates to English terms. It literally means "World view," also not an LC heading. I did a search in LC's catalog, and it often correlates with the LCSH subdivision Philosophy or main headings with the word Philosophy. Sometimes there's no one-on-one correspondence between it and a subject heading, as in Der Deutsche Turnerbund 1889 : seine Entwicklung und Weltanschauung. I'm guessing the cataloger thought the "worldview" of the organization (Turnerbund) was conveyed well by the various main headings: Sports and the state, Nationalism, and Antisemitism. I'm pretty sure anyone who has figured out what Weltanschauung means will have little difficulty with this. The point is that Mann isn't claiming LCSH does a researcher's work for him. It's only a tool for getting closer to the things we're looking for. Keyword searches are another useful tool, and he doesn't deny their value.

3. You say the displays in today's online catalogs are "semi-useless" because they're so long. But as Mann shows, that very length helps people find the variety of resources a library has. And as Martha Yee has shown, it is also possible to create a keyword search for words within heading lists. See http://cinema.library.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search. If you only want things on Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, click on topic and genre/form search and enter those two words. It will take you to a list of just a few headings that contain only those words. But it doesn't require the elimination of precoordination: the result is still a precoordinated browse list. You also mentioned Queen Anne's War as hard to find. But if you do a subject search for those words in LC's catalog, the More info icon will take you directly to the established heading (beginning with United States), without having to scroll through the alphabetical list.

5. You say that your users would have to go through 100 screens to find that Corporate state is a narrower term for Fascism. I don't know about your catalog, but in LC's, if you just do a subject search for Fascism and click on More info, you will see Corporate state listed as a See also. In fact, in that catalog, no amount of scrolling will give you that information if you don't click on the icon.

6. This point is about "information imperialism." It's true that there is some of that. LC undoubtedly does dominate other national cataloging agencies to a considerable degree, and it's appropriate for them to protect their autonomy as much as they can. But the "virtual international authority file" you appear to be speaking of, which would link names and subjects in different languages, need not change the form of headings in any one of the languages. In each of them, subjects will be represented by words understandable to their speakers. The international authority file will create a crosswalk between the different national files, perhaps with each heading equivalency represented by a number, but that need not change the forms of headings themselves.

8. Let's say for the sake of argument that copyright did go away somehow. Everything could be digitized and reused freely. That would still not make keyword access an adequate way of finding information, in isolation from controlled heading searches and browsing classified shelves. Here's a quote from David Bell about the problems with this: "The very nature of the computer presents a different problem. If physical discomfort discourages the reading of texts sequentially, from start to finish, computers make it spectacularly easy to move through texts in other ways--in particular, by searching for particular pieces of information. Reading in this strategic, targeted manner can feel empowering. Instead of surrendering to the organizing logic of the book you are reading, you can approach it with your own questions and glean precisely what you want from it. You are the master, not some dead author. And this is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master. Information is not knowledge; searching is not reading; and surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns.

"If my own experience is any guide, "search-driven" reading can make for depressingly sloppy scholarship. Recently, I decided to examine the way in which the radical eighteenth-century thinker d'Holbach discussed warfare. I could have read his book Universal Morality in the rare-book room of my university library, but I decided instead to download a copy (it took about two minutes). And then, faced with a text hundreds of pages long, instead of reading from start to finish, I searched for the words "war" and "peace." I found a great many juicy quotations, which I conveniently cut and pasted directly into my notes. But at the end, I had very little idea of why d'Holbach had written his book in the first place. If I had had to read the physical book, I could still have skimmed, cut, and pasted, but I would have been forced to confront the text as a whole at some basic level. The computer encouraged me to read in exactly the wrong way, leaving me with little but a series of disembodied passages."

Thanks for reading this.
Ted Gemberling
UAB Lister Hill Library
(205)934-2461