 | Content associated with the teaching activities of Candy Schwartz, Professor at the Graduate School of Library & Information Science, Simmons College. |
Congratulations everyone on finishing the semester, and especially congratulations to those of you who will be graduating. A big thank you to the gang in 419 who participated in blended learning.
If you want to keep anything in eLearning or Moodle, do it now, as I will be cleaning the content out of these courses shortly.
Last week - Jazz saxophonist Houston Person, this week Van Morrison.
Have a look at these - http://tinyurl.com/5apg7h - esp. This Place is Hot and FindIt.
This week's music was Michael McGoldrick's Wired. Michael is a Manchester-born Irish musician of renown. At the Celtic Connections fesitival I go to every January, he's just known as "Michael", as in "Michael's arrived" - and everyone knows who you mean. Everybody's favourite accompanist (flutes, whistles, pipes, several other instruments) and a really nice man too. He has been a huge influence on Celtic music, from traditional to fusion (he frequently has African and Arabic musicians on stage with him). He doesn't really have a Web page, but search for Michael McGoldrick in YouTube to see him at play. He is in Wikipedia. If you have seen the Scottish group Capercaillie in the past few years you have probably seen Michael.
Last week's music (415) was the wonderful Riccardo Tesi, world's foremost proponent of the Italian diatonic accordion/meolodeon (yeah, I know, but you have to be there). I have seen Riccardo 4 or 5 times, and coincidentally got e-mail from him last Friday afternoon (for the first time in years). This week's is the far better known Gypsy Kings. I have never seen them, although I was in their home town (Les Saintes Maries de la mer) last November. They come through Boston regularly.
This week's music was Bob Dylan's Blood on the tracks. My favourite of his post-mid-60s canon.
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
This week's music is jazz great Miles Davis - Kind of Blue.
This week's music comes from Paul Butterfield, a popular blues harmonica player when I was a young hippie at McGill. The album is East-West. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band included Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield, both big names in their own right. More here.
This week's music is Kerden, an anthology of the top Breton guitarists. You can see a tracklist here. I love Breton music, and have seen a fair amount of it live, either in Brittany or in Glasgow at the Celtic Connections festival. I saw some of these people last month in Glasgow.
Hi all, and Happy New Year. I am in my office for one day, and then off to Glasgow and not back in school until February 1. I would appreciate not getting e-mail during that time, though I will be using an Internet cafe regularly while I am gone. I have put some recent photos in flickr, if you want to see what I have been up to.
The music this week will be Van Morrison's Moondance - which includes several of what I would call "our songs" - songs that were popular shortly after Simon and I were married, and which marked our move to Madison, WI, for Si's graduate degree. I used to know this album off by heart (not anymore). You can wikipedia Van Morrison if you don't already know about him - it's a long and interesting story.
This week's music will be the album Fyace, by Ian Carr (guitar) and Karen Tween (accordion, and no jokes please). Ian is one of England's top folk guitarists, and accompanies many well-known artists. He and Karen also play (at least for another month or so) with an English-Scandinavian band called Swap. Karen is a friend, and widely regarded as Britain's top folk accordion player. She is eclectic, has played in all sorts of genres with all sorts of people, teaches in Newcastle and Limerick, and is hugely talented. Karen's myspace and Ian's.
I will try to remember to let you know what music was playing before class. September 6 and 7, it was Moving Hearts, The Storm. This is my number 1 Desert Island Disc. I had the good fortune to see this set performed in Glasgow about a dozen years ago, and saw Moving Hearts twice in the 80s - here and in Galway. Their web site is here - http://www.movinghearts.ie/index.shtml.
Karen Calhoun, of the Calhoun Report (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf), will be speaking to the Harvard U Librarians (HUL) group on Friday, May 4th, from 1:30 to 3:00 in Science Center B. This room is open to public access and holds more people than will attend, so if you are interested, please do go.
Thomas Mann, of LC, has an interesting paper on the Library of Congress Professional Guild site at http://www.guild2910.org/. Look for the link to his essay "More on What is Going on at the Library of Congress", from January 1, 2007.
If you were planning on coming in to school tonight, please note that Simmons is closing at 3, and night classes are cancelled. However, the Tech Lab will be open until 4, and the Cataloguing Lab will be open 24/7, since it's on a swipe card. So as far as I know, you can swipe into the building and swipe into the Cat Lab. But stay home and keep off the streets if you possibly can.
Phone and snack sheets have been added to the opening pages of 415 and 419 VISTA spaces. I will update these when (if) I get additional information sheets from students.
For 33 reasons why you should be proud to be becoming a librarian, and good responses when someone says "but aren't libraries obsolete?", see http://www.degreetutor.com/library/adult-continued-education/librarians-needed.
I hope everyone has noticed that we have a great line-up of CE offerings here at GSLIS, and that they are all available at a 50% discount for students. Check out the listings at http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/continuinged/workshops/.
I have been quiet for the past little while, so thought I would just drop in for a minute while in an Internet cafe in Glasgow (Scotland) and let you all know that I am still here. Stayed up till 4am last night/this morning listening to amazing music (after a day full of concerts, just one of 18 days full of music). I am on my way to hear two Breton musicians, and that will be followed by another late night of Club. If you want to know more about this amazing festival I have been attending for the past 14 years, check out http://www.celticconnections.com/. I am actually in this photo - http://www.flickr.com/photos/abirobertson/361740177/- the red hat at the switchback point of the stairs on the left. I have lots of my own photos, but no time to load them.
I have not ignored GSLIS completely. Thanks to Jen Doyle, I got some room problems straightened out for 419 and 415 (the former will be meeting in P-210, and the latter in L-305), and have been working on the journal which Peter Hernon and I edit.
See you next week - back on Wednesday.
If you got used to seeing the Clusty cloud on my blog, then you will notice that I deleted it. Too much real estate, and too much time delay. Nice idea though - make your own Clusty cloud by entering your name as the query.
Check it out - the Athenaeum is running a bicentennial lecture series, free and open to the public. They have a "fridge list" showing lectures throughout the spring on library topics such as copyright (Feb 22), preservation (Mar 15), the cultural influence of libraries (Apr 26), censorship (May 10), and the organization of knowledge (May 17). All Thursdays, and all at 6pm. They also have an amazing collection of Webcasts.
Allen Smith took this photo in the wilds of Washington State, and was kind enough to give me a copy. I want to know what was at the end of that mile. 
The clustering search engine Clusty has added "Clusty clouds", and they encourage you to run your own name. So of course I did. It's now a section on the right side of this blog. Too cool (but one has to wonder at some of the associations).