Organizing Corporate Knowledge: The Ever-Changing Role of Cataloging and Classification
by Suzanne C. Pilsk, MLIS;
Sandy McIntyre Colby, MLIS; Paige Andrew, MLS;
and Alane Wilson, MLIS
Suzanne C. Pilsk, MLIS, is a cataloger at Smithsonian Institution Libraries and is a member of the SLA Committee on Cataloging. Sandy McIntyre Colby, MLIS, is a product support specialist for the Cataloging and Metadata Services Division at OCLC, Inc., and is a member of the SLA Committee on Cataloging. Paige G. Andrew, MLS, is chair of the SLA Committee on Cataloging. Alane Wilson, MLIS, is a senior marketing analyst for the Cataloging and Metadata Services Division at OCLC, Inc.
The Evolution of Cataloging
Behind every successful information seeker is an information professional who seamlessly manages corporate knowledge and the information structure necessary for the organization to succeed. Professionals sometimes take for granted the underlying structure for managing that needed information. Information that seekers seem to think they find serendipitously actually has an organized, purposeful structure created by information professionals who use a variety of standards, systems and rules meant to bring order out of chaos. With the explosion of electronic data has come the obvious need to organize it into timely access points. Knowledge management and controlor cataloging and classificationhas recently undergone thorough review and changes. These changes may affect how you manage and provide access to information—particularly electronic resources—in your local setting.
The 2001/2002 year has already seen radical changes in the basics of library science. Not usually touted as cutting edge, cataloging standards groups have been working ahead of the curve to anticipate various types of needs related to organizing, retrieving, archiving and disseminating all types of information.
Change is never ending. In this world of new information producers (from high school students creating authoritative Web sites on their favorite rock bands to research scientists who use the Web as the first place of publication of their work) and information delivery systems (such as hand-held PDAs), knowledge managers are tackling the next wave of information needs. The cataloging world continues to rethink how best to organize and disseminate information, regardless of its origin.
Because of enormous changes in information, this is the appropriate time for librarians to look back at where we have come from to clearly see where we are going. Through a brief examination of the history of cataloging and the foundational structure underlying information organization, we will be able to move confidently forward with new skills and know-how.
Beginning of Rules (The Fight for Right)
Between the years of 1847 and 1849 there was a controversy brewing at the British Museum's Department of Printed Books. Antonio Panizzi was forced to defend his new cataloging rules before the Royal Commission. The dispute revolved around the museum's normal practice of publishing a catalog as an alphabetized inventory list ordered by author, which followed ancient practices. Panizzi's 1841 Rules for Compilation of the Catalogue (of the British Museum) brought together all manifestations of a particular work though a single main-entry point. The intellectual information was collected so that users would be able to see all relationships of a particular title. The Royal Commission sided with Panizzi and his rules. It forbid the trustees of the British Museum Library to interfere with matters of cataloging. While this pivotal event is the ideological foundation of cataloging, it still continues to be questioned, poked at and sometimes changed.
On the other side of the Atlantic, scholar-librarians influenced by Panizzi's codification of cataloging wrote their own seminal works. In 1852, Charles C. Jewett, then the librarian of the Smithsonian Institution, wrote the first code of cataloging rules in the United States titled On the Construction of Catalogues Of Libraries and of a General Catalogue, and Their Publication by Means of Separate Stereotype Titles: With Rules and Examples. Among Jewett's grand ideas was a large union catalog with printed cards to be shared by libraries. Controversial in his own way, Jewett was later fired by the Smithsonian.
In 1876, the same year the American Library Association was established, Charles Ammi Cutter published Rules for a Dictionary Catalog, possibly the most comprehensive set of rules produced by any individual. In that same year, Melvil Dewey published the first edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification System.
By the end of the 19th century practically all books and newspaper printing aspects had become mechanized and it was now possible to print thousands and thousands of pages per hour. Mass media had arrived and along with it the struggle that librarians continue to face.
"The volumes of trash poured forth daily, weekly, and monthly, are appalling. Many minds, which, if confined to a few volumes, would become valuable thinkers, are lost in the wilderness of brilliant and fragrant weeds," said Senator Yeaman (in Klaus Mussmans' book, Technological Innovations in Libraries) about the sheer amount of information available.
Those sages of librarianship recognized what we are now going through once again—the inability to catalog a huge amount of new material. To many librarians of that time much of the material being offered was of such ephemeral and questionable quality that right-minded catalogers would obviously choose not to catalog most of it.
The history of knowledge management and bibliographic control in the 20th century quickly shifts focus and is comprised of two major themes: the development of (and changes to) the codes for bibliographic control and technological advances adopted by or invented for libraries.
| Heads up for Cataloging Electronic Resources by Sandy McIntyre Colby
In the information game, knowing how rule changes could impact the delivery of your services is key. Regardless of library size or type, if you or your staff organize and provide timely access to informationparticularly electronic resourcesa summary of AACR2 (Anglo American Cataloging Rules, 1988 revision) changes may prove to be helpful.
AACR2R is "...designed for use in the construction of catalogues and other lists in general libraries of all sizes. The rules cover the description of, and the provision of access points for, all library materials commonly collected at the present time" (Rule 0.1, AACR2R, 1988 with amendments [to] 1999).
While modifications were made to various chapters and glossary terms, perhaps the most relevant changes that may impact your online special collections occurred in Chapter 9. "Electronic Resources" is not only the new chapter title but it also replaces all references to "Computer Files" throughout AACR2. Electronic Resources is also a new general material designation (GMD), in the form of (Electronic Resource), and now applies to all "material (data and/or programs) encoded for manipulation by a computerized device" (9.0A). This includes those items accessed remotely (now considered published, rule 9.4B2) either through a terminal, network or other non-removable storage devices, as well as those accessed directly from any type of disc/disk or tape inserted into a computer device.
Determining the chief source of information for electronic resources has also changed. Rather than using the title screen, use any portion of the resource itself or accompanying material as the chief source of information. This includes two new recognized types of formally presented evidencehome page(s) and encoded metadata such as HTML/XML. Obtaining information from "the physical carrier or its labels" has also been elevated as a primary alternative information source. Labels, defined as those added by the creator/publisher and as being printed on the item itself, may now be used as the chief source of information granted that its use is referenced in a note. Finally, if the title is obtained from a source other than the prescribed source of information for this area, be sure to indicate the source of the title in the note. As a result of these flexible options you or a staff member need to determine the order of precedence for title selection.
When presented with frequent content updates or multiple copyright dates, include only the most recent copyright date and exclude a formal edition statement for the resource but indicate the omission of the earlier copyright dates in a note. While many of the changes for the Notes Area (9.7) are simply new examples, you must now include the date a remote electronic resource was viewed for the cataloging process.
For more details about recent or proposed rule changes, access the ALCTS CC:DA Web site (www.ala.org/alcts/organization/ccs/ccda/ccda.html), the Reference Resources for Special Libraries section of the SLA Committee on Cataloging Web site (www.sla.org/committee/catalog1/index.html) or contact your SLA liaison to the CC:DA, Sandy McIntyre Colby, OCLC, colbys@oclc.org. |
Using Panizzi's rules, the philosophy of bringing together all manifestations of a single work, would have been impossibly time-consuming and costly. This could have very well been the beginning of the now constant refrain: "More, cheaper, faster, better!" The increase in publishing in general meant that efficiencies had to be found. One such efficiency would be introduced in 1901.
Standards and Committee Work
(Rules, Rules and More Rules)
The year 1901 began with a bang as the Library of Congress started its Distributed Printed Card program. Part of Jewett's plan was beginning to take shape. Shared cataloging had begun, relieving libraries of the burden and cost of producing all of their own cataloging. Not all librarians saw this innovation as desirable. Some claimed that a printed card could never replace the handwritten card, which opponents said was created with more care and attention than a mechanical one. Others saw this as administrator's plots to deprive catalogers of their work and reduce the number of library staff. "Endism" (the end of cataloging, the end of catalogers) will echo throughout the years, continuing to the present.
In 1908, the American Library Association and the Library Association in Britain published Catalog(u)e Rules: Author and Title Entries in two editions. "Codification by committee" had now begun. The 1908 rules were primarily concerned with the construction of author/title card catalogs and lacked a set of unifying principles of knowledge or information management.
"Is this rule necessary?" This was the question Seymour Lubetzky asked in his 1953 critique of the second edition of the ALA Cataloging Rules for Author and Title Entries. It picked up where Panizzi had left off. Lubetzky stated that the proliferation of rules led to obscuring the fundamental reasons for cataloging. His objective for the catalog was for it to reveal to users what other works the library had by a given author, including other editions, manifestations and translations.
Lubetzky distinguishes between "books" (specific manifestations) and "works" (abstractions of the manifestations). Lubetzky's cataloger would have users looking up the title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and retrieving a record that had in it information about all the versions of that title—the paperback, second edition, etc. The focus is on the content and its description, not the carrier of the information.
Lubetzky's desires for simplified cataloging rules received enough attention that he was named editor for the proposed revision of the ALA code. He resigned in 1962 when it became clear that his goal of collocation of manifestations would not be the result of the 1967 publication AACR (the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules).
Build, Innovate, Create
One invention that had a profound effect on the cataloging community and on librarianship as a whole was actually invented in 1889. Herman Hollerith's use of punch cards to represent the U.S. census data (which was collected in 1890) and the machine used to analyze the information, began a technological revolution. In 1924, Hollerith's company changed its name to International Business Machines (IBM). Some early library visionaries saw these punch card machines and their potential for improving the organization of information.
In Historical Note: A Personalized Prehistory of OCLC, Fred Kilgour refers to an article by Ralph H. Parker, written in 1936, where Parker had developed and installed what can be described as "the first library system based on Hollerith punched cards." In 1965, the Ohio College Association's Library Project hired Parker and Kilgour as consultants. Parker and Kilgour initiated their idea of a computerized, shared cataloging system, which is now known as an online catalog.
For those of us today who rely on such fixtures as OCLC's WorldCat or the Research Library Group's Union Catalog, it is hard to imagine the enormous audacity of the system that Parker and Kilgour were building from their ideas. They did not have hardware or software that could do what was proposed. There was no agreed-upon means of communicating bibliographic data between computers. And, it was only in the early part of 1965 that the first third-generation computers were even available. The IBM System/360 and the SDS Sigma 7 were probably the first timesharing systems capable of realizing this vision.
Also in 1965, Henriette Avram, a recently hired employee of the Library of Congress (LC), was given the MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) Pilot Project as her first assignment. LC had been investigating the possibility of automating aspects of its operations as early as the 1950s and Avram's project was to test the feasibility of distributing cataloging data in machine readable form to libraries for use in computer installations. Distribution of the first MARC records was in 1966 and the release of the MARC format, as a cataloging standard, was in 1968.
Many librarians were afraid that what started as the Ohio College Library Center and a unified online catalog vision would put catalogers out of business. The "endism" of their predecessors in 1901 was once again feared. With hindsight, it is clear that the late 1960s were pivotal times in the development of technologies related to the bibliographic world. Yet, librarianship was poised to reach another improved and advanced level with the introduction of true, online shared cataloging, a time of fully supported and shared information and advances in the creation of knowledge. The technology automated the clerical routine, allowing humans to perform higher-level work by integrating mountains of information into more useful knowledge repositories.
In 1977, Stanford University's Bibliographic Automation of Large Library Operations using a Time-Sharing System (BALLOTS) combined with the RLG (the Research Library Group) consortium, which consisted of the holdings of Columbia, Harvard, and Yale universities and the New York Public Library, to form the Research Library Information Network (RLIN). That same year Requiem for the Card Catalog: Management Issues in Automated Cataloging, a summary of the conference papers presented by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, was published.
Kilgour was asked at this conference to forecast where automated cataloging might go in the next 25 years. "Are we going to move increasingly in the direction of automating 19th century librarianship, or are we going to use automation to produce a new librarianship totally different from both the past and the present?" he asked.
The remainder of the 20th century found mainstream cata
| To Learn More About the History of Cataloging: ACM Conference on Management Issues in Automated Cataloging (1977 : Chicago, Ill.). Requiem For the Card Catalog: Management Issues in Automated Cataloging. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979.
Dougherty, Richard Martin. "OCLC: Commemorating a Decade of Accomplishment, Preparing for a Decade of Challenge," Journal of Academic Librarianship 8 (March 1982): 3.
Drake, Miriam A. "Managing Innovation in Academic Libraries," College and Research Libraries 40 (November 1979): 503-10.
Drake, Miriam A. "Technological Innovation and Organizational Change," Journal of Library Administration. 19 n.3-4 (1993): 39-53.
Freedman, Maurice J. "The Automation of Cataloging," Library Trends 25 (January 1977): 703-772.
Gorman, Michael. "Network! Or I'm as Rational as Hell and I'm Not Going to Take It Any More," American Libraries 11 (January 1980): 48-50.
Hewitt, Joe A. "The Impact of OCLC: the Good and the Bad, as Recorded by Researcher Joe A. Hewitt in an Epic Journey to Every Charter Library of the On-Line System." American Libraries 7 (May 1976): 268-275.
Johan Olaisen, Johan; Lovhoiden, Hugo; and Djupvik, Olay A. "The Innovative Library: Innovation Theory Applied to Library Services," Libri 45 (June 1995): 79-90.
Kallenbach, Susan, and Jacobson, Susan. "Staff Response to Changing Systems: From Manual to OCLC to RLIN," Journal of Academic Librarianship 6 (November 1980): 264-267. Kilgour, Frederick G. "Historical Note: A Personalized Prehistory of OCLC," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 38 n. 5 (September 1987): 381-84.
Kraus, Joe W. "Prologue to Library Cooperation," Library Trends 24 (October 1975): 169-81.
Lubetzky, Seymour. Cataloging Rules and Principles; Critique of the A.L.A. Rules for Entry and a Proposed Design for Their Revision. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1953.
Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1997.
Mintzberg, Henry. "Organization Design: Fashion or Fit," Harvard Business Review 59 (January February 1981): 103-116.
Moore, Barbara. "Patterns of Use of OCLC by Academic Library Cataloging Departments," Library Resources and Technical Services 25 (January-March 1981): 30-9.
Moore, D.M. "Library Networks; a Technological System Whose Time has Come," Journal of Educational Technology Systems 8 (1979-80): 147-53.
Mussmann, Klaus. Technological Innovations in Libraries, 1860-1960: an Anecdotal History. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Panizzi, Anthony. Rules for the Compilation of the Catalogue (of the British Museum). London. 1841.
Wilson, Alane. "2001: A Bibliographical Odyssey." OCLC Newsletter (May/June 2001): 35-41. |
loging standards and practices automating 19th century librarianship. The weight of AACR and general cataloging conventions prevented the full realization of the more forward thinking visionaries. But with another new millennium fast approaching, the pendulum of change would be swinging back toward the importance of content over carrier—the intellectual substance of the material over the physical format of the item.
And Then Along Came the Net
In the late 1960s the Defense Agency Research Projects Administration (DARPA) was given the mission to create a communications infrastructure for the United States military. The task was given to the newly created Advanced Research Projects Agency, headed by Dr. J.C.R. Licklider. In 1972 Licklider demonstrated how 40 computers could be connected and work together in a network they called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). Licklider saw computers not as merely arithmetic devices but as communications and information-access devices. Licklider was starting his "galactic network"his vision of a global network connecting individuals and information. It was that vision that would become the Internet.
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, known as TCP/IP, was the next major invention to lead us to the seamless Internet. Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn developed the routing mechanism in 1973 so that computers can now find and relay information.
The development of the Internet changed how humans and computers interacted and communicated, as well as how our work is accomplished. The ability to connect computers, establish and maintain interoperability among them, and to be able to exchange and share information radically changed the way library staff did their work. But even then, all of the huge productivity gains were only improvements to the way things had always been done.
What finally broke traditional approaches for librarians, corporate knowledge managers and information brokers, erupted in 1989. Tim Berners-Lee proposed that a global hypertext space be created in which any network-accessible information could be referred to by a single Universal Document Identifier or URI (this was eventually known as Universal Resource Locator or URL). This led to the creation of the hypertext transmission protocol (http), which was released as the World Wide Web. The importance of the Web was on the agenda of the 1994 ALA MARBI (MAchine-Readable Bibliographic Information) committee members who approved the addition of the 856 field to the USMARC format to accommodate the "Uniform Resource Name," also referred to as the URN or link.
In the latter part of the 1980s implementation of automated library systems was widespread. Catalogers were able to catalog faster and more efficiently and create more useful and powerful databases. Even then there were information professionals and researchers who saw, before the introduction of the Web browser Mosaic, that the rapidly growing Internet needed to be organized.
Licklider and Berners-Lee's ideas of a common space where we communicate by sharing content have generated a great need for data about data, or metadata. The Web and all its related technologies allow for enormous amounts of accessible content via the desktop, but information about the content is necessary for searching, categorizing and selecting.
Metadata Mission 2000
The 1990s were a time of enormous change. Advances in technologycombined with changes in publishing, user skills and demands and information seeking habitsaffected libraries greatly. Much of this change was external to libraries yet it impacted services delivered. Responding to the rise of the Web, librarians and information professionals were forced to examine some of their traditional ways of thinking and approaches.
Groups outside of the AACR and MARC communities had already begun developing schemes such as EAD (Encoding Archival Data) and TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) to describe materials not easily explained with traditional library-based standards. Most of the traditional standards communities were not focused on electronic resources and they did not address the issue of needing rules to further determine content. None addressed the issue of shared metadata or broadcast searching across repositories of information such as OPACS. Had it not been for the explosion of material made available on the Web, these types of metadata schemes might still be an academic concern, though information professionals in other areas were heavily involved.
In March 1995, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and OCLC held a metadata workshop in Dublin, Ohio, to discuss how a core set of elements for describing Web-based resources would be useful in simplifying Web searches. The result was Dublin Core, a 15-element metadata set.
In 1999, the staff at Fred Kilgour's old stomping grounds, OCLC's Office of Research, launched the Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) as a research project. In July 2000, CORC was released as a cataloging tool. The project explored the use of Web technology and techniques for providing libraries access to other electronic information. The idea was to build a cataloging system that would automate some aspects of the bibliographic description and use the OCLC cooperative to create bibliographic records for Web-based materials using AACR, MARC and evolving Dublin Core standards.
The traditional bibliographic record, a description of what the work is about, is a surrogate of the work. But once the URL became part of the record, to some degree the record became the described object. The record itself could now do more than notify the users of the existence of a resource. It could now deliver it simultaneously as well. This streamlined delivery mechanism has major implications for the future of the traditional notion of the library catalog. But the most profound change has been the notion of the "work," which strikes at the heart of the various cataloging codes of the past 150 years.
The history of Anglo-American cataloging has always been one of "third-party" cataloging; creators of information have had little involvement with the description and classification of their own works. This is rapidly changing. Web creators are embedding into their products metadata describing the works. And, the notion of creator-generated metadata rather than cataloger-generated descriptions strikes up the "endism" mantra of work for catalogers once again.
Web-based material was, to many librarians, initially considered of such questionable quality that right-minded catalogers would obviously choose not to catalog most of it. Once again the cataloging community balked at this flood of new information requiring our organizational skills, just as it had balked 100 years previously. But by the end of the millennium, cataloging and the catalog were the subject of conferences, presentations, discussions and, no doubt, arguments. Terms from the traditional nomenclature of "cataloged record" to "metadata" were even debated. Many wrote and spoke of librarians' inability to catalog this huge amount of new material.
Information managers were predicting that the traditional catalog and the traditional function of cataloging would end and that the component parts of the process and the product would fly apart under the weight of the Web. But this is not "endism"—predicting the complete disappearance of cataloging and those who do the work. Catalogers will not become obsolete in the near future. The papers and the responses presented at the November 2000 Library of Congress's Bicentennial Conference "Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium" represent some of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking ideas on the role and future of cataloging, the catalog and those who practice librarianship.
The huge increase in valuable digital material available on the Web made it clear to many that standards and bibliographic control must assist librarians and others in the description of Web-accessible materials. Information professionals are not seeing the end of their careers but instead a resurgence of them.
The Future Is Looking Bright
The Web, that common information space in which we communicate by sharing information, is not monolingual. It is a polyglot space occupied by many communities such as libraries, employees, publishers, businesses, museums, news agencies and other entities. Beyond the formal communities are millions of content producers, "publishing" their content without much thought given toward inventory control, especially by single individuals.
Because of all that had transpired during the last third of the 20th century, a review of the underlying principles of AACR began in 1997 at the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR held in Toronto, Canada. Participants agreed that "content" versus "carrier" problems are significant and must be addressed sooner rather than later. The explosion of digital versions of materials, not just "born digital" materials, has talk of allowing a single record to describe electronic and print journals and books.
The year 2002 brings to the cataloging/bibliographic control world new sets of rules, standards and guidelines—particularly related to electronic and digital materials—with more forthcoming. Substantial cataloging rule changes have recently been proposed and approved by the Joint Steering Committee (JSC) for Revision of AACR. Some of these changes have already been implemented, with others soon to be and updates to AACR2R scheduled for publication this year. The new rules apply to the description of cartographic materials, electronic resources (both born digital and digital versions) and integrating resources of all types (see sidebar on page 33).
Following the historical path of information management and the emergence of knowledge management allows us to observe that the early developers of cataloging rules and classification schemes established a means for us to better organize information—both new and old. Where would our companies and organizations be, especially when today's technologies allow for such rapid creation, expansion and changes to information, if it were not for the rules of organization that we continue to apply toward both traditional and digital worlds in order to maintain a semblance of order? We must have dedicated, technologically-savvy, and highly skilled librarians and information professionals, with the ability to apply existing and new rules for the organization of information in order to survive what we face today and into the future. Corporate knowledge, and all other forms of knowledge, still requires a foundation of rules and guidelines to manage the information wisely and appropriately for the good of all.
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