Early-semester lecture in "Organization of Information."

1. What we organize
(and why)
LIS 551
Dorothea Salo

2. Svenonius on prerequisites
• To create a system of organizing
information, you need:
• Ideology: the “why” of organization
• Formalized praxis: the “how it’s done”
• Theory: the “how it SHOULD be done”
• Problems: the “er, does this really work the way we
thought it did?”
• So let’s talk about the systems that got
us where we are today.
• Keep this list in hand! What is each system we’re
talking about addressing?

3. Key people in c. 19th
info-org history
• Panizzi: “Let’s organize the British Library!”
• Dui and the alphabet-soup avalanche
• Dewey Decimal (DDC), UDC, LCSH, LCC, AACR
• Cutter the Systematizer: objectives and
principles of organization
• lives on in the “Cutter number”

4. What’s YOUR Cutter number?
! !

5. Bibliographic objectives,
per Cutter
• Find a book if you know its author/title/subject.
• “Known item” search. (Svenonius: “finding objective”)
• Access point: Hooks chosen for searching. (More later.)
• Find every book the library has with a given
author/title/subject.
• Svenonius: “collocation objective”
• COLLOCATION: Put like things together, along a given axis
of “likeness.” (Fiction vs. non-fiction?)
• THIS is the organizing principle aimed at browsers.
• Be sure you have the book you were looking for.

6. Lubetsky the nitpicker
• Added “find the right edition” to the mix.
• How often does this matter? Seriously? In practice,
for a very few works and a very few users.
• Is this really a primary objective? Really? See what
you think when we get to AACR2 and FRBR.
• One important distinction: “work” versus
“edition.”
• Think about the Bible.
• Paris Principles: 1961.

7. IFLA 1997
• FIND entities corresponding to search
criteria.
• IDENTIFY entity, or distinguish it from
closely-similar entity
• SELECT entity matching a need, or reject
it as inappropriate
• OBTAIN/ACCESS desired object.
• this one’s new! but the Web made it salient.

8. Classification
• The operationalization of collocation!
• Bring like things together, with respect to
one or more attributes
• in an economic, extant-record-minded, and
technologically up-to-date fashion.
• Distinguish what is exactly alike from what
is almost alike.
• Even if it’s just “c. 1” vs. “c. 2”
• Underlying assumption: an information
package can only be in one place.

9. Navigation
• Author, title, and subject aren’t the only
possible breadcrumbs!
• Adaptations
• Associations (e.g. genre)
• Mentions
• Series and sequels
• “Mapping” the bibliographic universe
• Given one information package, find another one
“like” it based on associational criteria.
• Again, the Web forced acknowledgement of this
objective, but this isn’t quite “web navigation.”
• Svenonius says “random associational criteria aren’t
economic.” Do you agree?

10. What is this “information”
stuff anyway?
• Lots of definitions out there!
• info theory: “The information in a message is how
improbable it is compared to all other messages.” Um.
• Svenonius: “the content of a message created by humans,
recorded, and deemed worthy of preservation.”
• Not synonymous with “fact” or “true belief!” Fiction counts
as information.
• Not synonymous with “data” or “sense impression!” Can’t
reduce Homer to data. (Also consider Linear B. We can look
at it, but we can’t extract information from it.)
• “Worthy of preservation” begs a LOT of questions.

11. So what’s a
document, then?

12. So what?
Seriously, so what?

13. So what?
• So we understand the boundaries of what
we are and aren’t organizing.
• If we don’t, we build systems that either don’t
handle everything we need to organize, or pay much
too much attention to unimportant edge cases
(Lubetsky!).
• So we understand and exploit the
essential characteristics of what we
organize.

14. So what’s a document?
• “a piece of information” Really? (Think about a
photograph.)
• “A writing... conveying information.” Really?
• Ranganathan thought so!
• “A material having... a representation of the
thoughts of men.”
• Photographs, petroglyphs, cave paintings, the Sistine
Chapel... it’s all documents. Documents don’t have to be
textual! You just have to be informed by them. (Otlet)

15. Suzanne Briet
• “any physical or symbolic sign, preserved
or recorded, intended to represent, to
reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical
or conceptual phenomenon.”
• What’s the key word in that definition,
for you?

16. Consider the

17. Ian Burt, “Kudu Antelope - Botswana” http://www.flickr.com/photos/oddsock/264868235/ CC-BY

18. Iain Wanless, “Antelope” http://www.flickr.com/photos/reemul/5605641902/ CC-BY

19. What IS a document?
• Key Otlet/Briet insight: it’s not anything
inherent in the thing we’re considering.
• Least of all the physical form!
• It’s how WE treat it. We grant something
document-ness.
• Partly by organizing it the way(s) we organize
documents!

20. So, come on, really,
antelopes?
• Fair enough.
• But let’s take that a little further. How are
libraries and archives similar to and
different from:
• Zoos (why not?)
• Museums
• Herbaria and similar kinds of research collections.
• Think about WHAT gets organized, HOW,
WHY, and FOR WHOSE BENEFIT.

21. A good word to know:
REALIA
• Quoth Wikipedia: “three-dimensional
objects from real life such as coins, tools,
and textiles, that do not easily fit into the
orderly categories of printed material.”
• Do we have these? Sure we do.

22. http://www.good.is/post/at-toronto-s-human-library-you-check-out-people-not-books/

23. And then there’s...
• (UWRF realia in UWDCC)
• (photo can’t be reproduced per rights
statement, so I’m not reproducing it)

24. Another question
• Can documents become realia? Where is
the line? What happens to the
information value of the item?

25. CONTENT
vs.
CARRIER

26. Lots of content carriers!
• List a few.
• What does that mean for organization
systems?
• What difference does it make when the
carrier is digital?
• Think about information surrogates such as catalog
records while you answer.

27. Thanks!
• Copyright 2011 by Dorothea Salo.
• This lecture and slide deck are licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution
3.0 United States License.