Even though mountain bike sales and participation are down (as a percentage of market share, biking has been declining for ten years), the Library of Congress has just issued a directive to change the subject heading from “All Terrain Cycling” to “Mountain Biking.” The term was apparently first coined by Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher in 1979.

Arthur Schopenhauer is suggested to have said:

Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is violently opposed, in the third is regarded as self-evident.

If the reaction to Karen Calhoun’s report to the Library of Congress on The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools is any guide, libraries are stuck firmly in the second stage.

The most recent denial comes from an Inside Higher Ed story titled “Calling Melvil Dewey” which strikes out at both Calhoun’s report and the recent cataloging changes by the LoC.

My comment there remarks:

Among all the negative and alarmist coverage I’ve seen of Calhoun’s report and the LoC’s proposed cataloging changes (this included), I have yet to see anybody refute the premise or suggest a workable alternative.

Our patrons value our institutions in many ways, but amidst budget and technological pressures that threaten to eliminate libraries, our blind insistence on “business as usual” isn’t one of them.

Really, though, how are we supposed to take seriously an article that tells us “most librarians rely on the Library of Congress cataloguing copy pretty much wholesale,” then sounds the alarm at Calhoun’s suggestion that copy cataloging be streamlined? And, about that Dewey reference in the title? On the one hand the man was an unabashed progressive reformer of libraries, on the other he’s said to have held very repressive social values. Which side of Dewey is being invoked here?

reform, progress, library of congress, LoC, Melvil Dewey, Karen Calhoun, series authority records, cataloging changes, library, libraries, lib20, library 2.0, discovery tools

In a Washington Post column last week, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington proposed A Library for The New World:

[T]he time may be right for our country’s delegation to consider introducing to the [UNESCO] a proposal for the cooperative building of a World Digital Library. This would offer the promise of bringing people closer together by celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single global undertaking.

And in this time of war and strife, what makes such a proposal so important?

Libraries are inherently islands of freedom and antidotes to fanaticism. They are temples of pluralism where books that contradict one another stand peacefully side by side just as intellectual antagonists work peacefully next to each other in reading rooms.

And I can’t think of a better message to start the holidays with.

library, libraries, library of congress, washington post, librarian of congress, loc, world, world politics, cultural values, james billington, james h billington, library of congress, world library, international relations

Right up front in the prologue of Ruth Wajnryb’s Expletive Deleted she quotes the following from Richard Dooling on the difficulty in researching “bad language”:

The Library of Congress classification system does not provide a selection of books … on swearing or dirty words. A researcher … must travel to the BF of psychoanalysis, the PE of slang, the GT of anthropology, the P of literature and literary theory, the N of art, the RC of medical psychiatry, and back to the B of religion and philosphy.

tags: call number, call numbers, classification, expletive deleted, lc, lc classification, library of congress, ruth wajnryb

Wikipedia seems to get mixed reviews in the academic world, but I don’t fully understand why. There are those that complain that they can’t trust the untamed masses with such an important task as writing and editing an encyclopedia, then there are others that say you can’t trust the experts with it either. For my part, I’ve come to love Wikipedia, despite having access to EB and other, more traditional sources. Why? Because it takes better advantage of the web than others, and unlike those commercial products, I don’t have to sign in to use it.

In fact, my only criticism of Wikipedia is that I’d like to use it more by integrating it into library resources. One example I use is of putting biography data from Wikipedia into our catalog search results displays. We have three books about Nikola Tesla, but why not include the first few paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry on him?

In my presentations I note the increasing tendency toward self service, even when we know we can get better answers/service by talking with somebody. This is true of travel (when was the last time you booked airfare through a travel agent?), and there are signs that suggest that it’s becoming true in libraries too. What I’m suggesting is that we need to improve our automated systems so that we can continue to serve our patrons even as their needs, expectations, and wants change.

In short, we need to transform our online systems into answer systems. So my criticism of Wikipedia is that there’s a lot of valuable data there that is difficult to automatically link to library data (author names, for instance, are rarely in the library of congress’s authoritative form). I don’t have any real solutions for this right now, and I see a lot of benefit to Wikipedia’s open (more human) form, so I haven’t really argued this much.

Still, I was pleased to see this note in TeleRead suggesting that librarians are “infiltrating” Wikipedia. The tip of the spear seems to be at Quaedam cuiusdam, where Peter Binkley is talking about some things, like OpenURL resolution, that could make Wikipedia a better resource for libraries. Good stuff.

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia, integration, libraries, library of congress, networked information, nikola tesla, opac, wikipedia