Written for IS520, 3/11/2005.
What is a bibliographic organizing system? What factors are involved with choosing one system over another? What are the different forms a system can take? Why use an organizing system at all? Access to required information is a fundamental problem of information science. Belkin, Oddy, and Brookes hypothesize that an individual searches for information to fill in gaps in their knowledge structure, a phenomenon they refer to as Anomalous State of Knowledge or ASK (62). Information retrieval is the most basic function of a bibliographic organizing system. The purpose of organizing documents with a bibliographic organizing system is to provide end users with access to the information they require, and to allow library staff the ability to access the inventory, for use in maintenance, acquisitions, shelving, etc. There are many factors associated with determining what type of system will best fit a particular collection of documents. These are outlined in the graphic created by Dr. Perez.
“Objectives of the bibliographic organizing system” (Perez) refers to the goals of the system, the concepts that make it functional and useful, and the reasons for choosing it. It should be economical, meaning that it shouldn’t break the budget to purchase and maintain the system. After all, there’s no point in buying a fantastic system and having no resources left to purchase things to organize with your shiny new system, or be able to keep it updated and fix any bugs in its operation. MARC-compatibility can greatly decrease the cost and length of development time of the system, as each record will not need to be created anew, but can be purchased (or obtained as open-source) and uploaded to the system. It should be usable and comprehensible enough that a user can just sit down and start looking things up and working with the system, without needing a four hour course on how to operate it. The system should “feel simple enough to be used successfully by end users with only a high school education” (Bates 20).
Its operations should be dependable and consistent. A system that crashes every other time it is used doesn’t do much good to anyone, and if the users expect problems whenever they use it, they are likely to be quite dissatisfied and reluctant to use the system again. This is particularly true in a public or school library situation. Why waste time on a computer that’s frustrating to use and locks up on you, when you can ask a librarian, or simply wander the fiction section for that book whose title you know, but not the complete author name? The system should also be dependable in its accuracy. The users should be able to trust that their search results have a predictable rate of recall and precision. Recall is the fraction of relevant documents retrieved by the system. Precision is the fraction of retrieved documents that are relevant. If I do a search on Terry Pratchett, I expect the system to retrieve all of his works, including those written for young adults and co-authored with Neil Gaiman.
The overall user-friendliness of the system is enhanced by making its appearance and operations familiar. When replacing an old system, getting something entirely new and different will increase the difficulty of adjusting to it for the users who were accustomed to the old system. A new screen layout is easier to adjust to than complete new terminology. Nomenclature that is consistent with the old system, for example in the field names, will give the new system a continuity with the past that will make it easier (and more cost-effective, as it will reduce the need to completely re-train users who are already familiar with the old system) for the users to make the transition to using the new system.
The system should also use appropriate technology to the situation. As Dr. Perez put it during class, it should be as good as it can be while still being useful. A program with an opaque and difficult to operate user interface may be the best at returning high percentages of relevant documents to a query, but it doesn’t do any good in a public or school library setting, where the users need to be able to sit down at the computer and find the book they’re looking for without getting a degree in programming languages to do so. Conversely, if a newer, more effective technology is available, the library should not use an older, more cumbersome application simply out of convenience (financial or otherwise).
There are two purposes for organizing with a bibliographic organizing system: classification and differentiation. Taylor says quite simply, “We organize because we need to retrieve” (1). Classifying and differentiating between the information packages allows us to retrieve them more easily. Classification and categorization are important for retrieval purposes. It is easier to find a book on cats when books on a similar subject are grouped together. Differentiation makes finding a specific work easier. How is this item on cats different from that one? Is one a later edition, or a microfilm version, or a book on tape? Differentiating between them in the bibliographic organizing system will allow a user to see right away that one item is text and the other is an audio book, without having to spend the time to physically check.
A bibliographic system is organizing items, or literary units, or to put it more generally, information packages. There are two aspects of a literary unit: the concept and the document. The concept refers to the work itself, such as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or Van Gogh’s Starry Night. This can be referred to in a number of ways: expressed thought, message content, and transmitted information. It is the cognitive aspect of the work. The document refers to the physical embodiment of the work, the format it is in, the edition, the language. The system should be able to tell you what form a particular information package takes. A film version of Julius Caesar is a different embodiment of the work than the full original hand-written text, which is a different embodiment than the Cliff’s Notes version of Julius Caesar. If it is translated into Russian, again it is a different embodiment. It is still Julius Caesar, but it isn’t the same document as one of the others. This brings up the ongoing debates over what a document is. Michael Buckland describes several definitions of a document: “events, processes, images, and objects as well as texts” (215), and discusses historical perspectives on the subject, including Suzanne Briet’s antelope-as-document. In terms of the bibliographic organizing system, this issue would include whether items such as electronic resources and multimedia (images and sound files) should be considered documents. One library may choose to consider a collection of spiral-bound notebooks full of notes and poems to be documents, while another library may not.
There are several forms of bibliographic organizing systems. The system should take a varied expression to better suit its intended content and audience. Examples of different forms of bibliographic organizing systems are a bibliography, a catalog, an index, a database, a search engine, etc. The system will need to take on a different form to accomplish its objectives. A Google search has different applications than a museum accession log, but both are organizing systems. While an OPAC might be best for organizing a collection of books, it may not be the best choice for a museum, which might be better served by an accession log. The choice of what format the system should take will depend on the materials being organized. A bibliographic organizing system, as its name indicates, is rooted in books and texts but is now used to organize many mediums, including images, sounds, and movies. Collections commonly include multimedia and the system should be able to handle that.
Even the best bibliographic organizing system will not fulfill the requirements laid out by Dr. Perez without good input. J. Farradane believes that indexing is the key to information retrieval. “The efficiency of the retrieval system, considered as comprising the indexing and the matching, thus depends, apart from the mechanics of the system, entirely on the accuracy of the indexing process” (Farradane 16). A system is only as good as the information it contains. You could have the best organization system in the world for its intended purpose, but if the data is inputted incorrectly or inefficiently (assuming that you’re not just importing MARC records) then your fabulous system is not going to work at its optimum capacity.
A bibliographic organizing system can be described as any device or system that is created for retrieving stored information. “An information system performs three basic functions: storage (data organization), retrieval (based on queries), and presentation (interface design)” (Taylor 104). The bottom line purpose of a bibliographic organizing system is to provide short representations of the content of stored information packages so the user can easily and efficiently find the required information. A system should be easy to use and effective, and meet the goals as outlined in Perez.
Bibliography:
Belkin, N.J., R.N. Oddy, and H.M. Brooks, “ASK for Information Retrieval: Part I. Background and Theory.” Journal of Documentation 38.2 (1982): 61-71.
Buckland, Michael K. “What is a ‘document’?”, Historical studies in Information Science. Ed. Trudi Bellardo Hahn and Michael Buckland. Information Today, 1998. 215-219.
Farradane, J. “The Nature of Information.” Journal of Information Science 1 (1979): 13-17.
Perez, Ernest. Bibliographic Organizing Systems. March 2005. http://web.utk.edu/~eperez3/IS520/extra/biblio%20system.jpg
Taylor, Arlene G. The Organization of Information. 2nd ed. Libraries Unlimited, 2004.