cataloging humor

[squidia]

I like that for my cataloging class I have to discuss whether an antelope could be a considered a "document". Here is an example of one of my esteemed classmates responses:

Comments

[fireflyye]

Iiiiiiinteresting... although I don't see how a live creature could truly be a document. It's too wild, no matter its habitat. But where to draw the line? Rocks have life. Artwork has life. Paper has life, although it's been mega-processed. So where?

[squidia]

yes, where to draw the line is the question. zoos are indeed kind of like libraries of animals, and the animals in zoos are not the same as their counterparts in the wild. but lots of folks do argue that a living/changing thing cannot be a document. the problem with that is that by extension then a Web page or other electronic file cannot be a document (because it's liable to change or stop existing at any point, much like a living animal). the real problem librarians are facing today (and what the professor is trying to get us to think about) is how to organize (and therefore theoretically increase the accessibility of) the information on the Web, when the Web is an unstable shifting chaos if information...

[raveneyes77]

I've got an answer for your professor... from a lowly internet technican's point of view the answer to his quandry is Google.

In the modern age there is no "organization" or catagorization of information simply because accessiblity is not a problem. Sumarization and relevance are already documented heavily based on keyword and cross reference to a given document. Existence and continuity of information for a truly relevant document isn't at jeopardy because there are many companies who's sole purpose is to catalog and archive those very things.

[squidia]

The professor is a woman, actually, and both she and I would disagree with you about full-text/keyword and cross-reference/hyperlink searches (like Google uses) being good enough; for it to work, that method is dependent on (a) users putting relevant and useful keywords in their documents [and I'm sure you already know the story about people putting "sex" in their metadata even when their documents have nothing to do with sex, because it's one of the most commonly searched-for terms] and (b) other users having actually found a document and deemed it relevant/good enough to link to it.

The process is similar to what librarians have been doing for millennia (if we describe librarians' job as selecting desirable "information packages" and then making them accessible to a given community) but it confuses the role of publisher with that of consumer, which is why the system has yet to gain the efficiency of the library [which is historically a third party tending toward consumer advocacy