Working Group on Bibliographic Control Wades into the Murky Future
-- Library Journal, 03/22/2007
The first meeting of the Library of Congress (LC)-organized Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control was held March 8 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA, and, according to LC's meeting summary, participants agreed that "current bibliographic data do not fully meet the needs" of either end users (information consumers) or managers of library resources. According to the summary, Karen Markey of the University of Michigan's School of Information suggested that "retrieval systems and enhancements to bibliographic control need to focus on helping double novices," those who have little knowledge of both the bibliographic system and the discipline being searched. Thus, she recommended that bibliographic records should include information such as the authority of the author and how the content is accessible.
The faceted browser interface adopted by North Carolina State University (NCSU), marks an advance in guiding users, according to NSCU's Andrew Pace. However, Pace would like enhancements, such as "a classification scheme or subject thesaurus that enables faceted classification" and sufficient physical description (height, width, and weight of an item) to help with storing and moving items, according to the summary, written by consultant Nancy J. Fallgren of the University of Maryland's College of Information Studies.
Several commentators suggested that keywords and scholarly tagging could be more helpful than LC Subject Headings in identifying useful works, though they acknowledged the potential tradeoff in authority. One of those commentators, Swarthmore College academic Timothy Burke, in 2004 wrote an essay, "Burn the catalog," describing how he used Amazon.com "to find out what's new in certain fields: it acquaints me with the hidden structures of readership, it uncloaks the invisible college." He recommended "lock[ing] all the vendors and librarians and scholars together in a room, and make them hammer out electronic research tools that are Amazon-plus."
