Searching with Tags: Do Tags Help Users Find Things?

This study examines the question of whether tags can be useful in the process of information retrieval. Participants searched a social bookmarking tool specialising in academic articles (CiteULike) and an online journal database (Pubmed). Participant actions were captured using screen capture software and they were asked to describe their search process. Users did make use of tags in their search process, as a guide to searching and as hyperlinks to potentially useful articles. However, users also made use of controlled vocabularies in the journal database to locate useful search terms and of links to related articles supplied by the database

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SEMANTIC WEB AND USER-CENTERED TAGGING SYSTEMS

This paper uses Husserl’s theory of phenomenology to provide a model for the relationship between user-centered tagging systems, such as del.icio.us, and the more highly structured systems of the Semantic Web. Using three aspects of phenomenological theory—the movement of the mind out towards an entity and then back in an act of reflection, multiplicities within unity, and the sharing of intentionalities within a community—the discussion suggests that both tagging systems and the Semantic Web foster an intersubjective domain for the sharing and use of information resources. The Semantic Web, however, resembles traditional library systems, in that it relies for this intersubjective domain on the conscious implementation of domain-centered standards which are then encoded for machine processing, while tagging systems work on implied principles of emergence

RDA and RDF: A discourse analysis of two standards of resource description

The World Wide Web Consortium’s Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the library community’s new cataloguing standard, Resource Description and Access (RDA), both profess to provide sophisticated and flexible means of describing resources for modern Web environments. But both have attracted scepticism from potential users, who argue that their supposed innovations are overrated. A comparison of the two standards using Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse formations suggests that while the two standards differ in their community contexts and their use of intermediaries, they are similar to each other in their commitment to consistent, rigorously-defined entities and relationships; this shared commitment sets them apart from Web 2.0 developments, and offers the potential for fruitful collaboration

Tensions Between Language and Discourse in North American Knowledge Organization

This paper uses Paul Ricoeur's distinction between language and discourse to help define a North American research agenda in knowledge organization. Ricoeur's concept of discourse as a set of utterances, defined within multiple disciplines and domains, and reducible, not to the word but to the sentence, provides three useful tools for defining our research. First, it enables us to recognize the important contribution of numerous studies that focus on acts of organization, rather than on standards or tools of organization. Second, it gives us a harmonious paradigm that helps us reconcile the competing demands of interoperability, based on widely-used tools and techniques of library science, and domain integrity, based on user warrant and an understanding of local context. Finally, it resonates with the current economic, political and social climate in which our information systems work, particularly the competing calls for protectionism and globalization

The Paradox of Privacy: Revisiting a Core Library Value in an Age of Big Data and Linked Data

Protecting user privacy and confidentiality is fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship, and such protection constitutes one of eleven values in the American Library Association’s “Core Values of Librarianship” (2004). This paper addresses the concerns of protecting privacy in the library as they relate to library users who are defining, exploring, and negotiating their sexual identities with the help of the library’s information, programming, and physical facilities. In so doing, we enlist the aid of Garret Keizer, who, in Privacy (2012), articulates a fresh theory of the concept in light of American social life in the twenty-first century. Using Keizer’s theory, we examine these concerns within the context of the rise of big data systems and social media on the one hand, and linked data and new cataloging standards on the other. In so doing, we suggest that linked data technologies, with their ability to lead searchers through selfdirected, open inquiry, are superior to big data technologies in the navigation of the paradox between openness and secrecy. In this way they offer a greater potential to support the needs of queer library users: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or questioning (LGBTQ)

A Phylogenetic Approach to Bibliographic Families and Relationships

This presentation applies the principles of phylogenetic classification to the phenomenon of bibliographic relationships in library catalogues. We argue that while the FRBR paradigm supports hierarchical bibliographic relationships between works and their various expressions and manifestations, we need a different paradigm to support associative bibliographic relationships of the kind detected in previous research. Numerous studies have shown the existence and importance of bibliographic relationships that lie outside that hierarchical FRBR model: particularly the importance of bibliographic families. We would like to suggest phylogenetics as a potential means of gaining access to those more elusive and ephemeral relationships. Phylogenetic analysis does not follow the Platonic conception of an abstract work that gives rise to specific instantiations; rather, it tracks relationships of kinship as they evolve over time. We use two examples to suggest ways in which phylogenetic trees could be represented in future library catalogues. The novels of Jane Austen are used to indicate how phylogenetic trees can represent, with greater accuracy, the line of Jane Austen adaptations, ranging from contemporary efforts to complete her unfinished work, through to the more recent efforts to graft horror memes onto the original text. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey provides an example of charting relationships both backwards and forwards in time, across different media and genres. We suggest three possible means of applying phylogenetics in the future: enhancement of the relationship designators in RDA, crowdsourcing user tags, and extracting relationship trees through big data analysis

Repositioning the Base Level of Bibliographic Relationships: or, A Cataloguer, a Post-Modernist and a Chatbot Walk Into a Bar

Designers and maintainers of library catalogues are facing fresh challenges representing bibliographic relationships, due both to changes in cataloguing standards and to a broader information environment that has grown increasingly diverse, sophisticated and complex. This paper presents three different paradigms, drawn from three different fields of study, for representing relationships between bibliographic entities beyond the FRBR/LRM models: superworks, as developed in information studies; adaptation, as developed in literary studies; and artificial intelligence, as developed in computer science. Theories of literary adaptation remain focused on “the work,” as traditionally conceived. The concept of the superwork reminds us that there are some works which serve as ancestors for entire families of works, and that those familial relationships are still useful. Crowd-sourcing projects often make more granular connections, a trend which has escalated significantly with current and emerging artificial intelligence systems. While the artificial intelligence paradigm is proving more pervasive outside conventional library systems, it could lead to a seismic shift in knowledge organization, a shift in which the power both to arrange information and to use it are moving beyond the control of users and intermediaries alike

Communicating with Library Patrons and People with Dementia: Tracing an Ethic of Care in Professional Communication Guidelines

In both library reference work and dementia care, communication between personnel and service recipients can be both complex and complicated. Professionals in both fields have therefore developed protocols and standards to assist personnel in handling these interactions. In this article we detail an exploratory comparative study that used an ethic of care framework to compare prominent guidelines for reference librarians (American Library Association’s Reference and User Services Association’s Guidelines for behavioral performance of reference and information service providers) with guidelines for workers in long-term dementia care settings (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s Guideline on supporting people with dementia and their carers in health and social care). We explored how both sets of guidelines frame the act of communication as a combination of regulated procedure and empathetic discourse to determine how the similarities among and differences between these two guidelines provide useful insights into each other. Our examination was structured using an ethic of care lens, which emphasizes the importance of interpersonal relationships, reciprocity, and empathetic benevolence. Using specific phrases in each set of guidelines that align with and are evidence of Tronto’s (1993a) four moral principles of care, we ultimately discovered, in both sets of Guidelines, an underlying ethic of care: a repeated insistence upon embedding procedures within behaviour that manifests attentiveness, responsibility, responsiveness, and competence