Are traditions of facet theory geographically bounded or transcendent?

[Abstract] By drawing on a variety of sources, including personal correspondence with Brian Vickery, this paper draws upon a socio-historical approach in order to provide a platform for continued conversations among facet theorists and those who seek to create faceted applications. Once common ground is established, it is but a small step to the creation of operational definitions and functional requirements as Slavic (2008) and others have discussed. With variant terminology under control, facet theorists can move quickly to identify and promote exemplars of best practice for those seeking to implement facets as search and discovery structures in contemporary information spaces

Faceted navigation and browsing features in new OPACs: A more robust solution to problems of information seekers?

In November, 2005, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, proposed the creation of a “World Digital Library” of manuscripts and multimedia materials in order to “bring together online, rare and unique cultural materials.” Google became the first private sector partner for this project with a pledge of 3 million dollars (http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2005/05- 250.html). One month later, the Bibliographic Services Task Force of the University of California Libraries released a report: Rethinking how we provide bibliographic services for the University of California. (Bibliographic Services Task Force, 2005). Key proposals included the necessity of enhancing search and retrieval, redesigning the library catalog or OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog), encouraging the adoption of new cataloguing practices, and supporting continuous improvements to digital access. By mid-January, 2006, the tenor of discussion reached fever pitch. On January 12, 2006, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Library announced the deployment of a revolutionary implementation for their OPAC of Endeca’s ProFind™, which until now had only been used in commercial e-commerce or other business applications. NCSU made the bold claim that “the speed and flexibility of popular online search engines” had now entered the world of the online catalog through the use of faceted navigation and browsing (NCSU, online)

The Heritage of Facet Analysis in North America: Past Lessons as Pathways for Contemporary Exploration

This paper will contrast the broad contours of Ranganathan’s legacy in North America with a general assessment of contemporary North American facet applications. It will also offer a potential model for contemporary researchers that outlines heritage facet-analytical protocols currently in use

Returning the (faceted) gaze: Reflections on representation, meaning and form

This brief position paper is the central narrative in a theoretic-historical triptych. The first two documents: A (Faceted) Semantic Web? (La Barre, 2011) and Traditions of Facet Theory or a Garden of Forking Paths? (La Barre, forthcoming) amplify a question Brian Vickery posed to the author in 2005. The current proposal, deeply entwined in the same narrative, seeks to continue the agenda of articulation for a primarily North American audience. Instead of description and comparison, a starkly different analytical framework – Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘aura’ – is deployed to interrogate facet theory along the core dimensions of tradition, uniqueness, and authenticity. The final aspect of this proposal will be an investigation of the aesthetic of redemption that may well serve as the bedrock for operational definitions and functional requirements for facet theory

The Links to INSPIRE

Jay Conrad Levinson, the marketing guru who created the Marlboro Man, says, “A website is an island. Advertising is a bridge to that island.” Any public institution must choose carefully whether to build one or many bridges from its website. Moreover, a library, and by extension a library’s website, is “a good association for just about anybody,” A. Paula Wilson observes

A cast of thousands: Co-authorship and sub-authorship collaboration in the twentieth century as manifested in the scholarly journal literature of psychology and philosophy.

We chronicle the use of acknowledgements in twentieth century scholarship by analyzing and classifying more than 4,500 specimens covering a 100-year period. Our results show that the intensity of acknowledgment varies by discipline, reflecting differences in prevailing socio-cognitive structures and work practices. We demonstrate that the acknowledgment has gradually established itself as a constitutive element of academic writing, one that provides a revealing insight into the nature and extent of sub-authorship collaboration. Complementary data on rates of co-authorship are also presented to highlight the growing importance of collaboration and the increasing division of labor in contemporary research and scholarship