SIGIA-L Mail Archives: RE: SIGIA-L: About Information Architect
RE: SIGIA-L: About Information Architecture
From: Andrew McNaughton (andrew_at_tki.org.nz)
Date: Thu Jun 21 2001 - 21:27:28 EDT
On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, Sean Scott wrote:
> At my library, and others that I am aware of, there are organizers
> (catalogers) and retrievers (reference librarians). Refererence librarians
> work with patrons, and rarely have the opportunity to influence how things are
> organized, while catalogers barely work with each other, and never see the
> actual process of information-seeking in action.
>
> So the people who actually have experience with the information needs of their
> users are essentially taught, consciously or not, that the system of
> organization is something fixed that one can learn but not influence.
The distance between reference librarians and metadata design
is has a great deal to do with the scale of the collections, and relation
to other collections.
In fact the cataloguers often don't have much influence in the
organisational scheme either. The National library of New Zealand has a
policy of not building thesaurii for their own use. They select from
existing ones, and contribute to the process of maintaining
thesaurii they use - commonly on a global scale. It takes a great deal of
effort to get practices changed in even a small way. This is the price of
interoperability.
Small, specialized collections (eg most web sites, as well as what you
find in library collections) generally have less in common with existing
standards, and there typically isn't as much available that's suitable for
direct use. It's also common to have lesser or no requirement for
interoperability of metadata with other collections. This means that
there's more to do in terms of developing metadata schema, thesauri and so
forth, and more potential flexibility in what you come up with.
Andrew
--
Andrew McNaughton
Te Kete Ipurangi: The Online Learning Centre
andrew_at_tki.org.nz
Ph: 64 4 382 6500
Fax: 64 4 382 6509
Mobile: 021 323 076
PO Box 19-098
Wellington, NZ
http://www.tki.org.nz/
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