CATALOGUING

Cataloguing is a subset of the larger field of bibliographic control or organization of

information.

The process of organizing library materials and making them accessible to library users.
Cataloguing work is divided into three parts: descriptive cataloguing, subject cataloguing
and classification.

Descriptive cataloguing is the cataloguing process that is concerned with the identification and
description of an information package. This is the first step of the cataloguing process. This
means describing the material physically and determining the choice of access point (headings).
This is done by following the rules listed in the reference tool Anglo-American Cataloguing
Rules, Second edition, 1998 Revision. (AACR2)

Descriptive cataloguing is done in two ways: original cataloguing and copy cataloguing.
Original cataloguing means that the entire process of cataloguing is completed locally by the
library staff. In copy cataloguing, a shortcut is taken that entails copying the necessary
information from a source that contains works already catalogued.

Authority control

Authority control is the establishment and maintenance of consistent forms of terms—names,

subjects, and titles—to be used as headings in the bibliographic records of the library catalog.
Headings must not only be consistent, they must also be unique.

Authority file A file containing authority records. Unlike bibliographic records, records in an
authority file do not usually display to the catalog user, though the cross references and some
notes from the authority records do display in the OPAC.

Authority record A record that contains standardized forms for names, subjects, and some titles
that are used on bibliographic records, and that provides cross references in catalogs. Authority
records contain three basic components: headings, cross references , and notes ; they may also
contain additional information.

Authorized heading The standardized, “authoritative” form of a name, subject, or title that is
used as an access point in bibliographic records.

Authority control fulfills two important functions.

1. It enables the disambiguation of items with similar or identical headings. For example,
two authors who happen to have published under the same name can be distinguished
from each other by adding middle initials, birth and/or death dates. Disambiguation
 enables researchers to find all the material by and about a given person under one form of
name.
2. It enables the collocation of materials that logically belong together, although they
present themselves differently. For example, authority records are used to establish
uniform titles, which can bring together all versions of a given work even when they are
issued under different titles—Hamlet, Shakspeare's Hamlet, Tragicall historie of Hamlet
Prince of Denmarke

NAME AUTHORITY CONTROL

Need for name authority control

 There is no consistency present in materials cataloged
 Names and titles vary
 Names and titles change
 Headings that are not controlled present challenges to catalog users
 Different names in different publications:
James R. Smith
J.R. Smith
Jim Smith
 Different names in same publication
Title page: World Soybean Research Conference
Cover: Soybean Research Conference
Preface: Conference on World Soybean Research

Process of Name Authority Control

• Select a single and unique form of a name and enter (use that form as a value in) all
records under that uniform name or heading
• Provide cross-references from the names not selected as preferred headings to the
preferred name
Cross-References
• Equivalence relationships to control for variant names (see references)
– Examples : Sears, M.E., search under Sears, Minnie Earl.
– United States Library of Congress search under Library of Congress
 • Associative relationships for establishing relationships among different entities (see also
references)
– Examples : Day Lewis, C. search also under Nicholas Blake

Subject authority control

Subject Authority File: A set of records indicating the authorized forms of terms used as
subject headings in a particular set of bibliographic records; the references made to and
from the authorized forms; and the information used, and its sources, in the establishment
of the headings and the determination of the references to be made.

Subject Authority Systems have two main purposes:

To ensure uniformity and consistency in subject heading terminology and cross-

references.

To these ends, headings are established when they are used for the first time and subject
authority records are set up for them.

A subject authority record contains the following information:

 the established heading;

 scope notes;

 cross-references made to/from other headings;

 the sources/authorities the decision on the heading form was based.

Arrangement and display of physical and intangible information packages

Ethics of knowledge organization

Ethics tell people how to act in ways that meet the standard our values set for us.

A code of ethics is a text that formalizes a set of rules to which anyone who works in a
particular field should refer to in order to identify ethical principles, at the same time both
thoughtful and authoritative and reasonably stable and shared, that can guide their
professional conduct, beyond the varied and changing technical competences and in
compliance with administrative and legal rules that obviously any profession provides.

IFLA suggests that library associations "emphasize the obligation of the professional to
facilitate the unhindered flow of information and ideas...and emphasize the obligation of
members to protect and promote the rights of every individual to have free and equal access to
sources of information.

Some of the ethical values concerned with Knowledge organisation include:

Accessibility

accessibility is a sort of precondition to all the other values for knowledge organization, in the
sense that if it not possible to have physical access to information or to the indexes that lead to it
(or, even worse, neither one nor the others), the way -more or less rational -information and
those indexes are organized becomes irrelevant. It is important to ensure that both are available
to all persons without discrimination.

Competence

In order to communicate something meaningful and useful on any topic, we need to have at least
some competence on it. Primary data, metadata and indexes should always be correct and
accurate, avoiding material errors and formal inaccuracies. Then, as also required by the value of
accessibility, they should be expressed by a language that is clear, concise and current, avoiding
both obscure and unnecessarily complicated forms and spelling or syntax errors. The
competences required to achieve these results are mainly disciplinary (the knowledge of the
subject and the most reliable sources to update, enrich and verify it), linguistic (being able to
read and write well enough in the necessary languages) and psychological (to devote enough
time and attention to study and write).

Thirdness and impartiality

Based on the one of legal thirdness, proper to the judge that must ensure that he/she is a third
party, and therefore impartial, with respect to the prosecution and the defence. Decisions made
my catalogers and indexers should be based on objectivity. This law prescribes „that between
two or more claimants-say, for use as heading – the

Coherence and continuity

From a strictly technical point of view, coherence is one of the most important features of any
index. The value of coherence imposes that, once a criterion of ordering, or of class subdivision
or of highlighting of certain characteristics is adopted, it is maintained without exceptions for the
whole information field that is being organized, signaling clearly any point in which the field
must be considered concluded and a different criterion is adopted. As for the terminology to be
used in the indexes, the two most important principles of coherence are those, mirror-like, of
uniformity (things must be always called with the same terms) and of uniqueness (each term
should always refer to the same thing) applicable in thousands of situations. Continuity is the
positive characteristic of information systems that do not "abandon" users during their
information search, leaving them doubtful about the direction to be taken at a road intersection,
at a branching corridor or at a broken link in a site or in a directory, but that accompany users
until they reach the destination, providing constantly along the entire path the same quantity and
quality of data and options necessary to the orientation.

Completeness and granularity

It is quite intuitive that an index should consider all the information of the field it covers. The
granularity of a document can be defined as the extent to which it can be subdivided into a series
of "information atoms" of smaller dimensions but which maintain a sufficient autonomy and
significance (like the single entries of an encyclopedia) In Indexing, granularity refers to the
extent in which the indexes are able to give a full and distinct account of those microducuments
and on the other with the allocation to any document (regardless of its decomposability into
microdocuments or its belonging to a macrodocument) of metadata concerning concepts and
terms related not to the entire document but only to its parts or aspects. The index should be
continually updated to ensure completeness and the classification scheme should cover all
disciplines in the universe.

Usefulness and comprehensibility

It is important to develop an information retrieval systems that the user can understand and use.It
should be one that they can comprehend and therefore easy to use and simple.

Contextualization

from a technical and from an ethical point of view and both in the sphere of primary data and of
metadata, information should be organized and placed in the richest and most articulated possible
context, that allows users to evaluate it in a conscious and autonomous way. (don’t impose
opinions). The date of a document is very important as it distinguishes it from other versions.
Cognitive saving
Users of information systems should not be required unnecessarily dispersive cognitive efforts,
exposing them to redundant or inapplicable choice options that are confusing and time-wasting.
In the design and management of systems of orientation, navigation and retrieval, information
systems managers should therefore prefer the most rational, economic and useful choices for
users, avoiding vicious circles, unnecessarily long or complex paths, blind alleys and labyrinths,
minimizing the risk that users get lost or do not reach their prefixed targets.
Freedom

Data and metadata should be proposed in a progressive modular and ordered way, so that users
can exercise their right to choose their own information paths, avoiding both the random choice
because their excessive number prevent a well thought-out decision, and the impossibility to
choose another one because it is invisible or nonexistent, and (above all) to let someone else
choose it because interested in promoting a particular content, service or point of view respect to
others.

Interoperability and standardization

Interoperability is the ability to exchange and profitably reuse data and information both between
different systems and organizations, and internally in each of them. The fundamental tool to
ensure this is standardization that is first the creation and the dissemination of standards (i.e. of
shared rules about how data should be structured and managed) and then the adaptation as wider
and as deeper as possible to the de facto and de jure standards in force in the field.

Hyper-textuality

Hypertext means above all multilinearity that is the ability to read a document not only
unilinearly, from the beginning to the end, but also following a plurality of different paths chosen
by the user. the value of hypertextuality is strictly linked to the value of freedom, of which it is a
precondition

Trends in organization of knowledge

The accelerating pace of change in the economic, legal and social environment combined with
tendencies towards increased decentralization of organizational structures have had a profound
impact on the way we organize and utilize and organize knowledge. The internet as we know it
today and especially the World Wide Web as the multimodal interface for the presentation and
consumption of multimedia information are the most prominent examples of these developments.

Three trends can be identified:

1. Semantic Networks – Semantic networks are schemes that represent

knowledge involving nodes and links. The nodes represent objects or concepts and the
links relations between the nodes.-The most noted semantic network is Princeton
University’s Word net which is now used in a variety of search engines.
2. Ontologies – Ontology is a formal naming and definition of the types, properties and
interrelationships of entities that fundamentally exist for a particular domain of
disclosure. They represent complex relationship among objects and include the rules and
axioms missing from the semantic networks. Ontologies that describe knowledge in a
 specific area are often connected with the systems for data mining and knowledge
management.
3. Metadata: metadata has become a key enabler in the creation of controllable and
exploitable information ecosystems under highly networked circumstances. Metadata
provide information about data, objects and concepts. This information can be
descriptive, structural or administrative. Metadata adds value to data sets by providing
structure (i.e. schemas) and increasing the expressivity (i.e. controlled vocabularies) of a
dataset.
4. Taxonomies: Taxonomies are used in object used in object oriented design and
knowledge management systems to indicate any grouping of objects based on a particular
characteristic. Taxonomies are basic classification systems that enable us to describe
concepts and their dependencies-typically in a hierarchical fashion. Knowledge
taxonomies allow knowledge to be graphically represented in such a way that it reflects
the organization of concepts within a particular field of expertise or for the organization
at large.
5. Interoperability: Interoperability in computer science is the ability of software and
hardware on different machines from different vendors to share data. In a broader sense it
is the ability to link systems so that they can actually work together like one, integrated
system. In knowledge organization (KO) is interoperability the ability of knowledge
organization systems (KOS) to exchange information.
6. Knowledge Discovery Tools and Techniques: As digital information is growing in
organizations, massive amount of data are generated which exist in database systems.
This explosive growth of information requires new analysis techniques that can
intelligently transform the useful data into knowledge. Knowledge discovery is defined as
the non-trivial process of identifying valid, novel, potentially useful and ultimately
understandable patterns in data.