In my last post, I described the characteristics of libraries during the century before 1975. During that century, libraries faced no fundamental changes and were fully in control of how they presented themselves to patrons. That stability and control have now been shattered. Why?
The first crack came with the automation of library card catalogs in [...]
Archive for May, 2009
The breakup of the old library, Part 1
Posted in LIS on May 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The old library
Posted in LIS on May 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Until recently the online catalog continued to contain records only for items physically held by the library system. As libraries have entered into cooperative relationships, this principle of telling “what the library has” has eroded. In union catalogs that contain records from libraries of more than one institution, the concept was expanded to “what at [...]
How other people organize libraries
Posted in LIS on May 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
[W]e have all kinds of tools that are organized to aid in the process of finding information that we need: telephone books, directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies, indexes, catalogs, museum registers, archival finding aids, and databases, among others.
– Arlene G. Taylor, The Organization of Information (Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited, 2004), pg. 2.
Before reading this passage, [...]
Why we organize
Posted in LIS on May 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
We organize because we need to retrieve.
– Arlene G. Taylor, The Organization of Information (Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited, 2004), pg. 1.
Leaving aside the folks who organize because of OCD…
Is there a good study out there about the range of ways that library patrons use to retrieve? Librarians organize for patrons, yet it seems to [...]
