Don't Understimate the Work

Article:
The Library of Congress Comes Home

Subject: Don't Understimate the Work

Date: 2004-03-20 08:41:09

From: Mark Wilcox

Kendall - I think it's an interesting idea and will be interesting to see how you do.

However, you shouldn't be so dismissive of DDC (it's easier to comprehend for the average person)nor underestimate the work in front of you. I have my Masters in Library and Information Sciences (though I work as a solutions architect) and I'm married to a librarian.

First and formost original cataloging (as opposed to copy cataloging which is where you take an existing record and put it into your own system) is very hard. For example you must not only determine what subject it's primarily in, but any other related subjects people (or in this case yourself) might use to look it up. As well as making sure you track your author and title references (for example authors whose name is O'Reilly - you need to make sure that O'Reilly also maps to O Reilly and OReilly or tracking author's pennames such as Samuel Clemens == Mark Twain).

A trip to your library to access OCLC First Search (some libraries expose this over the Web behind some type of access control) will make it much easier to get access to the classification records for your non-digital (and some digital) materials. This will reduce much of the work you must do on classifying your books and what-not.

Finally you may want to check out the Scorpion project which is an OCLC research project designed to facilate improvements in organizing digital materials:
http://orc.rsch.oclc.org:6109/

Mark

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Don't Understimate the Work
2004-03-20 16:17:27 Kendall Clark [Reply]

Hi,

You make two points, both of which are the opposite of what I claimed, so I must not have been very clear:

(1) I chose not to use DDC because there's a better chance that a random item was catalogued by LC. So, I'm in no way dismissive of DDC. I say, in fact, that I'm not qualified to evaluate DDC technically.

(2) I say the goal is to do *no original cataloging*; hence, my choice to use LCC.

Sorry if these points weren't clear.

Kendall