CS 430 Information Discovery Lecture 13 Library Catalogs

CS 430: Information Discovery Lecture 13 Library Catalogs 1 1

Course Administration Thursday, October 16: Presidential Inauguration Narayana N. R. Murthy Chairman and Chief Mentor Officer Infosys Technologies Limited Cornell - The Unfinished Agenda: The Musings of a Corporate Person Biotech Building, Large Conference Room 10: 00 to 11: 00 a. m. 2

Information Retrieval with High Recall Full-text Indexing (automated) • Text only. Most effective on medium-length documents on related topics. High recall requires tuning system to the specific collection and skilled users. Catalogs and Indexes (created manually) • • Requires close quality control of metadata creation • 3 Can be used for all formats of material High recall requires tuning system to the specific collection and skilled users.

Descriptive Metadata Some methods of information discovery search descriptive metadata about the objects. Metadata typically consists of a catalog or indexing record, or an abstract, one record for each object. • Catalog: metadata records that have a consistent structure, organized according to systematic rules. • Abstract: a free text record that summarizes a longer document. • Indexing record: less formal than a catalog record, but more structure than a simple abstract. 4

Descriptive Metadata • Usually stored separately from the objects that it describes, but sometimes is embedded in the objects. • Usually the metadata is a set of text fields. Textual metadata can be used to describe non-textual objects, e. g. , software, images, music 5

Descriptive metadata Information discovery is can be very effective when applied to metadata rather than raw information • Allows fielded searching author = "Goethe" • Suitable for non-textual material type = "picture" and subject = "Ithaca" • Can be used with controlled vocabulary language = "en" 6 (English)

Examples of Library Catalogs Cornell University Library catalog: http: //catalog. library. cornell. edu/ Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs: http: //www. loc. gov/rr/print/catalog. html 7

Origins of Library Catalogs Bibliographic Objective: • To bring together like items • To differentiate among similar ones Sir Anthony Panizzi, Keeper of Books at the British Museum (1856 -67). His Ninety-One Rules (1841) were the basis of modern catalog rules. 8

Origins of Library Catalogs Information Discovery: • to enable a person to find a book of which either the author, title or subject is known • to show what the library has by a given author, on a given subject, or in a given kind of literature • to assist in the choice of a book as to its edition (bibliographically) or to its character (literary or topical). Charles Ammi Cutter Librarian of the Boston Athenaeum Rules for a Dictionary Catalog, 1874 9

Origins of Library Catalogs Classification: Division of subject matter into a hierarchy. Typically used in libraries to provided a subjectbased order for shelving books. Melvil Dewey Acting Librarian of Amherst College (1874) Dewey Decimal system of book classification, uses the numbers 000 to 999 to cover the general fields of knowledge and decimals to fit special subjects. 10

Technology Materials to be catalogued: • Originally books • Extended to serials, maps, music, etc. , but concepts still rely heavily on experience with books Form of catalog: • • Index cards (Cutter) • 11 Entries in books (Panizzi) Online databases (Kilgour)

Catalogs as Investments Costs: • Conventional Catalog Records are created by skilled librarians. (cost estimate $100 per record). • OCLC's catalog has 52 million records. Total investment is several billion dollars. Cataloguing Standards: • • Combine records of the past with records created today • 12 Enable libraries to share records Allow readers and librarians to move between libraries

Shared Cataloguing: OCLC -- Large centralized transaction processing database system When a library catalogs a book it deposits MARC record in OCLC Other libraries can copy the record • saves duplication of cataloguing • build database of holdings OCLC database has 52 million records, serves 47, 000 libraries When developed in 1967, OCLC was a pioneering computer system (had to develop own network, computer terminal, etc. ) 13

Library Cataloguing Anglo American Cataloguing Rules (AACR 2) • rules for what goes into each field of a catalog record MARC format • an exchange format for catalog records "MARC Catalog" • catalog in MARC format, where content of each field follows AACR 2 14

Example: Monograph catalog record Citation Caroline R. Arms, editor, Campus strategies for libraries and electronic information. Bedford, MA: Digital Press, 1990. 15

Cataloguing Rules Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 16

MARC fields tag value 001 050 082 245 89 -16879 r 93 Z 675. U 5 C 16 1990 027. 7/0973 20 Campus strategies for libraries and electronic title statement information/Caroline Arms, editor. {Bedford, Mass. } : Digital Press, c 1990. publisher xi, 404 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. collation EDUCOM strategies series on information technology series title Includes bibliographical references (p. {373}-381). ISBN 1 -55558 -036 -X : $34. 95 260 300 440 504 020 17

MARC fields (continued) 650 Academic libraries--United States--Automation. subject heading 650 Libraries and electronic publishing--United States. 650 Library information networks--United States. 650 Information technology--United States. 700 Arms, Caroline R. (Caroline Ruth) 040 DLC DLC 043 n-us--955 CIP ver. br 02 to SL 02 -26 -90 18 985 APIF/MIG

MARC Encoding tag: 260 subfield a: {Bedford, Mass. } : subfield b: Digital Press, subfield c: c 1990. MARC encoding: &2600#abc#{Bedford, Mass. } : #Digital Press, #c 1990. % 19

Name authority files • Caroline R. Arms or Caroline Ruth Arms? • Which William Phillips of Cardiff? • Mark Twain or Samuel Clemens? • Epithets: of Cardiff doctor • Dates: 1832 - 1876 flourished 1860 circa 1832 - 1876 20

Subject information Library of Congress Subject Headings Academic libraries--United States--Automation Hierarchical classification Library of Congress call number: Dewey Decimal Classification: Z 675. U 5 C 16 027. 7 Creation and maintenance of lists of subject headings and classifications is a never ending task. 22

Online public access catalog (OPAC) History: First stage • Library mounts its MARC records on a central computer • Provides a simple terminal interface and dedicated terminals • Boolean search -- fielded searching [Most university libraries reached this stage about 1990] History: Second stage • Library connects computer to a campus network and Internet • Converts card catalog records to MARC (retrospective conversion) 23

Library information systems When the catalog is online. . . Add other collections and services: • • Secondary information (Inspec, Medline, Chemical Abstracts) Reference works (dictionaries, encyclopedias) Improve user interface • Add full text searching • Add web interface Add gateway to off-campus information sources: 24 • • Scientific journals Databases (census, genome)

Library management systems A library management system, sometimes called an integrated library system, integrates the internal processes of a library, e. g. , acquisitions, cataloguing, binding, circulation, etc. It usually contains an online public access catalog, but does not provide integrated services to users. Library management systems are produced by small companies who lack the capital and technical expertise to develop modern digital libraries. 25

Notes on MARC A great achievement: • • Magnetic tape exchange format for printing catalog records • The dawn of computing: mixed upper and lower case variable length fields, repeated fields non-Roman scripts • 100(? ) million records with standard content and format • 26 Developed in 1960 s Thousands of trained librarians (millions? )

Notes on MARC A great problem: • Not designed for computer algorithms • One record per item (poor links between records) • Tied to traditional materials and traditional practices • Not Unicode • 100 of million records at $100 -- $10 billion A classic legacy system! 27