The card catalog: "I'm back. baby!"

I half-assed read something the other day that had me wondering. It was just a simple tweet by some twittererer about teaching kids intelligent tagging, and that's all it was, just a mention of some teacher attempting to get kids to think. But the twittererer included some additional observation, although with only 140 characters to play with, I now can't remember what it was.

But (yes, I'm still looking as I type this for the tweet) it was something about teaching kids to write for the internet and how tagging will become more and more important.

And it made me think that the future of the internet was moving away from keyword and full text toward an index of useful (and standardized) terms. And that these kids would need to learn these terms if they wanted to succeed in the online world, to have their data found through their mastery of metadata.

And my first thought was, Holy Shit, this is some librarian plot to bring back the card(less) catalog.

And that's exactly what it is.

Okay, a little librarian magic and I just found the original article, "teaching students how to create meaningful tags" (Written on May 13th, 2009), but not the original tweet.

What this teacher did was have his students write something then put it into Wordle to find the terms with the highest frequency of use then pull them out and add them to the main subjects and use those for tags. The Wordle generated image worked for him as both a visual tool and as something fun for the kids to do. Pretty simple.

But then I wondered if kids begin to learn which tags are used most often, will they begin to rely on them so much that their actual vocabularies decrease to just the 4,200 words they only really need to communicate?

And that was the seed for this post. "Will tagging make kids dumb?" I don't know. I assume everything makes kids dumb: video games, SpongeBob, lithium batteries, hand puppets, random number generators, novelty wristbands, safety scissors, 100 percent cotton t-shirts and spoons, all contribute to making kids dumb, in my opinion. Rock 'n Roll music and drugs make them happy, not dumb....................... anyway....

But getting back to the card catalog. Isn't one of the goals of the, and no, I'm not going to say "semantic web" and you can't make me. Isn't one of the goals of that to create a card catalog without the cards?

In fact, speaking of the smmnttwb (which I am not saying because I am not a library nerd), I think that there is an intelligent web out there already but we can't see it. It's been built for all the scientists, but they're not telling us about it. You want proof? Who is the smartest person on Twitter? Come on, think. The answer is nobody. There are no smart people on Twitter.

But those scientists over at CERN have the LHC cranked up full blast to run holographic web browsers with email and chat in 3-dimensional real time where each message has particle mass that alters the physical environment. Think, "good sandwich" and everyone gets a taste. Oh, yeah, these nerds just "think" stuff and that collider makes it happen.

But still, I think the card catalog will make its comeback one day. When keyword searching merges with an authority index so the more useful tags automatically replace weaker ones, then we will evolve from the chaotic tagging of LibraryThing.

Here is our friend Benjamin Franklin (see above image) tagged on LibraryThing:

18th century (98) america (43) american (62) american history (198)
american literature (49) American Revolution (51) autobiography (510) Benjamin
Franklin (141) biography (515) classic (41) classics (52) colonial (29) colonial
america (16) easton press (21) essays (23) founding fathers (49) Franklin (56)
history (356) literature (44) memoir (105) non-fiction (274) paperback (18)
philadelphia (20) philosophy (18) politics (43) read (47) tbr (20) unread (44)
US History (50) usa (42)

Take the most used tags and you get, history, autobiography, biography, non-fiction, American history, Benjamin Franklin, memoir.

Refine those "like" terms and you end up with Benjamin Franklin, American history, biography.
And what does that beaten, maligned, obsolete catalog card say?

Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790.
Statesmen --United States --Biography.

So don't be surprised if the card catalog comes back some day. Although, if we try to catalog the internet, those cabinets are gonna be freaking huge.


(oh, and the card generator is at http://www.blyberg.net/card-generator/ )

OCLC vs. Everyone

Firstly, I'm no cataloger. And the C I got in Doris Clack's Bibliographic Organization class in library school is definite proof. So what I have to say about cataloging records should be understood as coming from one who ain't got a clue.

But I've been a librarian for over 15 years, and I've seen people do original cataloging and I've seen them do copy cataloging. I've seen them do the actual work or pay to get the catalog record. And either way, I would guess that the record for that item belongs to the library that paid for the work to get done or paid for someone to download it. But now I guess I would be wrong because OCLC is taking the stand that all your record are belong to us.

Now, I'm busy getting all the cream filling out of this here package of Oreos so I can dunk the chocolate cookie part into my bourbon that I don't have the time to read the OCLC position, but I was just reading this article and it says a few things about the situation, but not enough to make me an expert. So I still have lots of questions:

• What I want to know is, at what point do libraries own the records in their catalogs?
• Is there a point where OCLC "sold" records to libraries in bad faith (since libraries were not informed that the records belonged to OCLC in perpetuity)?
• Is there anti-monopoly legislation that applies to an organization like OCLC that attempts to control a commodity too tightly?
• How can OCLC claim intellectual property to something which is already widely known such as a MARC record?
• Can't someone say they cataloged the same item identically independently? How could OCLC prove otherwise?

And where does the Library of Congress fit into this? Don't they have a database of records? Can libraries use these?

Now I believe OCLC has rights. But I'm not sure what they are or should be. Should all records "sold" to libraries before 2009 become public domain records since OCLC policy was not clearly established? And then should libraries decide whether to continue their relationship with OCLC for their future cataloging needs?

This is the problem I've always had with electronic product: what are we really paying for, and what do we own? For example, now that Apple is making their content DRM-free, iPod customers need to repurchase music they already owned in order to own it again for real. I always ask this about our library databases that we purchase and then discard our print resources that are now available electronically. What do we own? Can we download the database and keep it on our server and then cancel our subscription? What if you change the content and remove something we value and put that content into another database that we now need to buy (again)? Why the hell did we dump all those perfectly good books?

Sites like Wikipedia and LibraryThing and Facebook have proven that lots of people have a lot of free time to create content. And maybe libraries need to tap into this pool of free labor to create all new records from scratch. Lord knows, I don't have nearly enough to do during the day so that I could probably help. But thank goodness, I'm so nearly completely incompetent that I'm really only qualified to supervise.

How would you categorize this website?

What subject would it be under? I only thought of this because I know you think about it; you think, "Hey, this is a great site. In fact, it's the greatest site ever created. If this site had never been created, I would stare at the sun until my eyes dried out and shriveled up like tiny raisins. Because I don't want to see anything ever again if the.effing.librarian isn't the most beautiful, amazing, fabulous, thing I have ever seen. I love love love the.effing.librarian. But how can I share these wonderful feelings with others?"

So it's natural for me to wonder how to describe this stuff so that more true believers can find it. And I need to know under what category to list it in all those online blog directories.

Now, I don't think I've ever discussed anything that could affect librarians, so I guess this isn't a professional blog.
And since I make up most of this crap, this isn't a personal blog.
And since you've seen what passes for jokes around here, this isn't a humor blog.

Is there a category for "a-hole" blogs? For, "let's see what this idiot says today" blogs?

I know there's some saying about "no one should be judge in his own cause," so I guess I need some suggestions on how I should catalog this mess so I don't do it myself. Because I'd put it under "Religion."

Thanks for the help. And Bless You.