Organizing Information: From the Shelf to the Web

by Chowdhury, G.G. Chowdhury

Tomorrow's library and information service professionals will have to be conversant with all the tools and techniques for organizing information in various domains. This text covers the organization of the entire spectrum of information, as well as looking at the principles, tools and techniques needed to do this effectively.

Genres: Nonfiction, Library Science

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Eva Therese · Rating 2 out of 5]

This should have been excellent. It covers a wide variety of subjects and is written by authors who clearly know these subjects. Maybe that's the problem. Because according to the back of this book (which is called a textbook, BTW) it should provide "an easy-to-understand introduction to each of the individual topics" but I found nothing easy about this.
Okay, sure. Some subjects, like Colon Classification, might simply be eye-wateringly difficult to comprehend or I might be stupid, but even when they were talking about subjects that I know I understand at least the basics of, like Information Architecture or HTML, it felt way too complex.
I kept feeling like they were skipping parts of their explanations without realizing it because it all made sense to them. Or maybe it was that they kept explaining concepts by using words that were just as incomprehensible as the one they were explaining. Halfway through I started to wonder whether a better use of my time would be to simply write down the chapter headings and then look them up on Wikipedia, which actually has standards for readability.

I still don't know what an ontology is...

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book the 4th of the 5 preparatory reading books for my course, is it turns out, about cataloguing. This makes me happy as it means that the course I have to take term 2 which also has the rather ambiguous “organising information” title is also about cataloguing. The book is a great introduction. It’s written by the same people as the Digital Libraries book that I just said and I have to say I really appreciate their straightforward style and their frequent use of examples. I wish I’d read this book back in December when I started cataloguing properly as I think it would have explained a great deal to me, now it made the differences between the different levels of cataloguing that much clearer. It starts out with the basis premise of Cataloguing (which led to the rant below), then goes into detail about the traditional library methods for cataloguing, such as bibliographic formats, library classification schemes (I now understand Dewey much better but am kinda glad I don’t have to use it – though I did agree with all the authors’ complaints about LCC), and subject headings. The authors give a good solid overview of the methods, and the reasons behind this type of classification without going into the tiny punctuation details of the fiddly bits of MARC 21 and the ACCR2 (thankfully!). The “traditional” side of things takes up over half the book, then they look at cataloguing internet information resources and the new methods of cataloguing digital information that have arisen in the past decade or so. This starts with Metadata and mark-up languages, which seem fairly straight forward, and then go on to Ontonology, information architecture and the semantic web, which seemed increasingly more complicated. The book ends with looking at issues and trends within the field. Useful and practical, I was able to sit down and read the whole thing in one go without my head exploding, but I’m sure there are some parts I’ll need to go back and re-reference to properly understand them in terms of my course. But I found it to be very useful and would definitely recommend it as a good place to start to understand about cataloguing, whether traditional or digital. (Which seems to me to make a nice cross over between trad and cyber Goths! Lols!) Before I got very far in this book I had to ask myself about why library catalogue records are so useless, and why no one, well no one in the information profession that I’ve come across so far, will admit to this. For years now if I want to find out about a book I will without question go to Amazon first, look at the full description of the book and if it’s common enough be able to look inside, see the table of contents and read reviews. How different can library catalogues be? The information on the standard opac tells you NOTHING about a book, besides where to find it in the library. The subject terms are often obscure, (and speaking as someone who gets her best guesses removed finds the whole system rather archaic – particularly when perfectly good terms are no longer used). I remember at SOAS spending ages trying to figure out their classification scene, coming up with all the different key words to the books I might want, going through EVERY single reprocution of Taoist, just in case I missed something, religious books would get classified in with literature and religious history in with social history. Interestingly enough when I told the head cataloguer at the Maughan when she was training me that I actually used the subject areas to browse and try and find books she was really surprised! And asked if that was because I’d been working in libraries, but she didn’t expect students to actually be using them. To me the subject terms and especially the classification seem rather random. (A good example of this is Tim Barrett’s new book about Empress Wu which under Library of Congress classification is neither in Chinese history Tang dynasty or the section on religion, but under Z for information/printing side of things). Perhaps you need a librarianship degree to be able to figure out where an item should go and why it is there, but surely this is missing the point as the vast amount of readers don’t hold those qualifications and they are the ones trying to find the books, not the librarians. (Unless of course it’s closed access). But I digress, why is it that you can’t get information about a book from an OPAC? And why is it that no one is trying to include this information? Why is it that people don’t seem to care? Surely if libraries are under risk form online booksellers then you don’t want your users going to Amazon first to find out about a book, and then going to the library catalogue to check the library holdings to see if it’s there. More than likely they’ll go to Amazon realise it’s affordable and just buy it directly from them, bypassing the library altogether. As nearly all bibliographic records, at least for new books, are simply copied from existing records how hard would it be to include information useful to the readers in the library catalogue? Something to help them decide whether or not they actually wanted to read the book, and if it was on a topic that would interest them. I really hope this point gets mentioned on my course!

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first thing you need to know about Organizing Information: From the Shelf to the Web by G. G. and Sudatta Chowdhury is that it is published in England. Consequently, despite being the size of a trade paperback and a mere 230 pages, it will cost ninety-five dollars if bought new (and a fair hunk of change if you buy it used too). If you can get over the sticker shock, Organizing Information has some good stuff going for it. I will also grant that the high price was an excellent motivation to read the book in its entirety.

The book looks at what it means to organize information and how said organization works in realms outside the library. Later chapters look at specific aspects of knowledge organization in a library setting: cataloging (MARC), library classification (LCC, DDC, Colon), subject headings, organzing information on the web, metadata, markup languages, ontologies, information architecture, the semantic web, and finally current issues and trends.

I liked the structure of this book especially. Each chapter begins with an introduction that provides an overview of the topic before going into more detail in the body of the chapter which organized into different headings. The chapter ends with a summary, review questions, and a list of references.

Knowledge organization is one of those areas where some topics will be more interesting than others. This book gives everything a fair shake and provides a nice amount of information about everything. It just does so for a really ridiculous amount of money.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used this to review a year out of an MLIS program and found it ideal for this purpose. It hits most of the high points and current trends of information organization without getting bogged down in any one topic. Those looking for more depth on say catologuing or metadata would probably be best served finding a book dedicated specifically to those purposes, but for those wanting just a general overview of the field this is ideal.