Ronald Murray and Barbara Tillett
鈥淐ataloging Theory in Search of Graph Theory and other Ivory Towers鈥 published in Information Technology and Libraries, vol. 309, no. 4 (December 2011), p. 170-184.
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91传媒
The intellectual content of this article is original and highly thought-provoking. The “re-visioning of cataloging theory” presented by the authors has important theoretical value because it suggests a new and multi-disciplinary method of resource description. Using an ethno-mathematical perspective of simple and complex resource descriptions, patterns have been created and the representations of these patterns as expressions of mathematical ideas are presented. The jury found this to be a really creative spatial way to look at the organization of our bibliographic universe. The article is also timely in that it comes during a period when the field of cataloging is undergoing a great deal of change.
Murray writes in discussing their article: “The FRBR findings, from having collided with reality in the form of existing cataloging records, generated data models that could be — thanks to what we know about Linguistics, Literary Theory, intellectual property rights, and the publishing industry — given a plausible theoretical footing and brought into dialog with points of view in the Sciences and Humanities.
“In our work, systems of descriptions (W E M I, etc.) are the “building blocks” for much larger-scale networks that possess characteristics nearly impossible to see at the level of an individual work. The “Moby-Dick” network we described only hints at what is out there (for example, see the Wikipedia entry ").
“At the other end of the bibliographic universe, LLD (Library Linked Data) enthusiasts are intent upon breaking down library-forged systems of descriptions into reconfigurable RDF (Resource Description Framework) chunks that “may” be used for other purposes. From a LLD perspective, chunking “metadata” into Work and Instance modules represents an evolutionary step for the W3C approach them – but from our perspective, it is strongly devolutionary. Unfortunately, in the absence of implementation-independent ways of depicting and reasoning about resource description networks, this distinction is impossible to see.”
