What’s the use?: Searching for catalog user tasks beyond finding, identifying, selecting,

and obtaining

Marty KurthHeads of Cataloging Interest Group

June 30, 2014

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From “Professional vs Paraprofessional (again),” email message to AUTOCAT, 4 May 1994.

Cataloging, as a professional occupation, is, in its broadest and deepest sense, the activity of creating (i.e., planning, implementing), monitoring (including data control and quality) and modifying catalog systems as systems. . . .

Francis Miksa

From Lynch, Elke Greifeneder, and Michael Seadle, “Interactions between libraries and technology over the past 30 years: An interview with Clifford Lynch 23.06.2012,” Library Hi Tech 30:4 (2012): 575.

[H]ow do you conduct and curate a public conversation about cultural memory? You see institutions putting up materials now with fairly restricted metadata, because that is all they have and to reach out broadly for expertise to strengthen their knowledge of the collection. That process needs to become routine and it is a very complex process to engineer and to orchestrate.

Clifford Lynch

From “The Academy Unbound: Linked Data as Revolution,” Library Resources & Technical Services 56:4 (2012): 227.

Linked data has the potential to revolutionize the academic world of information creation and exchange. Basic tenets of what libraries collect, how they collect, how they organize, and how they provide information will be questioned and rethought.

Philip Schreur

FRBR generic user tasks

• to find entities that correspond to the user’s stated search criteria

• to identify an entity• to select an entity that is appropriate to the

user’s needs• to acquire or obtain access to the entity

described(FRBR, p. 8, 79)

http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/cataloguing/frbr/frbr_2008.pdf

Other relevant ideas from Schreur• Linked bibliographic data on the open web can invoke

an “iterative process of data use and correction” (p. 228)

• To participate in this process, “libraries must move from the exclusive creation of records to the inclusion of data captured at the source” (p. 236)

• Which will require services that create structured bibliographic data “as an automated by-product of the work of the academy” including “data enhancement and correction . . . by crowdsourcing” (p. 237)

Dempsey’s “Four sources of metadata about things”

• Professional • Crowdsourced (user-contributed)• Programmatically promoted (e.g., entity

identification services)• Intentional or transactional (generated

through use)

http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001351.htmlhttp://www.educause.edu/ero/article/thirteen-ways-looking-libraries-discovery-and-

catalog-scale-workflow-attention

From Lynch, Elke Greifeneder, and Michael Seadle, “Interactions between libraries and technology over the past 30 years: An interview with Clifford Lynch 23.06.2012,” Library Hi Tech 30:4 (2012): 575.

[H]ow do you conduct and curate a public conversation about cultural memory? You see institutions putting up materials now with fairly restricted metadata, because that is all they have and to reach out broadly for expertise to strengthen their knowledge of the collection. That process needs to become routine and it is a very complex process to engineer and to orchestrate.

Clifford Lynch

FRBR generic user tasks

• to find entities that correspond to the user’s stated search criteria

• to identify an entity• to select an entity that is appropriate to the

user’s needs• to acquire or obtain access to the entity

described(FRBR, p. 8, 79)

http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/cataloguing/frbr/frbr_2008.pdf

Quick FRBR overview

• Entities– work, expression, manifestation, item

– person, corporate body

– concept, object, event, place

• Attributes (of entities)

• Relationships (that link entities)

Relationships open the door to more active user engagement

Bibliographic relationships are important “in assisting the user to relate one entity or another or to ‘navigate’ the universe of entities represented in a bibliographic file or database. In a sense ‘relate’ could be viewed as a fifth user task.”

(FRBR, p. 80)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Beatle

A five-task model

• to find entities that correspond to the user’s stated search criteria

• to identify an entity• to select an entity that is appropriate to the

user’s needs• to acquire or obtain access to the entity

described• to relate entities to one another

Searching for active user tasks

(FRBR, p. 84)http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/cataloguing/frbr/frbr_2008.pdf

Searching for active user tasks

(FRBR, p. 85)http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/cataloguing/frbr/frbr_2008.pdf

A six-task model• to find entities that correspond to the user’s

stated search criteria• to identify an entity• to select an entity that is appropriate to the

user’s needs• to acquire or obtain access to the entity

described• to assign an attribute to an entity• to declare a relationship between entities

Other models of active user tasksJohn Unsworth’s Scholarly Primitives

• Discover• Annotate• Compare• Refer• Sample• Illustrate• Represent

http://people.brandeis.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

Open Annotation Data Model Motivations

• Bookmark• Classify• Comment• Describe• Edit• Highlight• Identify• Link• Moderate• Question• Reply• Tag

http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/

From The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (MIT Press, 2000), 29.

[B]ibliographic objectives . . . can be seen as historically determined: they have emerged as the bibliographic universe has expanded and has triggered ever-increasing difficulties in the search for information and as users’ needs have become more demanding.

Elaine Svenonius