Preparing this week’s lecture, I came across an interesting paper by Ling Hwey Jeng questioning the necessity and cost-effectiveness of authority control. After a brief synopsis of the main aims and objectives, Jeng concludes that In cataloging, accuracy means authoritative, standardized, and consistent accuracy. It means both completeness ...

One of the highlights of Elisad was hearing metadata expert Karen Coyle speak. Her paper Future of the Catalog was unusual for Elisad in that no reference was made to AOD, but it was no less riveting for that, and probably very healthy for subject specialists to be faced with a wider perspective. Beginning with stats [...]

I arrived on the red-eye flight from London>Turin just in time to catch the end of Bonaria Biancu’s workshop at Elisad, Do It Ourselves: Social Technologies for Information Retrieval, so I’m really pleased to see that she has posted a brief synopsis on her blog, The Geek Librarian (Google English translation here, with all the ...

When I worked full-time as a taxonomy designer for a big international database company, one of my key learning experiences from our user testing was that, no matter how good the browse options you offer, the majority of people will always prefer to search rather than to browse. I was, therefore, unsurprised but very interested by this finding ...

Thanks to Pamela Ben-Eliezer for pointing out Richard Horton’s opinion piece on libraries in this week’s Lancet In it, he provides an entertaining tour of the library’s historical purpose as custodian of knowledge and argues that today’s medical libraries should band together to provide a global digital storehouse of ...