Reading through Haykin, Wilson & Prevost for this week’s readings lead to a great number of thoughts on topics both related to the topic of subject cataloging but also some broader observations regarding cataloging practice in general. As we consider ontological concepts like “aboutness” in the domain of subject cataloging many questions arise and the ideas of boundaries, cybernetics (control communication) and ideas of place gain relevance. I continue to see the larger links between cataloging and the philosophy of being – existence and essence overlapping and also being the substrate for machine learning and the use of machines in cataloging. Clearly, these are not new insights as is clear from the sources that Wilson cites in his book (i.e., Carnap, Ryle, etc.). And taking a historical approach to the unfolding of various practices lets us play a what if game of development – what might have happened in cataloging practice if rule X had been adopted in place of rule Y. It’s also a useful tonic to consider what currently exists as the best of all possible worlds – and revisiting ideas that may have a new affordance character in the wake of new developments in technology or social attitude. Contrasting Haykin and Prevost two different attitudes on the importance of the subject headings being authorized by the vocabulary of the public or the cataloger as knowledge organizing authority. One adapts or one conditions.
In a Tayloristic sense, the cataloger must be willing to make betterment happened by raising the bar of good enough common usage and fight for an improved, bettered system. Prevost’s method of grouping subject headings made the overall system of cataloging more efficient and simplified the rule behaviors with the high likelihood that library user practice would quickly normalize the new system arrangement and find better value from the catalog.
A question that becomes more relevant over time is who the catalog is for. In the past we could say it was for the cataloger, then the users of the library, but increasingly that user is going to be another machine which will need to know who to extract data and meaning form the catalog. Wilson is heading in this understanding by making the problems of aboutness and subject understanding less cut and dried. The intrusion of analytic philosophy and artificial intelligence is clearly making an expanded vision of the problems more foregrounded. To explain how a machine “knows”, we examine how humans know, and find voids in our understanding. Sometimes we fill the void with the story of how the machine “knows” as in a computational theory of mind or the grammar organ hypotheses of Chomsky.
The passage of time has vitiated these simple first approximations and we have again reached a point of a new void in our understanding. For cataloging, this will mean new approaches as in FRBR and RDA. But one may ask have we dug deep enough yet and imagined a better catalog by a new betterment or just tweaked the current path?
Haykin, D. J. (1951). Subject headings: A practical guide. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.
Wilson, P. (1968). Subjects and the sense of position. In Two kinds of power: An essay on bibliographic control (pp. 69-92). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Prevost, M. L. (1946). An approach to theory and method in general subject heading. Library Quarterly, 16(2), 140-151.