Scholarly Argument
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| Information Technology | Scholarly Argument | Professional Document | Miscellanea |
Contents
- Interest -- Debate -- Obsession
- Breaking the Law: A Survey of Non-Standard Cataloging Practices
- What I've Learned About Scholarly Arguments
Interest -- Debate -- Obsession
The title of this section is "Scholarly Argument." However, the Information School requirements discuss a "sustained intellectual argument." Both academic writing and development of professional documentation can be considered the product of a sustained intellectual argument but I see them as subtly different entities. Scholarly arguments (in my experience) are often the brainchild of an individual's personal interest and motivation, whereas professional documentation is more often driven by institutional necessity.
Scholarly research is the result of an intellectual snowball. A spark of interest arises from an article or a situation in applied practice that leads an individual to ponder "what's going on with this?" This leads him to an internal debate over the nature of the problem and eventually into an investigation of what other people have thought about the problem. After a while this moderate interest builds into an obsession that drives him to devour all the literature on the topic and strike out and do research himself in order to truly figure out "what is going on," and to share his findings with others in his field of practice, so that others driven with similar problems will have somewhere to turn.
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Breaking the Law: A Survey of Non-Standard Cataloging Practices
Although not my first obsession in an academic research, my first library oriented obsession came from cataloging. My first cataloging class intrigued me enough to play around with some cataloging software over the summer. As a result I built this little OPAC. However, I was shocked and amazed at how the system lacked certain functionality, like creating a level of display for subject headings instead jumping straight to titles, but what I was more amazed about was how the cataloging side even lacked certain MARC record fields and delimiters. Of critical importance to me was to get a good display of genres from my book collection. Because the software (at the time) lacked and therefore did not search the 655 field for genres, I was forced to blur a logical distinction in the MARC record and put genre headings in with subject headings so that they could be searched in the catalog. This situation was terribly distressing to me, because it violated so much of what I had just learned in my coursework.
As I began my fall quarter and got into a new position at Seattle Central Community College there arose another cataloging issue: A drama class was looking for plays in the catalog, but nobody was finding anything in the catalog, when we knew that some of those plays were in the collection. The main problem was that the works were contained in drama anthologies and even though their contents were described in tables of contents notes they were not being searched when performing a title search, and on top of that tables of contents were not even displayed in a "full" record display, but in a separate "table of contents" page. Students were leaving our library and going to the University of Washington to find things that we already owned! This had to stop, how could we fix it? Once again I turned to fudging with the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. After this incident I had to ask myself, how many other catalogers had to break cataloging rules and MARC record standards in order to serve their user community? Was there something wrong with the rules?
When the time came for me to choose a topic for my thirty minute presentation in my advanced cataloging class the choice was simple. Why do people break cataloging rules, how do they do it, and what should we think about it? The title of my presentation was "Breaking the Law: How to be a rebel cataloger (and get away with it)." But this was a difficult topic to find in the literature, especially since there was no sufficient indexing terminology. I was unable to find a basic survey of non-standard practices in cataloging, only individual instances as documented in journal articles froam Cataloging and Classification Quarterly. Only two articles felt satisfactory.
This pushed me to do my own original research into the matter. Using the university's Catalyst research software I developed an exploratory survey to solicit open ended responses from members in a cataloging listserv. The questions focused on what types of problems other catalogers had encountered where the current cataloging standards were insufficient, and how they worked with or around that constraint. The response was an overwhelming 95 participants, with only one observable duplication. The qualitative data were analyzed for patterns and many of the categories that I had identified in my previous research did still hold, as well as finding additional categories that had not been encountered in practice or in literature. I am currently writing this research up for a submission to Library Resources and Technical Services, the journal for the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services. I hope that this will further our understanding of how cataloging rules are used and interpreted in local situations so that future revisions of the rules may take these circumstances into consideration.
- The Eric S. Riley Collection OPAC
- Seattle Community College District OPAC
- "Breaking the Law: How to be a rebel cataloger (and get away with it)"
- Breaking the Law (working draft)
- Library Resources and Technical Services
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What I've Learned about Scholarly Arguments
- An intellectual argument isn't something that happens overnight. It's something that develops over a period of time and takes on new shapes with every stage of its development.
- Always try out your surveys a couple of times before officially sending them to people, because you may find that the questions you ask elicit the wrong kind of information from your respondents.
- Writing for publication is a time consuming and painstaking process because a) you have to maintain the continual third person voice of the paper, and b) every publication has its own style requirements and lots of them.
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