Hur-Li Lee

What is a collection

Advances in information technology have dramatically changed information seeking, and necessitate an examination of traditional conceptions of library collection. This article addresses the task and reveals four major presumptions associated with collections: tangibility, ownership, a user community, and an integrated retrieval mechanism. Some of these presumptions have served only to perpetuate misconceptions of collection. Others seem to have become more relevant in the current information environment. The emergence of nontraditional media, such as the World Wide Web (WWW), poses two specific challenges: to question the necessity of finite collections, and contest the boundaries of a collection. A critical analysis of these issues results in a proposal for an expanded concept of collection that considers the perspectives of both the user and the collection developer, invites rigorous user-centered research, and looks at the collection as an information-seeking context.

The Concept of Collection from the User's Perspective.

This study explores the concept and functions of collection from the perspective of the user. In‐depth interviews with ten professors from a social science discipline and a natural science department provided descriptions of their information seeking involving material sources and their perceptions of the library collection. Participants used the following parameters in perceiving the library collection: instant availability, selectivity, physical collocation, catalog representation, user privilege, material stability, and further parameters for subcollections, including subject and format. Additional components that were important in the users’ information environment were personal collections, the Internet, and other institutions’ collections. Analysis revealed that collections provided valuable functions, such as collocating sources for convenience and saving time and money, selectivity, narrowing the search scope to increase precision and ease of use, presenting choices, and assisting in clarification of information need. The user’s perspective demonstrates the need for user‐centered and flexible, rather than library‐centered and fixed, collection structures.

Proclaiming Intellectual Authority Through Classification: The Case of the Seven Epitomes

The study investigates the main structure of the classification applied in the Seven Epitomes (Qilue), the first documented Chinese library catalog completed a few years before the Common Era. Based on a close examination of the partially extant text and structure of the catalog, other historical records and secondary sources, the authors identify two principal classification methods in the scheme being studied: dichotomy and ranking. It is theorized that the compiler of the catalog, Liu Xin, used ru classicism, or Confucianism, as the principle for guiding the construction of three sets of ranked dichotomies that manifested into the six main classes in the set sequence. As a result, he successfully achieved the chief goal he intended for the catalog—to proclaim classicism as the intellectual authority. This design made the catalog, and its numerous successors in imperial China for two thousand years, an effective aid for intellectual, political, and social control.

Purposes and Bibliographic Objectives of a Pioneer Library Catalog in China.

This research aims to ascertain the conceptual basics underlying the design of the Seven Epitomes, the first library catalog to establish the bibliographic model in imperial China. The analytical framework for the study consists of a reconstructed version of the catalog and its historical contexts. In analyzing the surviving text of the catalog, the study identifies its bibliographic objectives as the identification, choice, finding, and collocating objectives. Further deduced from these objectives, the study reasons out four general purposes that might be intended by the catalog’s compiler Liu Xin: the catalog was to be a guide to literature, a plan for knowledge organization, a retrieval tool, and a library inventory. Ru classicism (or Confucianism) was the catalog’s guiding philosophy. In classicism‐dominated imperial China, generations of bibliographers followed this model and focused their attention primarily on making bibliography both a classicist guide to literature and a plan for organizing knowledge.

Online Cataloging Education at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee School of Information Studies was an early adopter of teaching Masters of Library Science courses online, including cataloging courses. In this article we discuss features of our curriculum, including translating visual presentations for teaching cataloging in a physical classroom into the virtual environment; incorporating cultural diversity by consciously selecting a wider range of topics in cataloging examples for online classes for online students who are from all over the United States and sometimes the world; the curatorial trichotomy of resource description, cataloging, and collection management; and continuing education for working professionals.

What is an author now? Discourse analysis applied to the idea of an author

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss and shed light on the following questions: What is an author? Is it a person who writes? Or, is it, in information, an iconic taxonomic designation (some might say a “classification”) for a group of writings that are recognized by the public in some particular way? What does it mean when a search engine, or catalog, asks a user to enter the name of an author? And how does that accord with the manner in which the data have been entered in association with the names of the entities identified with the concept of authorship? Design/methodology/approach – The authors use several cases as bases of phenomenological discourse analysis, combining as best the authors can components of eidetic bracketing (a Husserlian technique for isolating noetic reduction) with Foucauldian discourse analysis. The two approaches are not sympathetic or together cogent, so the authors present them instead as alternative explanations alongside empirical evidence. In this way the auth...

Epistemic foundation of bibliographic classification in early China: A Ru classicist perspective

Purpose – This study aims to understand the epistemic foundation of the classification applied in the first Chinese library catalogue, the Seven Epitomes (Qilue).Design/methodology/approach – Originating from a theoretical stance that situates knowledge organization in its social context, the study applies a multifaceted framework pertaining to five categories of textual data: the Seven Epitomes; biographical information about the classificationist Liu Xin; and the relevant intellectual, political, and technological history.Findings – The study discovers seven principles contributing to the epistemic foundation of the catalogues classification: the Han imperial library collection imposed as the literary warrant; government functions considered for structuring texts; classicist morality determining the main classificatory structure; knowledge perceived and organized as a unity; objects, rather than subjects, of concern affecting categories at the main class level; correlative thinking connecting all text ...

Organizing knowledge the Chinese way

This paper examines an approach to knowledge organization that is fundamentally different from the analytic model evolved from ancient Greek philosophy. The classification being studied is the scheme used in a catalog, entitled the Seven Epitomes (Qilue), for organizing the Chinese imperial library collection in the Former Han dynasty over 2,000 years ago. Its knowledge organization model influenced almost all bibliographic classifications throughout imperial China. By applying a multidimensional framework to place the target scheme in its own cultural and historical context, the study identifies and discusses three key aspects of the Chinese classificatory approach. First, the scheme purposefully embraces a ru classicist ideology as its guiding principle. Second, it presents the knowledge universe as an integrated whole. Third, it applies correlative, rather than analytic, thinking to organizing textual categories, with the so-called ru Classics in the center of all major relationships. In conclusion, suggestions are made to identify additional aspects of the Chinese tradition in knowledge organization, to incorporate this way of thinking and test how it can work in constantly evolving information environments, and to understand categories and relationships in cultural contexts.

Tracing the Conceptions and Treatment of Genre in Anglo-American Cataloging

This study examines the conceptions and treatment of genre in four sets of modern Anglo-American cataloging rules spanning 171 years. Genre-related rules are first identified through “genre(s),” “form(s),” and “type(s)” keyword searches, and manual examination of the contents, then analyzed by level of treatment genre receives and by user tasks, as defined in the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. While genre is found to be sporadically addressed across the rules, its significance has increased over time. In conclusion, the authors call for a rigorous and functional definition of genre and an integrated approach to genre in cataloging.