Week 6 Information as information

not an

In the databases of library literature there are tons of articles about the definition of "information" and what the implications of that definition these articles fall into that category nicely. However, the one thing about all of the articles on the subject that I have read is that they all contain a strong element of circular reasoning. The best example of this in these articles is in the Buckland article, " if anything is, or might be, informative, then everything is, or might well be, information." Creating a definition of a word with out using the context that the idea functions in is really an exercises in futility and of little value once its hashed out, which is probably the problem I had with this article and others like it. I am a practical creature I believe in ideas and theories but only when the application has a purpose or becomes a foundation for something later on, All things considered after class this article might just find a circular file of its own to live in as my Files already have a better information definition article from 551 which is the same basic idea with a degree of usefulness woven in.

Hope Olson's article The Power to Name.

User vs system is an old argument in catalog construction. Folksonomy has been gaining favor for a while and up to a point I agree that its nice to be able to tag things however I want them so that I can find them easier later but at the same time I can't help but thing that all of these things have to go together and can function together better then they function independently.

A good cataloging system need to have a well worked out controlled vocabulary behind it so that people can use it and find it when they are looking for similar things getting to specific in a card catalog search isn't really in the searchers best interest when subject searching because you lose out on general resources which might have a chapter or two on the specific subject that the researcher wants. Control vocabulary terms as a foundation doesn't prevent more in-group terms from being added to a record in order to do a minority justice where as including only the term that the minority uses would do them a disservice as it would prevent the majority from finding those resources. The key is to cross-reference subject terms as completely as possible, as long as the end result of a search for pigs gives you swine it shouldn't matter what term is first or more often used. The other minor issue is that sometime you have to give the end user more credit then Olson's article seemed to give them most people are willing to start their search in the catalog general and then browse the section for what they are really looking for.

Everything is Miscellaneous

This book is a dinosaur, it has out lived its relevance. Yes digital information can be organized in many ways and physical things can only have one physical place. The book had no new information to offer a population that familiar with google. To add insult to injury the author knew he didn't have a lot of informaton to work with becasue he continued to repeat the same information over and over and over and over and over and over just in different words in an attempt to either sound smarter or write a longer book. I probably would think better of the book if I would have read it before google was a verb, but that time is long past.