RE: Revenge of the librarians

Claudio,

I don't think librarians are entitled to 
any revange, far from it.They are to blame for they 
were the only one who had enough expertise to make 
change and they failed at least in the following:

a) to make their field of expertise more coherent, more
organized and more transparent
b) to realise the importance of knowledge organziation tools
in relation to information technology and information systems
- they have not embraced IT as a core of their skills until recently
c) to share tools and expertise with others involved
d) to oppose to dumbing-down of system engineers/programers
who knew less about information retrieval and limitation of
natural languages - than they did

There is a huge gap in research in this area after 1970 as many
library schools stopped to provide fundamental education in 
the area of information and knowledge organzation - in the
past twenty years. This was considered to be unecessary once
libraries were automated and they could search by keywords in 
title. 
So there are many of professionals
with LIS degree or even fancy titles such as 'knowledge architect' 
who have never heard or basic principles in semantic/syntax 
paradigm, diffrence between term and concept, formality of 
indexing languages, faceted analysis, taxonomy
principles of modern controlled vocabularies
etc. and differences between free text search and controlled 
vocabulaires. But there are also those who know more
and who try to see further.

Generalizing librarians is no better than generalizing 
computer specialists. That is not helpful. 

System talking to each other such as Z39.50 
or today web services on a larger scale are fundamental 
achievements, but I am glad that there are more and more people
around (both librarians and non-librarians) realising that
this will not solve the problem of 'contents talking to each other'. 
This is really encouraging and may eventually get us somewhere.

Aida Slavic
School of Library, Archive and Information Studies
University College London
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/fatks

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Claudio Gnoli [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: 11 March 2003 17:13
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [facetedclassification] Revenge of the librarians
> 
> 
> / Claudio Gnoli --> "Faceted classification discussion"
> 
> """ [Danny Ayers]
> I think a big part of the problem may be that there's been 
> material in the media for a few years with web services 
> as "the answer", even "the *only* answer", which keeps 
> attention away from semantic aspects. Problem is, no-one 
> really bothers to frame the question...
> """
> 
> Indeed: years of users coming into the library and asking 
> us "so where is the search engine?" -- instead of "the online
> catalog" -- are the reason why librarians feel a need of 
> revenge :-))
> 
> But I think the process already began in the 80s, when 
> computers came massively into libraries, so that attention 
> got away from indexing problems to softwares: not
> surprisingly, indexing theory has had few advancements 
> after that. So the question (at least in Italy) is also how 
> to wake up librarians and make them aware that the revenge 
> is behind the corner...
> 
> Saluti!
> 
> 
> 
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