COMMUNITY CATALOGING Current Trend and Technology, April Parker, Special Libraries
The Thing about LibraryThing
Special Libraries are often created to support a specific population and clientele. Special Libraries such as The Lesbian Herstory Archives, The Greensboro Carnegie Negro Library, and The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Lending Library are special in nature as they supply information, house the history and access to information for marginalized populations. Libraries repetitive practices are saturated with power dynamics that leave minority populations unrepresented within collections. This mutual feeling of exclusion provides a catalyst for unification amongst the disenfranchised, which special libraries act as a platform for community building. The author seeks to explain how the use of social cataloging, LibraryThing, and tags can be used as a tool for increased collaboration within libraries that specialize in representation of minority groups, and community building. LibraryThing is prime example of our technology savvy society Web 2.0 advancement. LibraryThing is social cataloging web application that acts as a book catalog. Users vary from individuals, authors, publishers, libraries, and book lovers of all kind. Members are able to store book collections, categorize them using social tagging, obtain book recommendations, create and read reviews, and interact in discussion forums. LibraryThing is growing in use and as of February 2011, “LibraryThing had 1,277,641 members, 59,694,064 books catalogued, 72,677,255 tags and 5,889,427 unique works. www.librarything.com/zetgeist).” (Voorbij 2012) Tags are keywords that are user applied labels. All members can use this method, as well as their natural language in order to classify a book. This is drastically different from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are descriptors assigned by “professionals”, they are much regimented and the user doesn’t hold the authority of creation. Although they are useable they are not malleable. Tags can remain current and allow for diverse identities to describe books appropriately. The LCSH are the standard but they do not invite other experts, or people as
experts of their own lives. This norm creates a power dynamic and further creates a disconnect between cultural information and the self-identification of the users. Authors of “The Fruit and Root of the Community” used Mcmillian and Chavis (1986) conceptual framework of what constitutes a community in their research which analyzed the African American’s sense of connectedness that the special library became an “anchor institution for a traditionally excluded population”. “According to McMillian and Chavis, the four building blocks of community are membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and emotional connection.” (Hersberger, 2010) It is clear that the inherit structure of LibraryThing and its practice of social tagging is paramount to creating community for minority focused special libraries. Membership: A sense of belonging, an investment by an individual in a community that results in a feeling of a “right to belong.”
Information wants to be free and accessible, and whereas LibraryThing is not an Opensource but the pricing is low to make it accessible for organization with limited budgets. The first 200 books cataloged are free. The flat rate for both organizations and individuals is $10 annually or $25 for a lifetime membership. “Members of LibraryThing create personal online catalogs by scanning ISBNs into the system and retrieving records from Amazon, Library of Congress, or a member library. Members can edit their records.” (De Fino, 2010). Members are able to tag their collection, and navigate their reading selections, and identify those with similar items based tags. Paying dues and having ownership of catalogs creates a community where fully engaged persons can explore the literary world on their terms. This form of interactive cataloging deviates from traditional norms as information seekers are required to participate.
Influence: A bidirectional concept where not only the individual potentially affects the community as a whole, the community also welds influence over the individual. Cohesiveness and conformity are artifacts of influence. People or the community had great influence on the establishment and running of the library. LibraryThing has no established hierarchies. Organizations and individuals pay the same fee, and have the same access to the services offered. This form of participatory librarianship and the practicing of social tagging is significant especially those of nondominant cultures that have often been rendered silent by oppression. There is power in naming. LCSH since their initial creation in 1902 are now used internationally and are considered the norm. The standard doesn’t rely on the communities ability to “name its own resources” (Adler ) LCSH has been criticized for being slow to evolve and inclusive of multiple identities, and Sandy Berman “effectively argued that the headings reflect and serve a mainstream audience, lacking terns for and misrepresenting groups on the margins.” (Adler) LibraryThing empowers the individual by appropriating authority to the individual. This positively affects the system overall, the multiple uses of tags mirrors the diverse populations and fosters visibility. That change stems from “Olson’s (2007) concept of “connected knowing” (p 523-4). Olson argues that because it “might be construed as a kind of connected knowing because of its ground in a knowing community”, a collaborative web-based tagging, or folksonomy, might be able to achieve a user-oriented “retrieval aboutness” (p. 524). Olson suggests that in order to develop more connected knowing within information organization, universal models of organization need to be rejected allowing different models to exist and operate collaboratively; and, there needs to be awareness of the justification for change: recognition of power as a factor in knowing” (p. 531).(Bates, Rowley 2010)
Integration and Fulfillment of Needs: Operate through positive reinforcement and are examined through variables that address needs, including status, values, and reciprocal social capital. Recognition that the library was able to meet the needs associated the community’s values transforms the library’s services into a motivator for continued use. It is essential for the special library to meet the audiences need because at times unfortunately that is a last resort to those who may those in need of information. “Many researchers recommend incorporating social tagging into the traditional library environment and combining folksonomies and formal classification. Spiteri states that folksonomy can add value to public library catalogues by enabling users to 1) organizes personal information space; 20 supplement existing controlled vocabularies; and 30 create online communities of interest.” (Lu 2010) LibraryThing for Libraries offers this system that supports the values of community, social inclusion, and collaborative cataloging that will undoubtedly foster a sustainable community. Shared Emotional Connection: Based in part on a shared history. May also be based on shared attributes. The seven features that characterize this criterion are interpersonal contact, quality of interaction, closure to events, and importance of share events, investment, effects of honor and humiliation, and spiritual bond. LibraryThing and other platforms that use tagging have a unique social nature that further perpetuates the sense of community. Members have the ability to search tags and collections of other users, participation in book clubs is available; these are all cultural activities that engage communities. Folksonomy “coined by blogger Thomas Vander Wal to describe an emergent decentralized approach to classifying information on the Internet…folksonomy asks each user to classify information as they see fit, sharing the resulting classification between users.” (Friedman 2005) Folksonomy represent a shared language and develop a socio-historical
memory. LCSH is quite the opposite and has proven to not accurately identify, or speak to nondominant groups. “Ellen Greenblatt (1990) critiqued LCSH for its representations (or rather, lack of representation) of gays and lesbians. By tracing the history of terms related to homosexuality in common usage and in LCSHs, she concluded the Library of Congress is slow in created subject headings for gay and lesbian topics, and it may lag years or decades behind the time the terms have entered into common usage. She proposed heading changes and additions based on contemporary usage.� (Adler) LC oppressive practices result in literature to be in accessible to the population, by not using common language literature becomes invisible on the shelves lost amongst our heteronormative, racist society. Social tagging and the use of transparent, diverse expression is necessary for special libraries to be social inclusive in a field that has historically been aimed at universality with broader terms but seemingly falls short with narrower minds.
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