INFORMATION DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE—Lesson One
Northeastern
Seminary (
*Why
bother learning about ‘information description language’? Because
the problem of information retrieval demands an efficient and systematic method
for finding the right information quickly among the vast amount of recorded
material. Imagine the difficulty sorting out the information you need
for your research paper if you had to rummage through a mountain of unorganized
material. Suppose the clerk at the supermarket had to look up the price on
every item in your grocery cart. Or the
Department of Motor Vehicles had to dig through piles of paper to find record
of the driver’s license you lost.
Society depends on information organization and retrieval, and libraries
operate on principles of organization.
*Suppose
you decide to research the topic, “The Christological Hymn of Philippians
2:11-14.” How would you muster courage
to undertake the prodigious task of locating the right information? For the library to support this type of
research, the library must (1) systematically collect the types of resources
that support this subject area, (2) organize the resources according to a
classification scheme, and (3) provide a means for systematically searching for
specific information (catalog). Without
these means of organized information retrieval, research would require a
prohibitive investment of time and effort.
You’d have to dedicate your life to tracking down resources for your
paper, with no time left for nonacademic pursuits like windsurfing or
backpacking.
*Ever
rummage through a stack of scholarly books trying to find something on the communicatio idiomatum? Frustrating, right? Imagine how much trouble it would be to find
information for your paper by examining the contents of actual books and
articles, one-by-one. Fortunately, we
don’t have to examine each individual resource, in every instance, to find the
information we need. People have devised
means for finding related resources through terms that represent the concepts
in those resources. These terms
represent different levels of concepts, and there are various means for
deriving these terms, but we discuss these terms as “information description
language” because the terms represent the bits of information for which we’re
looking.
*Most
information searches in today’s libraries use computers to quickly sort through
enormous quantities of information.
However, many library patrons—kids, adults, students, faculty—approach
the library’s computers with unrealistic expectations and little knowledge
about how the information retrieval process works. Most people forget that computers aren’t
human and consequently don’t understand normal communication patterns. This happens all the time when people surf
the Internet. The task is to translate information needs into language that the
information retrieval system can understand.
*Translation
of needs into language requires communication, and communication involves the
transfer of information. Communication
involves the risk of ‘noise’—interference that distorts the message. While ‘noise’ is something you hear in budget
motels, we’re speaking here of ‘noise’ as distorted communication. ‘Noise’ happens in everyday
communication—particularly when library patrons are expressing their
information needs to reference librarians.
‘Noise’ gives rise to misunderstanding—for example, an undergraduate
student wants information on Cubism, and receives a highly specialized
monograph on art history. The frustrated
student quickly explains that all s/he needs is a brief one-page overview (the
paper is due tomorrow morning).
*Reference
librarians are well acquainted with people who know they need information, but
aren’t quite sure what they need. The
librarian’s job is to engage in dialogue and draw out the real need from the
perceived need. This comes through query
and re-statement, and may take some initial forays into resources. Often the initial forays will yield clues,
and sometimes these efforts provide nothing useful.
However,
the usual outcome is clarification of the person’s real information need. People almost never state the real need in an
initial statement.
*People
often have no better outcome with online catalogs—they simply walk up to the
terminal and start typing whatever comes to mind. Sometimes they type sentences, as though they
could engage in a human conversation with the computer. Certainly, the computer/human interface is
even more subject to the risk of communication noise than the human/human
interface.
*At the beginning of your research project,
write a brief summary of your topic. Get
it down in print just exactly what you want to do in this paper. Clearly articulate the research problem you
are addressing in a thesis statement.
A few hours spent focusing on your topic at the project’s inception
will reap rich dividends in efficiency and significantly lower your stress
level. Make certain that you invest
significant time into building your research vocabulary—this could be far more
important to your research than may be obvious in the early stages of your
work. Collect terms that precisely
describe your subject and consider the ways you can group them together as
search terms. This aspect of research is
crucial for developing your skill in online database searching. If you yearn to become an expert online
database searcher, then learn the difference between keywords, descriptors,
identifiers and subject headings. Learn
how to carry out Boolean searches. The
skilled researcher knows how to conduct title searches, author searches,
keyword searches, subject searches, publication year-range searches—AND
adroitly combines these searches in ‘Advanced’ or ‘Expert’ search box
interfaces. The skilled researcher
interacts with the research vocabulary and ‘experiments’ with combinations of
terms and search modes.
*After
you build your research vocabulary with a rich set of search terms, experiment
with various combinations of these terms in the database search interfaces.
Recognize that the best keywords are the most specific terms and phrases—e.g.
sacristy, pyx, hapax logomenon, Barmen Confession, Shrove
Tuesday, Azusa Street Revival—and that precise searching often requires the
combination of keywords, especially in a ‘soft’ subject such as religion where
terms are relatively imprecise. For example, you may need to place ‘Book of Common Prayer’ and ‘1928’ in
separate search boxes. Some of the best search terms are proper names—Smith
Wigglesworth, Jonathan Edwards, Howard Snyder, Edward Leroy Long—but it takes
sound judgment to determine whether you should search for the name as a phrase
in the keyword field, as an author name, or as a subject term. Some proper names—in the author or subject
field—require dates for precision, e.g. Watson, Richard, 1781-1833. If you search for the same ‘Richard Watson’
on an Internet search engine, you will retrieve scores of different people
named Richard Watson. Then you will need
to combine terms as related to your subject—‘Richard Watson,’ Methodist or
Methodism,
*Spend
some time getting acquainted with the ‘big red books’—the Library of Congress Subject Headings—these can save you a great
deal of time. Ask the staff member at
the library’s reference desk to show them to you—look at the front matter for
an explanation of the symbols employed throughout the set. For a quicker, easier introduction, see my
handouts Library of Congress Subject
Headings—Lesson One and Library of
Congress Subject Headings—Lesson Two.
As these handouts explain, subject headings are one means by which the
library catalog ‘collocates’ resources.
No matter what the title, the subject heading ‘Church work with
prisoners’ brings together books that contain the same main concept. The books may contain many other concepts as
well; however, the cataloging process has assigned the term ‘Church work with
prisoners’ as representing—from one ‘perspective’—what the book is about as a whole. No matter which vocabulary the title contains—incarceration,
prison, jail, ‘big house’, penitentiary’—or even titles that do not have these
specific terms, e.g. Ten Years on Death
Row—you will still find resources that contain the same concept behind the
term, ‘Church work with prisoners’.
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Last Modified
27
January 2006