Introducation to Core Competency F. Use the basic concepts and principles related to the creation, evaluation, selection, acquisition, preservation and organization of specific items or collections of information.
Is the natural state of information objects, the set of all material objects, order or disorder? Philosophers have argued this for centuries: is there a natural order to the universe of matter? Or does matter exist in disorder and at random? Astronomers argue about information crossing the event horizon of a black hole, is it lost forever? Physicists argue that all matter flows toward entropy or disorder. Material objects including information consist of atoms ordered in some matter, the order determining the type of matter, inert matter being a different ordering of different atoms than living matter. Intellectual ideas are not information until they are given a material form of some sort and only then can they be manipulated as information objects. Virtual information objects are forms of inert matter and consist of electrons and bytes.
The ordering of information objects is a concern of library and information scientists, as well as most other scientists, while artists seem to handily accept and even thrive on the possibility of random disorder as the natural state of the material world. Collections of information objects are by definition ordered or organized in some manner, because they are collections, versus piles or heaps, which by definition have no order or organization.
Human beings are the most complex collections of organized matter in the universe, the “crown of creation.” Human nature addresses the material world with the purpose of placing an order to it, or, if order is already there, reordering matter to our liking. Librarians and archivists may be those individuals with a human nature that makes ordering and organizing material information their life purpose. Over the millennia, librarians, currently called information professionals and information technologists, but not information scientists, have developed processes and principles to assist them in their life purpose. In order to include myself as a member of this profession, I must convince my teachers that I possess an understanding of these processes and principles and the ability to apply them correctly in the here and now. What follows is proof of my competency to execute the following six acts toward the world of possible information objects and toward pre-ordered collections of these objects:
Create
While the act of truly creating information objects may be best left to God or to artists, or perhaps to the manufacturing industry, I can claim to have constructed an information object in this e-portfolio, but I didn't really create it. I didn't create the electrons that give it material form, nor the soft- and hardware needed to view it, nor the Internet that transports it. I did create the thoughts and ideas that give it meaning.
As for creating collections of information objects, librarians, archivists, and museum workers are experts at this. Librarians create collections when they pull from their holdings all the books on a theme, say gardening or landscape architecture, to feature in a special display when spring comes. They may create collections of best children's stories for summer reading programs and locate them in one place accessible to parents and children. Creating collections, then, means gathering together a smaller selection of material out of a larger selection for a certain purpose or because of a shared idea or feature. I can create collections. I created a small collection of 14 articles on Information Retrieval from a larger collection located in SLIS Restricted Readings. This collection lives virtually in my hard drive in a folder under LIBR 202→Assign2→Articles and has a physical life in my filing cabinet, also in a folder called LIBR 202. The only record of this collection that can be presented here is Data Records. These data records, which represent journal articles, have no given order, not even an alphabetical order by title or author, except for the numerical order given them by InMagic's DBTextworks, which reflects the sequence in which they were entered into the database.
Evaluate
The act of evaluating information objects or collections of objects suggests the necessity of having a purpose in mind or a set of criteria to use. A librarian may evaluate the suitability of a book for the afore mentioned children's summer reading collection based on the age of the children she has in mind, the interests of the children and perhaps the parents reading to them, the home language that the parents speak, the illustrations in the book, etc. Even if her criteria are not explicit, somewhere in mind she has a standard against which she's measuring each potential book. I can evaluate information objects. When I chose these 14 articles from the list of Supplemental Reading for LIBR 202, I evaluated each one according to criteria that may have been: author, title, subject category, year published, journal, length, perceived level of difficulty, etc. When I did an evaluation of the holdings in the De Anza College Library on the subject of Middle East Studies: Women in Islam (Muslim Women), I used criteria that are commonly recognized among collection development specialists: scope, currency, appropriateness, physical condition, monetary value, etc.
Select
The act of selecting an information object or a collection of objects may or may not involve their prior evaluation, but differs in purpose. Selection is for the purpose of re-assembling the objects into a new or different collection, while evaluation is static. After evaluated the Collection Development Policy Statements of 22 public libraries according to their completeness, ease of use, content, etc, I selected eight to use as a model for my proposal for a new policy for SJPL. The reasons why I selected those eight were different than the criteria I used to evaluate the 22. The entire process is described in depth in the Proposal for New Collection Development Policy for SJPL. In another assignment, I selected $2000 worth of books partially based on how reviewers had evaluated them for an opening day collection on Terrorism Studies for the Naval Postgraduate School, Dudley Library.
Acquire
The act of acquiring information objects and collections for libraries usually means making purchases and receiving gifts. Spending taxpayers' money on materials for your public or university library demands understanding the needs of your service group and interpreting how the materials you buy will meet their needs. All this requires doing your homework before going shopping. In my SJPL internship, we are in the process of gathering information from the communities surrounding new branch libraries in San Jose. We researched these neighborhoods and send out surveys in four languages. Before spending taxpayers' money, we wanted to give the community the chance to tell us what they want in their local libraries. The whole process required hours of work: designing the survey, choosing who and where to survey, contacting people, collating by hand the print surveys, delivering and picking up print surveys, designing and publicizing online surveys, tallying results, and writing reports. Included as evidence of my contribution to this ongoing team effort are samples of the English print survey, email communication with an adult education center, my report to my supervisor, my internship log, and the Excel tally sheet.
Preserve
The act of preserving information objects and collections of objects is fundamental to libraries and archives. A fine example of how a small, special library can create a collection by preserving and organizing objects that would normally be thrown away is the Pamphlets and Newspaper Articles collection at Acterra Environmental Library and Resource Center, Palo Alto. I worked on this collection with the long-time, volunteer librarian. This collection preserves over 30 years of newspaper clippings about local, Bay Area and California-wide environmental issues. The collection is not contained in acid-free folders or being preserved as an archive even though it may be the only one of its kind in this area. It has been an expanding collection for 30 years but is in danger of becoming obsolete because the volunteer librarians are aging and the younger part-time librarian has not been trained in library and information science, not even in library tech, and does not understand the books of Subject Headings or the Tracings Lists. The Acterra document, which describes the collection and discusses the controlled vocabulary, consists of notes from an oral presentation of this collection given in LIBR 247 Vocabulary Design.
Organize
The act of organizing information objects and collections of objects is also fundamental to libraries and archives. The book of Subject Headings and the Tracings Lists at the Acterra library discussed above are also an excellent example of organizational principles applied to a collection of newspaper clippings. Their subject headings are a homegrown controlled vocabulary that is created on the fly, meaning that as new articles are clipped, new subject heading are created if none already exist that apply. This means that the new subject headings must be cross referenced to existing subject headings as See also related terms. Also entry vocabulary is represented as See terms and serves to redirect users from an unused term to the term used in this vocabulary. The number of subject headings at that time was approximately 2,000. The alternative to a homegrown vocabulary is using a ready made one like the Library of Congress Subject Headings or one specific to environmental libraries.
Another example of how a collection of information objects has been preserved and organized, in this case as a archive, is the Congressional Records of Arthur Bellums, retired Congressman and current Mayor of Oakland. Our LIBR 256 Archives and Manuscripts class acquired these records through Lori Lindberg, Archivist and Instructor at SJSU, and applied to them the principles of evaluation, selection, preservation, and organization. My group created a Descriptive Summary of a small portion of the collection, one box of House of Representative Bills from the 99th Congress. The description includes statements explaining how the collection is organized, the applicable Library of Congress Subject Headings, and a list of the container contents. We refiled in acid free folders and containers all documents that we selected for preservation.
