Approved-By:  Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <LIBPACS@UHUPVM1.BITNET>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.pacs-l
Date:         Mon, 14 Dec 1992 08:21:27 CDT
From:         "Katy Silberger" <JWEZ@MARISTB.BITNET>
Subject:      RE:Musings on the Infostructure

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
     I found Alan Emtage's Musings interesting.  I concur that
the scholarly world will benefit from the formation of a new
community of techies and librarians and the hybrid which will
eventually emerge. Your essay is thought provoking and I hope
will stimulate a dialog among the two camps participating in
this discussion group.

     As my words will reveal, I am a professional librarian
and I truely believe in BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTROL. Alan questions
the need and wisdom of trying to control something so complex.
I believe that it is fundamental to the process of scientific
(in the old Latin sense) communication.  Scholars in any corner
of the world and at any point in time must be able to follow the
bibliographic trail mapped out in a document's bibliography.

     I think that the problem with the corner store analogy
is that we are looking at one month's production of a minute
fraction of the all the serials published.  Furthermore, the
corner store has a much more limited clientele that all but
the smallest special library, and therefore can arrange things
according to a very personalized scheme.

      The gist of the comments concerning classification schemes
escaped me, but I had quite a reaction to the assertion that
it should be possible to achieve one-to-one mapping between
any two classification schemes.  I STRONGLY DISAGREE.  I have
worked for several years each with (1) Dewey Decimal; (2) Universal
Decimal ( and incidentially that number, if in fact it was a
classification number -- which is not the same as a call number --
it was a UDC #); and (3) Library of Congress (LC).   I have
also read Ranganathan in both English and a Portuguese translation,
the accuracy of which I was verifying for the publisher; and I have
read some of Bliss' work with respect to the ideas of colon
classification.  The Library of Congress system is by and large
ennumerative: i.e. all the possible numbers are set out in the
classification tables.  The Dewey Decimal system is synthetic in
that the classifier takes a basic number and adds certain strings
with specific meanings to create a number.  The UDC and the colon
system are far more synthetic in that several concepts can be
combined together into very long numbers.  UDC has seven or eight
punctuation marks to connect such sequences of numbers, each of
which has a specific meaning.  All of the ennumerative systems are
basically infinite in the number of classification numbers which
can be derived which is not to say that there couldn't be a one
to one mapping between different infinities, but it certainly
would be an unrewarding task.  I also think that they tend to cut
of the universe of human knowledge in very different ways.  Look
at the UDC's refusal to recognize sociology as a subject area!
I can't believe that a one-to-one mapping would be possible.  That
is not to say, however, that the same book could be given a number
in all of these schemes.  It would be human discretion which would
make that possible rather than an exact equivalent number existing
in each scheme.

      I think that classification shemes have tremendous potential
for international information retrieval.  Arabic numerals are
understood throughout the world, and rather short strings can
encode a substantial message.  Obviously that makes classification
numbers efficient for searching massive and or remote databases.

      Certainly user communities are one good forum of organization
but may have cultural limitations and certainly will have
limits over time.  I see these user communities as  being a more
open and expansive form of the "informal college".  They are very
useful for the present.  They are very personalized, but they
can only accomodate communication among the currently living.

   I will be interested in other people's reactions.

K Silberger
jwez@maristb
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