Competency G: organizing information, including classification, cataloging, metadata, or other systems

“Core Competency G — demonstrate understanding of basic principles and standards involved in organizing information, including classification, cataloging, metadata, or other systems.”

Introduction

Human beings compartmentalize. We classify and sort and try to make sense of the minutiae of life by labeling each thing and grouping it together with other, similar things. We seem to do this instinctively and without thinking about it. A library catalog differs in that it must be planned and thought out. A library without a catalog wouldn’t be a library; it would be like an unmapped land, a warehouse full of jumbled up materials that would do no one any good because, first of all, no one would even know what was there and if they did, by some chance know that an item existed in that mess, no one could find it.

Classification and Cataloguing

That was the quandary in which my child’s preschool staff found themselves a few years ago. They had a small library of books, both purchased by the preschool program and donated by parents. They did not know what books were in the collection, but they wanted to be able find books to read to the children appropriate to the curriculum and the children’s interests. I volunteered to do an inventory, classify and label the books and then arrange them on the shelf. I also volunteered to create a catalogue of the books in a format that would coordinate the classification system with the books’ locations on the shelf. The preschool did not have a computer, so the catalog I would create would be a paper printout. This would not be the ideal format since any changes to the collection, whether additions or losses, would have to be handwritten on the paper, however, I gave the files to the director of the site on a memory stick so that she could take it to the center’s headquarters and update the catalog on their computers.

The first step I took in this process was to take an inventory of the collection. This meant pulling every book off the shelf and writing the title by hand on a sheet paper. I took this paper home and entered the data into a Microsoft Excel worksheet. I then sorted the entries alphabetically. There were almost 500 books in the pre-school’s collection. I brought the list to the director and we decided that the best way to classify the collection was by topic. That way, when the teachers wanted a book about a specific issue or event, that book would easier to find. Because space was limited, we could not assign much shelf space to the collection. We decided to put colored labels on the book spines and arrange the books on the shelf, grouped together by topic and alphabetized within the grouping by title. I offer the catalog and documents used to develop the catalog as evidence (see G_Evidence_1a, 1b).

Systems

The way in which I created the preschool’s library catalogue was obviously much simpler than what modern libraries go through to classify, arrange, and catalog their materials. I have so much more knowledge and information about cataloging and classification than I had a few years ago when I classified and cataloged the collection at the preschool. At that time I had no knowledge of AACR2 or RDA or MARC. I was very familiar with Dewey, however the Library of Congress system of classification confused me. I have a much better understanding of LOC now. Of course, none of these systems were necessary for the small collection of EB materials at the preschool, however, knowing what I do now, I could have done a better job classifying and cataloguing their collection. I am more knowledgeable about classification and cataloging because of a class I took in the MLIS program. I offer comprehensive, graded exams which display my competency in these areas (see G_Evidence_2 and G_Evidence_3) One of the first things I should have done is make a brief description of each of the materials. This description would have assisted the teacher who was selecting material for the day’s story time to make an appropriate choice. Grouping materials by topic does not go far enough to describe each book; a short description could help a teacher find germane material more quickly. Like a keyword only search, it doesn’t narrow the selection to the most relevant material.

Since this was a collection unique to the preschool and only they would be using it, it was not necessary to use AACR2 or RDA to standardize the catalog so that others could access the collection. Furthermore, since there was no computerized version, save the Excel files saved on my hard drive and the memory stick I gave to the director, MARC was also unnecessary. In a hypothetical scenario, in which I was classifying and cataloging the entire preschool system’s collection, that is, all of the materials in each site, then I would have used AACR2 and added a field with a short description of the material, one identifying which site had possession of which materials, as well as a field showing how many copies of each item the system possessed overall. That catalogue would not only be standardized among the preschool sites, it would also be far more extensive and detailed and most likely computerized.

Conclusion

Sorting and classifying comes naturally to humans; perhaps it is our finite minds’ way of making sense of the infinite universe, this parceling out and labeling bits of it. However, with a catalog, the things we classify don’t make sense. We may inherit an immensely valuable coin collection, but without a catalog to tell us what each coin is or how it is significant, we might never know what we have. Because I understand not only the importance, but the various methods used by libraries in organizing information and materials, I am better able to not only assist information seekers in finding what they seek, but also in navigating the catalog and classification systems to further my own research and continuing education to better serve patrons overall.