Ray Saintonge wrote:
Library science has indeed invented numerous schemes.
Any such scheme
designed for general application is as good as its competitors. Each
developped independently to address the priorities of the originating
library. Any of them may thus be validly criticized for its nationalist
tendencies.
I think you are wrong here, but I wish I was more certain of my case.
I'm not a librarian. I'm just fond of observing this German-American
cultural clash from some distance (from Sweden).
In the field of digital libraries, there is a subculture that likes to
discuss "thesauri and ontologies", especially bordering on the
"semantic web" subculture. It seems to me that most people in the
thesauri and ontologies subculture are from Germany and have some kind
of German library science background. I'm talking about stuff like
http://www.ecdl2003.org/ecdl.tutorials.html#tutorial4
and
http://www.jcdl2004.org/tutorials.htm#t2a
U.S. libraries have the Dewey Decimal system for classification and
other countries have other systems. These systems are colored by the
time and country where they were created. So far you are right. But
it seems to me that perhaps German library science scholars have gone
deeper into making more of a science of this part of library science.
Instead of learning, using and teaching the system they have, German
library scientists discuss how best to design such category systems.
I've heard them dismiss Yahoo's and Dmoz' category trees as naive
creations of people who don't know the basics of library science.
I think this is what is happening on wikide-l and I'm glad that we
have library scientists there.
Problematisieren -- the German word for making a problem out of
something, to see problems (worthy of a deeper discussion) where
others don't -- is the first step of a scientific approach.
I only speak Swedish, English and German, and this reduces my
perspectives. Perhaps Chinese, Russian or French library scientists
have totally different approaches that I should take into account.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se/