Lars Aronsson wrote:
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).
I readily admit that I am not up to date on modern trends in German
library science :-)
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
I checked those links and am not any further ahead. I think that I can
understand how thesauri might be relevant; however, I'm puzzled by how
they have imported a term from metaphysics to serve their purpose.
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.
Their criticisms of Yahoo and Dmoz are quite likely valid. Hard core
scientists will dispute that there can be any science in Library
science. Still we need a technology more than we need a science. Will
the efforts of the German scientists lead to a user friendly system.
Users too easily reject any kind of coded system.
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.
How scientific does our approach need to be?
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.
And how has this issue been developping in Swedish? As I said before,
each wiki is likely to find its own solution to the problem.
Compatibility may need to came at a later stage.
Ec