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Statement of Competency I

In which I discuss use of service concepts, principles and techniques that facilitate information access, relevance, and accuracy for individuals or groups of users.

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In my opinion, providing access to information is one of the most important aspects of librarianship and the information profession. Through out history, library and information professionals developed a number of tools to facilitate users’ access to information and collections. From the Pinakes of Callimachus to the WorldCat, librarians listed, catalogued, indexed, and tagged their collections. Libraries opened branches in the furthest parts of the town, loaded books on buses, and drove long distances to reach their users. When computers come, the libraries were among the first to make use of computer technology and provide on-line catalogs. Today it is almost impossible to find a library that does not have their catalog available through the Internet, which does not offer interlibrary loan or reference services. However, as digital and computer technology changes, there are always new challenges and opportunities to reach even more people and make access and retrieval of information easier, more relevant, and accurate.

As library collections mostly consist of mass produced items, like books or video-tapes, with well defined characteristics, access to this collection could easily be standardized. Almost all libraries use catalogs as the tool for access to their collections. Catalogs in different countries may use different classification systems, but they all offer a number of the entry points through which the collections could be searched and information retrieved. With the arrival of the Internet, union catalogs and library consortiums were created to enable searches through multiple catalogs or databases.

The main characteristic of collections in libraries is that they are cataloged on the item level. Archives and repositories deal with unique collections consisting of a large number of items and generally cataloged on the folder level. The tool archives use to facilitate access is the finding aid. On their web, site the Society of American Archivist [SAA] defines the finding aid as:

"... a single document that places the materials in context by consolidating information about the collection, such as acquisition and processing; provenance, including administrative history or biographical note; scope of the collection, including size, subjects, media; organization and arrangement; and an inventory of the series and the folders" (SAA 2008).

During my internship in the Special Collections of UC Riverside libraries, I had first hand experience processing the archival collection and writing the finding aid for it, my EVIDENCE 2 for this competency.

The collection was composed of manuscripts, galleys, notes and correspondence created by Anne McCaffrey during her writing career and, with only a few exceptions, exclusively related to the writing of her books. The finding aid follows the traditional format of archival finding aids and provides basic information about the creator and scope of the collection, stipulates accessibility and copyright information, as well as details about the acquisition of the collection. That is followed with a short biography of Anne McCaffrey and a list of additional sources. The scope and content of the collection and definitions of series and sub-series precede the detailed folder list. The access to the information about the contents of individual folders is possible either by querying the Access database or searching through the thirty-four-page folder list.

Traditionally, finding aids for each collection were assembled as independent units, often presented to a user in bound volumes. As collections were not necessarily indexed, searching across collections required time and patience on the side of user and ample assistance on the side of the archivist. However, with the development of the Internet and popularity of HTML, the archival community developed Encoded Archival Description (EAD) encoding system that enables accessing the finding aids in an online environment. The EAD is one of a number of customized variations that conforms to the SGML and XML standards, which means that, in essence, EAD records are simple text files. That means that although the individual finding aids could preserve their original structure, when uploaded in a common database, they are accessible through the Internet and the user have opportunity to search for information across different finding aids. Online Archives of California is an example of such database that use EAD encoding for finding aids submitted by archival repositories across California.

Information retrieval is all about satisfying informational needs. That would mean that we want to connect a user with documents that are relevant to his needs, not merely one that matches the query. However, only the user can determine if the retrieved document is relevant or not, which makes the concept of relevance extremely fluid and subjective. If the user already knows some information, then that information is not relevant to him, no matter how much the document answers to the query question.

One of the common problems, particularly in university and repository libraries, is providing access to information in foreign language or script. The traditional practice was to transcribe the text into a local script (like Hanyu Pinyin system of Romanizing Chinese characters), but that diminishes the accuracy of the information. Muenchen or Munchen is not quite the same as München. Before the Internet and OPACs, the way individual library systems dealt with this problem did not matter much because most of the access was local. However, with development of the Internet, problem of scripts and cataloging of foreign literature become a serious problem.

Reflecting the United States origin of modern computer development, the first software used ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) keyboard-encoding scheme, all monitors showed only ASCII characters, and all printers printed only ASCII fonts. The software users from the non-English speaking world had serious problems with processing and outputting information in their native languages and scripts. Every country solved the problem in its own way, changing the keyboard mappings to local standards, usually following the local convention for typewriter keyboards. However, with the rise of the Internet, the international community needed to find international solutions. During the 1980s, an idea emerged of a system of mapping characters where every character of the every script on the world would use a unique code – hence the name Unicode – associated only with that character across languages, software programs, or operating platforms. As I explain in my e-paper about Unicode, my EVIDENCE 1 for this competency, the Unicode was designed to be universal, efficient, uniform, and unambiguous, and to provide a means to encode and display any and every script in the world.

One of most admired features of Unicode is its ability to manage the display of different scripts on the same page regardless of the script direction. This feature is commonly used on the international news web sites, where links are displayed in the original text providing the indication that link would bring text in another script or language. University libraries and research centers with international user and books in many languages also make good use for this feature. See the example of the library of Tel Aviv University where the text about the Jaffe collection was written in English, but the bibliography of the sources is in Hebrew. In this way, libraries could provide access to the local as well as the international users without sacrificing the quality of the information.

One of side effect of the unlimited possibilities of the Internet is the problem of ensuring the accuracy of information. Not to say that before development of the Internet, everything in print was true and accurate, but the sheer flood of the information makes it very difficult to ensure that we provide the users with accurate information. As probably any reference librarian knows, Google searches are easy but the accuracy and quality of the information retrieved is not guaranteed.

During my internship in the Autry National Center, I experienced first-hand how important it is to maintain high standards of accuracy in creating records that will be accessed on-line.

The main goal of my internship in the Southwest Museum of the Autry National Center was to acquire practical knowledge of the technical and conceptual issues related to a comprehensive digitalization project in a museum environment. The internship had two outcomes: (1) inventory and imaging of artifacts selected for digitalization and (2) preparing the electronic records for public access on the Internet catalog. The second outcome, my EVIDENCE 3 for this competency, mostly involved re-cataloging of the Pomo Indian baskets and indexing the records.

As I have no expertise in Native American culture or basketry, the results of my first attempts with the records were quite bad. I mixed terms like sedge (Carex) with sage (Salvia); entered the information "black bracken fern root" in the number of the records before realizing that somewhere in the line the word "design" was lost, and that the correct sentence is "... black design in bracken fern root ..." After working on the records for a while, one of the major insights was that it is very difficult to find a mistake if you do not know what is the right information. Only after some substantial readings about basketry techniques was I able to string together a decent sentence that had meaningful (and accurate) information.

Although the importance of the distinction between "black bracken fern" and "black design in bracken fern" could be minimal, it does matter. The user of the Autry Collections On-line is partially the general public, but mostly are Native Americans, students, and experts in the field of Native American studies. For them, the quality of information is of utter importance, and inaccuracies and sloppiness even in small number of records brings into a question the quality and accuracy of all the records.

Reference:

Pearce-Moses, R. (2005). Finding Aid. A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology. The Society of American Archivist [SAA] web site. Retrieved April 19, 2008, from http://www.archivists.org/glossary/term_details.asp?DefinitionKey=66