Thursday, October 13, 2005

The nature of Truth and the definition of Authority

Librarians and others are currently debating the nature of truth and the definition of authority on the Web4lib listserv. "Authority" is a standard criterion used by librarians in evaluating information and reference sources. But what is authority? Is it "findability," as some suggest, or does "objective" truth contained in a tome grant it authority? Read along by subscribing or browse the October archive (subject: Authority + Wikipedia ). Here's the article that set off the debate.

4 comments:

Barbara said...

Authority has always been negotiated - and debated, and challenged and changed. You simply can't say it exists, ab eterno. Uh uh. However - OCLC's new plan to let patrons add comments and even alter the notes fields on WorldCat seemed incredibly hairbrained to me. The reviews on Amazon are to a large extent skewed and misleading and certainly not helpful as reviews, though occassionally interesting as a record of debate about a particular book. (But altering notes fields? I'm not that folksonomical.)

Barbara

Alec said...

Notes? Notes?!? I didn't realize they were letting patrons go that far.

Barbara said...

Okay... I probably misinterpreted their press release. It says "On the Details tab for a particular title, registered users may use separate fields to input the table of contents and factual notes, such as a summary of the work's themes or historical context." Since the contents are typically in the notes field of the cataloged record, I guess I concluded they could change the notes field. Actually, I guess they can just add different notes fields. Goody, if I don't like the table of contents, I can make up my own. And describe what the books about in competition with subject headings. Actually it may be more fair to say "to enhance" subject headings, but really, does this just mean we think the Folk can catalog better? I just don't understand the motivation here, I guess.

Barbara

Alec said...

Barbara wrote, "..does this just mean we think the Folk can catalog better?"

This brings me back to my earlier rants about "folksonomies" and indexing theory. Sorry, but I am not in the Folk camp, even if I am a folk. I am still a firm believer in controlled vocabularies and the theories and practices professional indexers and catalogers have honed since the early 20th century, often informed by empirical research.

Folk fan always point to the book Wisdom of Crowds as evidence that "correct" information will emerge from groups. However, as one of my friends noted, "Gasp! You mean, when you take a bunch of samples, they all cluster around a mean? That might be truly surprising if it wasn't true for literally all phenomena." Another observed, "Stupid people don't magically get smart if there is 100 of them together in a room." I'm not suggesting that librarians are smarter than everyone else, but I think my friends have a point.