As a former student of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, and now as a graduate student in Library and Information Studies, I value knowledge of both the source and context of the written word. St. John's used the original source in lieu of textbooks with interpretations of the source material, and in Library School at UNC-G, we constantly evaluate sources and context for a variety of reasons.
Information must be organized for efficient retrieval because documents and information, like possessions, are useless if they cannot be found.
Information must be searchable through a variety of keywords, including author, title, or subject.
While librarians are avidly against book banning, we also have a responsibility to supply the most pertinent, accurate, reliable sources to library patrons. We don't want a Google-like approach, supplying jillions of matches to a search.
We seek, not the most, but the best sources for those who seek information.
This is primarily done with information gathering. We identify who wrote the work, or "who to blame," as my cataloging professor Dr. Shiflett would say. We identify any other works the author, authors, or corporate bodies have created, and whether they have any pseudonyms. We note where and when a work is created, what sort of document it is, whether the document is deemed credible by professional peers in the field, how many times it is used as a citation in other works and so on.
Gathering and grouping information creates an invisible net of cross-referencing with the goal of accurate, specific information retrieval, the net tightening until we've caught the butterfly and pinned it to the wall.
Information must be organized for efficient retrieval because documents and information, like possessions, are useless if they cannot be found.
Information must be searchable through a variety of keywords, including author, title, or subject.
While librarians are avidly against book banning, we also have a responsibility to supply the most pertinent, accurate, reliable sources to library patrons. We don't want a Google-like approach, supplying jillions of matches to a search.
We seek, not the most, but the best sources for those who seek information.
This is primarily done with information gathering. We identify who wrote the work, or "who to blame," as my cataloging professor Dr. Shiflett would say. We identify any other works the author, authors, or corporate bodies have created, and whether they have any pseudonyms. We note where and when a work is created, what sort of document it is, whether the document is deemed credible by professional peers in the field, how many times it is used as a citation in other works and so on.
Gathering and grouping information creates an invisible net of cross-referencing with the goal of accurate, specific information retrieval, the net tightening until we've caught the butterfly and pinned it to the wall.
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