: THE IMPACT OF NETWORKED KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS ON CATALOGUING

1. THE FUNDAMENTAL INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF ALL THINGS #CIG12 : THE IMPACT OF NETWORKED KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS ON CATALOGUING CILIP Cataloguing & Indexing Group Conference 2012 Simon Barron E-resources Co-ordinator Durham University Library @SimonXIX

2. “…the dawn of a new era in cataloguing…” Welsh & Batley, Practical cataloguing, p. 172.

3. “FRBR suggests that the library catalogue should do more than enable the location of a particular item. In essence, in creating a 'FRBRized' catalogue record, we are describing not only the thing we have in our hands, but its relationship to other things in the bibliographic universe - not only to its creator(s) and previous editions, but, theoretically, to any other thing that may be of use to an end user.” “FRBR describes the entities in the bibliographic universe, their relationships and attributes.” Tillett, ‘FRBR and RDA: resource description and access.’ Welsh & Batley, Practical cataloguing, p. 8.

4. ‘The School of Athens’ by Raphael

5.  “A hierarchy is a system of nested groups.” Wright, Glut: mastering information through the ages, p. 7.

6. ‘The Fall of Man’ by Lucas Cranach the Elder

7. “Linnaeus’s classification is typical of a taxonomy in that the relationships between living things are depicted by means of a hierarchical structure. This is a structure in which successive steps in division create smaller and more specific classes. It is usually represented visually as a tree structure, with the tree branching at each new level. This sort of structure is probably what is ordinarily thought of as a system of classification.” Broughton, Essential classification, p. 13.

9. “…treat knowledge as if it were a unity which can be subdivided into smaller and smaller units. At the top of the tree is the whole universe, which is divided and subdivided to arrive at all the different entities, events and activities represented in the subjects of books.” Broughton, Essential classification, p. 32.

10. “Aristotle’s taxonomic conventions would persist for more than 2,000 years… His quest for logical order led to his conviction that the world was ultimately knowable. That conviction not only drove Aristotle’s personal ambitions, but also served – along with his personal library – as the intellectual foundation for the greatest library of the ancient world.” Wright, Glut: mastering information through the ages, p. 70.

13. “…individuals function as autonomous nodes, negotiating their own relationships, forging ties, coalescing into clusters. There is no “top” in a network; each node is equal and self-directed. Democracy is a kind of network; so is a flock of birds, or the World Wide Web.” Wright, Glut: mastering information through the ages, p. 7.

14.  "Our biological existence, social world, economy, and religious traditions tell a compelling story of interrelatedness. As the great Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges put it, "everything touches everything." Barabási, Linked, p. 5.

17. "Consider for example a network crucial for our ability to find scientific information: the citation network. Each scientific paper cites other papers, relevant to the discussed work. A mathematics paper would cite other maths papers focusing on similar problems or occasionally a biology or a physics paper, illustrating the applications of the obtained results. Therefore, all scientific publications are part of a web of science in which nodes are research publications connected by citations. These links are directed. Indeed, following the references at the end of this book will allow you to find the quotes papers. Yet none of these papers could send you to this book, since they do not cite it. The citation network is a very peculiar directed network in which the IN and OUT components reflect the historical ordering of the papers and the central component is very small if it exists at all." Barabási, Linked, p. 169.

19.  “Network thinking is poised to invade all domains of human activity and most fields of human inquiry. It is more than another helpful perspective or tool. Networks are by their very nature the fabric of most complex systems, and nodes and links deeply infuse all strategies aimed at approaching our interlocked universe.” Barabási, Linked, p. 222.

20. Institutional Repository Search http://irs.mimas.ac.uk/demonstrator/

21. “[Consilience is] a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.” Wilson, Consilience, p. 6. “The map of the material world, including human mental activity, can be thought a sprinkling of charted terrain separated by blank expanses that are of unknown extent yet accessible to coherent inter-disciplinary research… If the consilience world view is correct, the traverse of the gaps will be a Magellanic voyage that eventually encircles the whole of reality.” Wilson, Consilience, p. 299.

22. “…obviously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and speculative. The reason is quite simple: we do not know what the universe is.” Borges, ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’ in The total library: non-fiction 1922-1986, p. 231.

23. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., (B. Massumi, tr.) 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Honderich, T., ed., 2005. The Oxford companion to philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, L., and Maguire, M., 2010. ‘The rhizome and the tree: changing metaphors for information organisation’. Journal of documentation, 66 (4), pp. 604-613. Tillett, B. B., 2007. ‘FRBR and RDA: resource description and access’ in Taylor, A. G., ed., 2007. Understanding FRBR: what it is and how it will affect our retrieval tools. London: Libraries Unlimited. Welsh, A., and Batley, S., 2012. Practical cataloguing: AACR, RDA and MARC 21. London: Facet Publishing. Wilson, E. O., 1998. Consilience: the unity of knowledge. London: Little, Brown and Company. Wittgenstein, L., 2001. Tractatuslogico-philosophicus. Oxon: Routledge. Wright, A., 2007. Glut: mastering information through the ages. London: Cornell University Press. Bibliography Adams, D., 1988. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. London: Pan Macmillan. Barabási, A-L., 2003. Linked: how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science, and everyday life. London: Penguin. Borges, J. L., 1942. ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’ in Borges, J. L., (E. Weinberg, ed.) 2001. The total library: non-fiction 1922-1986. London: Penguin. Bowman, J. H., 2003. Essential cataloguing. London: Facet Publishing. Broughton, V., 2004. Essential classification. London: Facet Publishing. Buchanan, M., 2002. Nexus: small worlds and the groundbreaking science of networks. London: W. W. Norton & Company. D’Alembert, J., 1963. Preliminary discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc.

24. Image credits ‘Yet another bean photo’ by Flickr user kern.justin. ‘remember to thank all the books you haven’t read over the past three years’ by Flickr user osiatynska. ‘The School of Athens’ from Wikimedia Commons. ‘Pear tree branches circles on the fig tree’ by Flickr user Mammaoca2008. ‘Look Closer and You Can See…’ by Flickr user gogoloopie. ‘The Fall of Man’ from Wikimedia Commons. SystemaNaturaescan from Wikimedia Commons. Jefferson’s library catalog scan from the Massachusetts Historical Society. ‘The Tree of Books’ by DeviantArt user vladstudio. ‘Alexandria Library’ by Flickr user Dallas75. Several images of networks by Flickr user gephi_org. ‘Web 2.0 Digitage 2012’ by Flickr user ocean.flynn. ‘Rhizome seed’ from http://www.a-website.org/mnemosyne/no_signposts/pics/rhisome_seed.gif ‘Big bang’ by Flickr user entonceeees.