Automated Cataloging: Implications for Libraries and Patrons

Weibel, Stuart L.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/1294 Copy

Description

Title

Automated Cataloging: Implications for Libraries and Patrons

Author(s)

Weibel, Stuart L.

Issue Date

1990

Keyword(s)

• Libraries --Automation
• Expert systems (Computer science)
• Artificial intelligence
• Library science --Data processing

Abstract

"Many changes in cataloging practice have been and will increasingly be technology driven. Bound lists and drawers of cards defined the form and function of catalogs for as long as they existed until the advent of digital computers. Even today, however, MARC records are as much a derivative of catalog cards as the reverse. The additional functionality of computer catalogs affords opportunities to increase the effectiveness of the cataloging process and improve the value of the catalog itself. Three main research areas are examined with regard to their anticipated influence on this evolution. Automated cataloging research, focusing on the application of rule-based systems to cataloging, represents a novel way to address the cataloging process per se, but has as yet made only modest progress. The incremental implementation of a variety of computer-assisted methods for addressing aspects of cataloging represents a second, more conventional approach to advancing the state of the art in cataloging automation. This approach shares the goal of the first to build intelligent capabilities into cataloging systems but the focus remains on human cataloging systems and the methods of implementation are more conventional. The third area is not part of traditional concepts of cataloging at all, but will have a major impact upon what is available in catalogs in the broadest sense of that term. This ""non traditional"" cataloging involves automated processing of documents to extract bibliographic information as well as full text. It will expand the range of cataloged objects to include items not generally cataloged due to resource constraints. Automated processing of such materials will be characterized by lower quality and less complete cataloging, but will nonetheless promote improved access to materials that are currently lost to bibliographic control."

Publisher

Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Series/Report Name or Number

Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing (27th : 1990)

ISSN

0069-4789

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1294

Copyright and License Information

Copyright owned by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1990.

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