1. SOCIAL DISCOVERY TOOLS: CATALOGUING MEETS USER
CONVENIENCE
Louise Spiteri
School of Information Management
Dalhousie University

2. THE ROLE OF THE CATALOGUE
The traditional goals and objectives of the library
catalogue are to enable users to search a library’s
collection to find items pertaining to specific titles,
authors, or subjects.
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The library catalogue has long acted as an important
and fundamental medium between users and their
information needs.

3. CHANGING NATURE OF CATALOGUES
Interact with the catalogue and with each other
 Create and participating in discussion groups
 Tag items of interest in language that reflects their needs
 Share reading, listening, or viewing interests
 Provide recommendations and ratings for selected items.

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Today’s library catalogues are competing against
powerful alternatives for information discovery. Services
offered by sites such as Amazon and LibraryThing allow
members to:

4. SOCIAL DISCOVERY SYSTEMS

Allow users to enhance the content of bibliographic records by
adding their own tags, ratings, and reviews.

Can play an important role in helping information professionals meet
one of the primary underlying principles of cataloguing, namely that
catalogue records be designed with the user in mind and that,
whenever possible, the needs of clients must be placed above other
concerns
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Library discovery systems, such as AquaBrowser,
BiblioCommons and Encore provide an enhanced search and
discovery experience for the users.

5. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
What is the relationship
between culture and user
convenience?
What are the ethical
dimensions involved in
creating catalogue records to
reflect user convenience?
How can social discovery
tools facilitate the creation of
catalogue records that reflect
the culture(s) and needs of
the library community in
which they exist?
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What is the relationship
between the principle of
user convenience and social
discovery systems?

6. CODE OF ETHICS FOR INFORMATION
PROFESSIONALS (KOEHLER & PEMBERTON, 2009)
Understand the roles of the
information practitioner and
strive to meet them with the
greatest possible skill and
competence.
Support the needs of the
profession and the
professional association(s).
Insofar as they do not conflict
with professional obligations,
be sensitive and responsive
to social responsibilities
appropriate to the profession.
Be aware of, and be
responsive to, the rights of
users, employers, fellow
practitioners, one’s
community, the larger society
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Whenever possible, place the
needs of clients above other
concerns.

7. IFLA STATEMENT ON INTERNATIONAL CATALOGUING
PRINCIPLES (2009)
convenience of the user
representation
accuracy
sufficiency & necessity
significance
economy
consistency & standardization
integration
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common usage

8. USER CONVENIENCE AND CULTURE
(BEGHTOL)
:
User warrant
• Individuals are considered to be members of a
certain culture(s) and represent that culture(s)
when they participate in the development and
use of knowledge organization systems.
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Cultural
warrant
• Any knowledge organization or
representational system should reflect the
assumptions, values, and predispositions of
the culture(s) in which it exists.

9. USER CONVENIENCE AND CULTURE
(BEGHTOL)
Cultural hospitality
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• Knowledge organization systems
allow for personal and community
choices

10. ACTIVITY THEORY (HJØRLAND, 1997)
Knowledge organization and representation cannot
be isolated from the culture, environment and
context in which these processes take place.

Individual resources are analyzed and described
according to their uses, both intended or actual.
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

11. DEFINING CULTURE
Culture is a collective phenomenon and involves
groups of people who share the same culture.
Cultural groups may define themselves
in different ways, such as according to
language, nation, religion, generation,
region, or workplace.
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Defining cultural values is particularly challenging
in pluralistic countries like Canada, where people
who live within the same political nation may
belong to several cultural groups.

12. RECONCILING CATALOGUE RECORDS
WITH CULTURE
How do you reconcile these different needs
with the integrity of the content of catalogue
records that follow standard procedures and
guidelines?
How do you create catalogue records that meet
user convenience in environments of shared
bibliographic databases and little opportunity
exists to create customized records?
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How can library catalogue records be designed
to meet the different cultural needs of
communities?

13. BARRIERS TO MEETING USER NEEDS
Insufficient
interaction with
clients
Cataloguers
involved in
back-end
processes of
catalogues
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Cheaper to use
minimal vendor
records

14. INCREASING ROLE FOR CATALOGUE
RECORDS
 Library
 Increasingly,
the catalogue record must provide
information that clients would have obtained
traditionally from browsing physically through an item
and scanning its contents

Enhanced content, e.g., tables of contents, images,
detailed summaries, and so forth.
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use often occurs outside the confines of a
physical building.

15. SOCIAL DISCOVERY SYSTEMS TO THE
RESCUE?
Library staff can learn more about the
members of the library community by
examining tags, ratings and reviews, and
create collections and services, such as
Readers' Advisory, that more closely
reflect the needs of the users.
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When users add metadata to existing
catalogue records in the form of tags,
ratings, or reviews, they are given the
opportunity to express both their needs
and their cultural points-of-view.

16. SOCIAL DISCOVERY SYSTEMS TO THE
RESCUE?
User-created metadata can reflect not
only a personal perspective, but also a
community perspective. User-contributed
metadata can assist in the expression of
different cultural manifestations.
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User-assigned tags and reviews can
help members of the library community
connect with one another via shared
interests and connections.

17. BUT WHAT IF THEY MESS UP THE
RECORDS?
Inoffensive
content could be
flagged by other
clients
(Edmonton
model).
User content
Library staff
may be less
could monitor
accurate or
neutral, but still
content to fix
errors
informative (e.g.,
the tag “boring”).
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The MARC record
cannot be altered.
Users can only
add content to the
MARC record,
e.g., tags, ratings,
reviews.

18. WHAT ABOUT OBJECTIVITY?
Cataloguers have traditionally believed in the importance of
creating records that are free of bias. The provision of
unbiased catalogue records, while laudable, is rarely truly
attainable in practice. Cataloguers decide what to include and
exclude in a catalogue record.

Subjectivity becomes even more of an issue via the choice of
subject headings and classification numbers.

User-contributed tags and reviews could certainly reflect bias,
but this bias could be a useful and important expression of
user convenience and cultural warrant.
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

19. GRASSROOTS LANGUAGE
Social discovery
systems can
balance formal
vocabularies with
those of the
community
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Formal
representation
language may not
reflect users and
the community
User-contributed
metadata could
allow us to
examine to what
extent controlled
vocabularies
reflect the needs
of the user and
help us update
these
vocabularies.

20. CONCLUSIONS
User-contributed metadata allow clients to express their needs
and cultural warrant
User-contributed metadata can be an invaluable resource by
which to examine how people use and interact with catalogue
records and to modify controlled vocabularies such as LCSH.
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Social discovery systems can bridge cataloguers' desire to
create accurate catalogue records that conform to accepted
cataloguing standards, and their ethical imperative to ensure
that these records meet the needs of the clients.