Indexing

Readers,

Once again, The Dean Files is back in action. Last week was great, but very busy, full of things that I hope to be able to share with you at a later date. Jen and I celebrated our second anniversary, which was lovely! We also completed our Christmas shopping - which is great! Although, we do need to get to work on our Christmas cards. (Here's a photo from our anniversary):



Last week in my classification course, we were discussing the importance and difficulty of indexing and describing non-textual phenomena - sound, dance, etc. Our professor Dr. Kwasinik shared this with us:

Despite the difficulties inherent in classifying non-linguistic phenomena, people are constantly trying to come up with schemes that will do a good job of representing them.

This becomes more important in a digital environment where language is often the only method for retrieval, and so an object such as a melody, image, etc. is lost unless the indexer has assigned sufficiently expressive terms.

You know, I have always taken digital, text based indexing and metadata for granted - of items in all formats - textual and non-textual. It is very difficult to describe non-textual phenomena, and this is one of the areas in which a controlled vocabulary works well for consistent description. I think even outside of the modern digital environment, most indexing was text based. More than that, though, I began to ponder what the catalog (and classification) might be like if it were not text based. Of course, the easiest next step to take is speech and sound based indexing. I just don't know if this line of thought is fruitful, though. We live in a society very much grounded in text - in written words and descriptions. Why, then, should we change the catalog from something many people are familiar with and adept at using? Admittedly, there are people for which adaptations should be made - people with problems interfacing with the catalog. For the majority of catalog users, though, text based searching is the preferred method, and so it is our job as catalogers to accurately and consistently describe all phenomena and objects in a textual format.