Bookends Theme?

As we've been placing the library materials on the shelves, we've realised they're going to need some extra support to stop them slipping and falling all over the place.

Buying ordinary library bookends is one option. However, as we want to limit the money spent on this project as far as possible, we wondered whether it might be possible to avoid buying the bookends.

I came across a couple of wikis with suggestions for how to create one's own bookends: the first wiki suggests customising a brick - a rather nice idea for an Architecture and Built Environment Centre? ; and the second one gives several suggestions for creating bookends including recycling milk cartons, cereal boxes and even cowboy boots.

I thought these brick bookends were rather lovely.

And here I even found a tutorial on how to create physics geek-themed bookends.

Vacated Shelving

Here - in all their spartan loveliness - are the shelves where the bookshop used to be, and the reference library will soon be.

Lovely New Shelves

To make room for the reference library, PLACE have transferred their bookshop books (the ones they sell) to some rather covetable new shelves on the gallery floor...

THE TUNNEL EFFECT

We have been quiet for a while. I think we are experiencing what project management gurus would refer to as THE TUNNEL EFFECT.

Old Henry Gantt would have had a thing or two to say.

It seems we did not plan the progress of our project carefully enough at the outset, and have consequently got lost in the tunnel. The lack of milestones in our project seems to have been a particular problem.

"It is possible to have the major events other than the tasks themselves show on the plan as points of connection for the project: these are the milestones. The milestones allow the project to be decided in clearly identifiable phases, which avoids the end of the project being too far off (this is often referred to as the "tunnel effect", a project with a long duration and no intermediate endpoint). A milestone could be the production of a document, the holding of a meeting, or a deliverable of the project."

Fear not though, we are back on track and will emerge into the sunlight soon.

"I am very much afraid of definitions, and yet one is almost forced to make them."

So said Robert Delauney. Isn't that link just loaded with cognitive authority?

Having now spent a few hours classifying our material, it's become all the more apparent that it's difficult to ensure cross-classifier consistency. Where one person might put a book under Community, another might argue that it should go under Green Issues & Environment. Indeed, we've already pointed out that defining the aboutness of an item is a subjective process.

So in order to ensure all volunteers and staff are classifying in a consistent manner, I think it might be an idea to develop a set of rough guidelines to tell us whether a book about art in Belfast should go under Belfast or Art & Exhibitions. Or, to use another example, to tell us whether a postcard of Delaunay's Eiffel Tower should go under Art & Exhibitions, or under Architecture.

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(Eiffel Tower, an oil painting on canvas by Robert Delaunay from 1910–11. Image from Encyclopedia Britannica)

Why Putting Your Library in Order is Like Gardening

Tomorrow, PLACE launches its new exhibition: PLACE's Garden - a programme and exhibition "focussed on ideas of local ecology, healthy, well-used cities and questioning how we engage with public space". Check out the programme of events which includes family workshops, picnics, film screenings, vertical gardening and tango lessons.

The library/garden analogy is not hard to understand. We have already spoken of the need to weed a library - just as we would a garden - in order to make way for more interesting, rare or visually attractive material. We have evaluated the resources in our garden of knowledge, considered how best to arrange them, and we have been monitoring the progress of our project, like good gardeners might.

But the garden analogy can be pushed further.

Think, for example, about the potential to find community, refreshment and stimulation in both gardens and libraries.

Consider, also, therapeutic potential. Today, The Guardian reports that James Purnell has recently been grounding himself - à la pomme de terre - by arranging his personal library. While we're not so keen on his classification scheme, we applaud the impulse.

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Image from http://www.place.uk.net/en/exhibitions-events/2009/04/30/upcoming/places-garden

Encore Un Cochon

On holiday, I came across another fine specimen of a pig: this pig money box in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. It reminded me that we need to buy or otherwise procure some things for our library project, namely:


sticky labels (for book spine labels)

cellotape (potentially) (to fix spine labels on doubly well)

shelf labels (to indicate subject areas)

We are going to beg some old cardboard boxes from the good shopkeepers of Fountain Street, and we'll use these to help us classify and organise our collection before it goes on shelves.

Can anyone think of anything else we need?

"Less is More"

The time has come to cast away stones, irrelevant publications, many dozens of duplicate leaflets, incongruous packets of pot pourri, and quite a few issues of the Ulster Tatler - whose pernicious presence in the PLACE archive continues to baffle and bewilder...

The gentleman on the right is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He had the right idea.

According to this very helpful guide to weeding by Texas State Library and Archive, there are six major benefits of weeding a collection:

1.You save space.
(Less materials = more room. This is a particularly important one for PLACE, where space is definitely limited)

2. You save the time of staff and users.
(You will not need to sort through items that are not of use in order to find what you need)

3. You make the collection more appealing.
(By discarding old and irrelevant materials you will makes the shelves look more attractive and user friendly)

4. You will enhance your library's reputation for reliability and currency and build public trust.
(A library with unreliable or obsolete materials will discourage users)

5. You will keep up with collection needs.
(Staff who weed their collection will have greater knowledge of the collection - what needs replaced, mended etc.)

6. You will have constant feedback on the collection's strengths and weaknesses.
(Better knowledge of the materials you have is going to be helpful when making decisions about future purchases. Purchasing power isn't going to be much of a consideration at PLACE, but it will certainly be useful for staff to have better knowledge of the materials they own)


So as we classify and organise, we will weed.

Although the impulse to hoard is great, we should perhaps guard against slipping into the collection development antics of this old fellow - as lovely as he was. Do any of you people remember him?



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(Photo of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Found on web here but this is likely not the source and no information is provided.)

Aboutness

Having reached consensus about the classification scheme that we're going to use (we decided to stick with the one outlined in the post below), we're moving on to consider the practicalities of how to apply this scheme to our materials.

The concept of 'aboutness' is an important one in classification, and one which we will be grappling with in the coming weeks as we try to assess the subject matter of each item in the library.

If you want to give yourself a headache, you might like to try getting your head around this article.

A couple of quotes from it are, however, permissible:

"Aboutness is one among other terms used to express certain attributes of a discourse, text or document. Aboutness is what is said in a document, what it is about, its content, subject or topic (etc.). Aboutness (or synonymous terms) is of course extremely important for knowledge organization and information retrieval."

So, 'aboutness' is important to us in deciding the broad class to which each item belongs. This decision is unavoidable because each item must be physically located somewhere. Let's remind ourselves of the classes we are using:

A - Architecture, general
B - Belfast
C - Community & Society
CN - Construction
E - Exhibitions & Arts
G - Green Issues and Environment
H - Heritage
L - Learning
P - Planning & Policy


Most of the time, there won't be much difficulty in assigning a class. A publication about arts exhibitions in the UK is about exhibitions, so we should put it the the class for Exhibitions and Arts. There isn't any sensible alternative.

However, other items may be problematic. Our Belfast by Dr Jenny Millar was published to accompany a workshop and exhibition series about children's experiences of iconic buildings in Belfast. Should this item go in Belfast or Exhibitions and Arts? It might even conceivably be placed in Learning. Deciding the subject of an item may be tricky because the decision is subjective. Here's the aboutness of this blog, according to Wordle.

It may be particularly difficult to say what an item is about if one does not have subject expertise. Since we volunteers do not have a background in architecture or a related subject, we feel slightly cowed at the thought of classifying all the material. For this reason, we have set aside a day - in a few weeks' time - when we will get together with the PLACE staff for a classification blitz, so to speak. By getting together as a team to classify the first load of materials, we'll be able to ensure that our main classes are useful and meaningful. We'll also be able to ensure classifier consistency; and we'll feel more confident about working independently on the classification once we have done it as a team and discussed it.

PLACE library Wordle

from wordle.net

(Indulge me)

Bones of a Scheme

After much discussion, we have the bones of a provisional classification scheme.

We've decided to create our own classification scheme, rather then use an established system (such as Dewey Decimal Classification or Library of Congress Classification) which would be too complex for our needs, and would require training to apply.

Our materials will be classified principally by subject, then by the form of the material (i.e. book, journal, ephemera etc), and the author's name. This will produce simple classification numbers consisting of a letter (for the subject), a number (for the format) and a cutter number (for the author's name). Decimal points will separate these elements.

Our scheme will organise materials into the following nine (provisional) main subject classes.

A - Architecture, general
B - Belfast
C - Community & Society
CN - Construction
E - Exhibitions & Arts
G - Green Issues and Environment
H - Heritage
L - Learning
P - Planning & Policy

The materials will be placed on shelves alphabetically according to the class they have been assigned. Here, we've drawn inspiration from the classification system adopted by Glasgow Women's Library who use letters which correspond to the main classes, to act as a memory aid. We liked the simplicity of this idea.

Since many of the materials are in unusual formats, materials within a class will next be organised according to their format. We hope that this will aid browsing. A number will be used to indicate whether the material is a book, a report/journal, or ephemeral.

1 - Book
2 - Journal/Report/Grey Literature
3 - Ephemera

The third element of the classification will be the cutter number, which will enable alphabetic order to be maintained within a given class, and will aid shelf placement, browsing and retrieval. Cutter numbers will not be assigned to ephemeral material as we do not believe these materials merit this level of classification. Rather, ephemera will be grouped together in browsable files at the end of every class.

The cutter number will be created by using the first three letters of the author's name. Where the author's name is not available, the first three letters of the publication's title will be used. Thus, a book by the enigmatic author Dr Field Vole will be given the cutter number VOL.

Putting this altogether, we can start applying the classification...

The book 'How Architecture Got its Hump', by the author Roger Connah, would be given the classification A.1.CON

The book 'Our Belfast' by Dr Jenny Millar would be given the classification B.1.MILL

A file with ephemeral materials relating to community will be labelled C.3

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We hope that this system will be simple enough to be used by volunteers, staff and users; but that it will also be sufficiently expressive in its ability to group similar subjects together.

Inexplicit Arts Administrators

As well as providing for the information needs of the visitors to PLACE, it seems important that we bear in mind the needs and information seeking habits of the staff at PLACE.

At some stage in the past, someone at PLACE attempted to create some order among the materials, as when we began our volunteering, we noticed that materials were already loosely grouped together in categories: Education, Exhibitions, Belfast etc. It's useful to see these categories, as they were obviously meaningful and useful to the member(s) of staff who created them.

I recently came across this study on the information behaviour of arts administrators, which is rather interesting:

The main findings of the study are (a) arts administrators do not consider information seeking to be a discrete management task, (b) they rely heavily on direct personal experience to fill their information-seeking needs, and (c) they are
“satisficers” when it comes to seeking information. The finding that arts administrators do not characteristically engage
in a formal information-seeking process to support managerial activities has important implications. These administrators
perceive themselves to be following a highly intuitive process based on personal experience or expertise to meet
their information needs, but that process has not been explicitly structured or evaluated. (Zach (2005))

I'm not convinced these findings are in any way relevant to our project. But I'm nonetheless intrigued to discover that arts administrators have an "inexplicit information-seeking style".

PLACE staff, is this you?

Either way, it must be the case that by having access to materials that are organised and easily browsable, staff will be more likely to uncover information that may assist their daily work. Again, this points to the need for an ultra-simple classification that is easily browsable.

The Three Princes of Serendip

Today I discovered that the word 'serendipity' was coined by a man called Horace Walpole who was inspired by a Persian fairytale, The Three Princes of Serendip. The Three Princes of Serendip is the story of three princes who, in their travels, were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not looking for.

In choosing a classification scheme, it seems sensible to remember that people are not likely to come to PLACE to look for highly specific information - at least, this is my presumption; but please correct me, readers, if you disagree. People looking for very specific information on architecture and the built environment are likely go directly to an academic or special library that has resources enough to cater for their research needs.

With this in mind, Chang's browsing theory seems particularly relevant to our project. According to Chang, browsing is

an examination of unknown items of potential interest by scanning or moving through an information space in order to judge the utility of the items, to learn something of interest in the item, or to satisfy curiosity about something. (p73, Theories of Information Behavior).

Chang notes that we often do not know exactly what we are looking for when we browse, and that we often alter our interests during browsing. She suggests that libraries should arrange physical layout and displays in a way that encourages enjoyable browsing (p74, Theories of Information Behavior)

Researchers have also explored the value of serendipity in libraries. Clearly, the user-friendliness of the physical library will greatly affect the possibility of finding materials and information not planned for. Björneborn (2008) observes:

... we are physical beings who like to interact with physical materials and other physical beings in physical spaces; physical library interfaces should thus be better designed with intended affordances to facilitate this interaction.
(Björneborn, Serendipity dimensions and users' information behaviour in the physical library interface)

So we are going to focus on choosing or creating a simple classification scheme which is easy to browse and understand. In so doing hope to find that serendiptous browsing can indeed lead to serendiptous learning.

Wrangling with Classification

Many hours of leaflet lifting, subject sifting, post-it pasting and book baiting later, we have reached saturation point .

We have now a pretty solid idea of the subject matter of the materials at PLACE, have been able to zoom out and start to consider appropriate classification schemes.

As Broughton suggests in Essential Classification, different schemes have characteristics which make them better suited to particular types of collections, materials and users (Broughton, p288). She lists the subject of the collection; the intellectual level of the content; the format of the materials; the people available to do the classifying; the subject tools and services required; and the users of the collection, as questions of particular importance (Broughton, p288).

It seems worth reflecting on our own set of circumstances before making decisions about the classification.

So here we go.

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The Subject of the Collection: We have a small collection of materials relating to architecture, the built environment, planning, landscape, community, environment, Belfast, heritage, education, recreational activites, and the arts generally.

The Level of the Material: While some of the materials at PLACE may only be intelligible and interesting to people with a prior knowledge of architecture, most of the collection would be of interest to people with only a casual interest in architecture and the work of PLACE. Very broadly speaking, the materials are not overly complex and intellectual. The vocabulary of the documents is not particularly technical and detailed; and the subjects are not overly complicated in terms of content analysis. Therefore, our classification scheme does not need the ability to express very complex subject content.

The Format: The material is in unusual formats and includes much report literature and ephemeral material. So there probably needs to be some way of expressing these different forms.

The Classifiers: The experience of the staff who will be doing the classifying has a significant impact on the choice of scheme. This is a small organisation, relying on volunteers with limited classification experience to do the classification. It is also desirable that the permanent staff of PLACE and any future volunteers can be easily trained to classify material. Some classification schemes are easier to apply than others. Whatever we choose, it needs to be very easy to apply.

Since this is a special collection, copying classification data from the OPAC of another special collection (such as the OPAC of the Royal Institute of British Architects) is a possibility. However, we would then have to accept their choice of classification and all the decisions they make about the treatment of particular items. We should also remember that no other library is going to have all the ephemeral resources that PLACE has. The main advantage of copy cataloguing is therefore lost.

Subject Access Tools:
This is probably a minor consideration for the PLACE library as browsing, rather than retrieval, is the main purpose of the classification. We do not need a particularly expressive notation because we do not need a detailed breakdown of resources such as that which might be required for people conducting research.

The Users: This is not a research library. PLACE aims "to act as a focus for education, information sharing and debate on aspects of the built environment, targeting both the general public and those who have a role in developing the built environment" (my emphasis). In order to make the materials accessible to general public, simplicity and usability of the scheme take the greatest priority. The filing order of the system needs to be simple and brevity of notation is important. Whether or not we volunteers decide that we should try and create a catalogue, the reality is that most users will probably never use it and will rely on the collocation of items to find what they need.

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Sheesh. That turned into a bit of an essay, didn't it?

Anyway. Some food for thought maybe.

Pigs and Periodicals

Pigs and Periodicals

Today and we are continuing with our ongoing survey of the materials held at PLACE. Delving deeper and deeper into the shelves and storeroom of PLACE. Well, actually, the shelves aren't that deep but the storeroom is. The material that we have come across is varied. The miscellaneous make up of the material is a huge plus point. This is not, however, without its own problems as the diversity of the material may be likely to pose later problems when we come to draw up a broad classification system that will encompass its wide ranging subject matter. Equally varied are the genres of material; there are books, periodicals, pamphlets, official government publications, leaflets and advertising snippets.

Yesterday we discovered a number of architecture and design magazines and periodicals, including Architecture: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland, Multi Magazine and Living Design. We also came across a huge bundle of backdated Ulster Tattlers, not for inclusion in the proposed library. This has raised two very, very, very important questions: (1) why are journal sub-titles so long and (2) have you ever read the Tattler outside of your dentist waiting room? Answers on a postcard please for these.

I, particularly, was attracted to one newsletter with the rather unique title, "The Wee Can: The Community Arts Newsletter for Northern Ireland" (Summer, 2008). Produced by the Community Arts Forum, the cover image of the work was a piece of sculpture in Alley Theatre in Strabane, which has been affectionately nicknamed as "Ambrose the Pig" (see image above). The sculpture (entitled "Where Dreams Go" (2008)) is by Martin Heron, commemorates the Strabane Pork Market (held in the town in the 1950s) and is awash with Celtic symbolism. It is also said to believed to be a wishing pig. Place your finger in one of the Celtic swirls, follow the lines and all your dreams will come true. In the midst of the credit crunch, I would say taking a trot down to Ambrose and making a wish may not be a bad idea. Never mind the swine flu! With all this free publicity, I should really be sponsored by Strabane District Council!!

The sculpture, while undoubtedly cute and quirky, is an reminder of how important and possible it is to utilise art, architecture and public spaces in the creation of focal points for remembering, in order to serve as a useful source of tourism and to create something beautiful and stimulating that we can share. This is the kind of work that is of interest to architecture and built environment centres such as PLACE and will form an important component of its expanding library.

Next we will decide upon the classification system that the PLACE library should use. More of this anon. Stay posted.