Use the basic concepts and principles related to the selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation of physical and digital information items

Introduction

Information organizations must properly manage their collections so they can continue to serve their users’ needs. Time is short and contemporary expectations are rising for what can be accomplished by individuals every day (SEE: “hustle culture” [Mescali, n.d.]). If collections cannot keep up with this pace, users will go elsewhere for their information needs. However, some organizations like academic libraries have an obligation to remain relevant; in a study done on doctoral students in Malaysia (Yousaf et al., 2016), one of their worst stressors was anxiety over whether or not their libraries were equipped to support their scholarly obligations.

The four aspects to collection management are selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation.

During selection, an item will be judged qualified before it joins the collection. Outside of principle requirements like how current, appropriate, or intellectual the content is, a necessary consideration would be if it was also open access.

Evaluating a collection involves information professionals (IPs) deciding what stays or goes. A common dilemma is whether or not to discard books banned by other organizations.

Organizing a collection involves putting items in relation to each other in a way that helps users retrieve them more readily. In digital collections, this involves using metadata and an encoding scheme to enable a broad range of search features.

Preservation is to maintain content usability. This is a critical issue when analog text items are converted to digital files.

Selection

Epictetus (108 CE) said “… nothing is acquired for free, and necessarily must cost us something.” So “open access” does not mean “free”, when resources were spent to make, format, and maintain this openly available content. Deciding on items or entire catalogues to buy or subscribe to, information organizations could opt for open access alternatives first. Not only do they save money, organizations will also participate in and support open access models.

Evaluation

Because the American Library Association (ALA) has a page dedicated to decrying censorship of “Banned and Challenged Books” (ALA, n.d.), it is best practice for IPs to also champion intellectual freedom by not deleting such content from their collections solely due to their controversial status. Instead, while evaluating what to keep, IPs should examine their users’ needs and discard only items with content that no longer serve them, for example: outdated texts and maps.

Organization

A well-organized collection makes it easier for users and IPs to retrieve the items they need. For digital collections, this could involve using encoding schemas and metadata derived from a controlled vocabulary so items can be ordered and related to each other. This way, search features can be multi-faceted, where users can use keywords or full-text searches together with browsing lists and recommendations.

Preservation

Collection preservation is not simply ensuring that items, physical or digital, survive deterioration over time, but that their contents are continually converted to the formats users need. With much of the world gone digital, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the predominant process to convert physical texts to digital. Though available software is not yet perfect, an acceptable error rate for OCR is 1-2% (Holley, 2009), so with some manual editing that can lead to teaching the OCR programs to make less mistakes, large-scale transcription projects are still feasible.

Evidence

INFO 220 – Resource and Information Services: Digital Humanities – Subject Discussion: Open Access

This was a discussion post on Open Access for INFO 220, Resource and Information Services. I started by defining “open access” as not “free”, because people produced, formatted, and maintained structures that store the information that just so happens to be available to users with no extra charge to them. Then I examined how support for sustaining open access models will rise over time because it is in certain organizations’ interests to give access to their copyrighted materials free-of-charge. I gave two examples: contractual conditions with accepting endowments, and businesses able to offer free basic-level services by charging advertisers to sell on their webpages.

Cost is an important consideration when selecting items and services for a collection. Not only will it save the information organization money to provide open access options, but it will also support businesses, institutions, publishers, and content creators as they collaborate to take down paywalls.

This discussion post is evidence I understand what “open access” means, and how such items/subscriptions’ inclusion in a collection can benefit the information organization, users, and vendors.

INFO 210 – Reference and Information Services – Sharing Post: Banned Books

This was a discussion post on Banned Books for INFO 210, Reference and Information Services. I mentioned hoping to write one myself, then reviewed the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom’s website dedicated to “Banned and Challenged Books”. This resource had annual top-10 lists going back to the year 2000, with books under categories like “Children’s Books” or “Books with Diverse Content”.

In evaluating a collection, the highest authority an IP should comply with is their users’ needs. The best information environment for a user is one that defends their right to intellectual freedom, and deleting content based on someone else’s moral ideals works opposite to that.

This discussion post is evidence I understand how important it is for IPs to consider carefully the value of content in their collections and discard only what no longer serves user needs, not because it had offended someone.

INFO 246 – Information Architecture – Critique Assignment: an online secondhand bookstore

I filled out a heuristics table and critiqued an online secondhand bookstore for INFO 246, Information Architecture. In the critique portion I highlighted the website’s features that had contributed to the findability of its catalog/collection. As shown at the top of the table, I had searched for three authors. Though I had given the findability heuristic a 7/10, it was because the last one returned results that were too cluttered at the top by one title. However, this was a result of my query, not because of the items’ metadata or the catalog’s encoding schema.

A collection has failed if their items take too much effort to retrieve, or cannot be found at all. This online secondhand bookstore employed browseable categories and a basic search whose results can be refined by a number of facets. This shows the site is organized at a high level where, as my assessment of just the basic search has shown, the biggest problem I ran into was how the results returned too much of one thing.

This heuristics table and critique are evidence that I know how to assess if a collection is organized to a standard that meets user needs, and if it is not where improvements could be made.

INFO 220 – Resource and Information Services: Digital Humanities – Subject Discussion: Electronic texts, OCR, and Errors

This was a discussion post concerning electronic texts, OCR, and errors for
INFO 220, Resource and Information Services. As mentioned earlier, the most advanced OCR programs in 2009 had an error rate low enough that a team working on a large-scale digitization project can log errors for the program to learn better. The example I provided was Strange et al.’s (2014) case study of how it took only two computer scientists and a digital humanist a few years to complete the transcription of the Walworth murder project.

The murder project is a good example of collection preservation. In 2003, over 400 newspaper accounts on the Walworth case was transferred from microfilm to paper, and in 2012 a research grant allowed the digitization project to move forward. By then, the collection, with text on paper and images on PDF, had become too unwieldy for users to manage.

This discussion post is evidence I understand how OCR contributes to collection preservation, and how with each project the programs used are improved for the next.

Conclusion

Due to each aspect of collection management –selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation- requiring multiple steps to execute properly, each information organization must establish a collection development policy that will be revised regularly as technological advancements and social trends evolve user needs. An inadequately managed collection could do worse than become irrelevant; it will have abandoned users who by association relied on the quality and retrievability of the content. In future, I will regularly survey my users, be they colleagues or library patrons, about the difficulties they have or feel may appear in collections I manage.

Reference

ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom. (n.d.). Banned and challenged books. American Library Association. Retrieved October 20, 2022, from https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks

Epictetus. (108 CE). Enchiridon. (Arrian, Ed.)

Holley, R. (March/April 2009). How good can it get? Analysing and improving OCR accuracy in large scale historic newspaper digitisation programs. D-Lib Magazine, 15(3/4). https://doi.org/10.1045/march2009-holley

Mascali, M. (n.d.). Hustle culture: How “every day I’m hustling” became a mantra. Monster. https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/what-is-hustle-culture

Strange, C., McNamara, D., Wodak, J., & Wood, I. (2014). Mining for the meanings of a murder: The impact of OCR quality on the use of digitized historical newspapers. Digital Humanities Quarterly; Providence. 8(1).

Yousaf, S.U., Usman, B., & Akram, M. (2017). Exploring the causes of stress and coping with it amongst doctoral level students: Highlighting the importance of information collection and management. Pakistan Journal of Information Management & Libraries, 18(2), 19-39. Retrieved October 21, 2022, from http://journals.pu.edu.pk/journals/index.php/pjiml/article/view/1095/580

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