Reflections on the challenges faced in cataloging "things" in the library, and the importance of using controlled vocabulary.
As many public libraries are finding, a key element to remaining relevant in today’s society is to offer much more than books for people to borrow. "Libraries loaning 'stuff' isn’t a new concept. Framed paintings were available for checkout at the Newark (N.J.) Public Library back in 1904. 'Libraries were sharing before sharing was cool,' says Miguel Figueroa, director of the American Library Association’s Center for the Future of Libraries. As the sharing economy continues to swell, nontraditional collections become more pervasive, community-specific, and imaginative" (Mead, 2017). Whether donated by community members or purchased by grants, "Library of Things" are popping up in public libraries across the country. Sometimes the "Things" are tools used for crafting, home and yard work, etc.; sometimes musical instruments or items of technology. In our case, we chose to catalog science/technology kits for children of all ages.
For the libraries that circulate these items, they are extremely popular; however the main issue that we ran into when cataloging our "Library of Things" items was the lack of examples to use for copy cataloging. Within the examples we did find, the language employed to describe the items varied greatly. If we, as librarians, had trouble locating libraries that offered "Library of Things" for circulation, and then had difficulty finding the records for them in the online catalogs, I imagine that a typical user may never discover the possibility of checking out these items. By adapting or customizing an existing controlled vocabulary, we were able to assign subject terms that will make our science tool kits easier for users to locate in an online catalog.
Controlled vocabulary is selected lists of terms and phrases that are used to populate metadata elements. "Language is hardly a precise method of communication. Often, a concept can be expressed in a multitude of different ways (e.g. 'retrieve,' 'search,' or 'query'), and unless there is some mechanism to recognize them as pointing to the same concept, interpretation of words to their intended meaning can be rather difficult. In order to reduce such ambiguity in interpretation, some information retrieval systems employ the use of 'controlled vocabulary', a set of agreed-on terms that represent specific concepts, thereby reducing the number of possible values for meaning. Controlled vocabulary can be used to generate a list of preferred terms as tags representing key concepts of documents” (Yang, 2005).
The goal in using controlled vocabulary is to make the retrieval of resources and information through searches more efficient. Controlled vocabulary reduces ambiguity in language and helps to ensure data consistency. When deciding on the subject terms we would use to describe our kits, there were a few things we needed to keep in mind:
The aim of catalogers should be to create a controlled vocabulary that works universally, for all items. The determination of subject headings is just part of the process of maintaining standardized and consistent forms used in catalogues, but once subject headings have been determined for a particular type of item, the work of cataloging "Library of Things" items or kits will become much faster, more economical, and universally consistent. There are many vocabulary sources and tools available and there are various ways in which they can be implemented. We chose to both customize an existing vocabulary and develop our own, because we were cataloging a combination of tools, books, and media items as a kit. Through maintaining and continuously updating the controlled vocabulary for items, and eventually having enough examples for other public libraries to copy catalog records, the proper forms of controlled vocabulary will allow for easier access of "Library of Things" items to be retrieved by library patrons.
