LIS 5703 Subjects Paper

Nathaniel Finley
LIS 5703 Subjects paper
For Doctor Michelle Kazmer
December 10, 2009


Part I
A.
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot is a do-it-yourself manual for Volkswagen repair. It describes basic repair and complete overhaul of systems as well as periodic maintenance procedures for various VW models.
This edition is a special 25th Anniversary edition. There is an introduction by the author’s wife which describes the author’s life philosophy, and a photo collection of the author and his family.
The book is also about the author’s philosophy of life, which is an approach to living and problem solving that is representative of the 1960’s counter-culture.

B.
The likely audience for this book is VW owners who want to maintain and repair their vehicles themselves. It is more useful for amateur rather than professional mechanics, since the book presents tips and procedures for working on tight budgets without specialty tools.
Two unlikely audiences for this book are scholars of the 1960’s counter culture and people who are interested in “dropping out” of established society. This is due to the author’s use of the manual as a means for describing an alternative lifestyle and approach to living which is outside of the world of capitalism and careers.

C.
Derived:
John Muir
John Muir Volkswagen or (Volkswagen)
John Muir (not naturalist)
Tosh Gregg (“other author”)
Peter Aschwanden (illustrator)
Volkswagen Maintenance
Volkswagen Repair
Do-it-yourself
Repair manuals
Volkswagen art
John Muir Publications
Volkswagen—Santa Fe, New Mexico
Books—Anniversary Editions

Supplied:
1960s counterculture—history
1960s counterculture—philosophy

Part II
A.
Volkswagen repair/Volkswagen Maintenance
Do-it-yourself Volkswagen
“How do I _____ my Volkswagen?”
Volkswagen home repair manuals
Volkswagen maintenance manuals
John Muir family
John Muir Publications
Volkswagen—Santa Fe, New Mexico
Volkswagen art
Collectible items
Special editions
Volkswagen counter culture manuals


B.
I.
I decided to use Google for the search engine because of the popularity of this item and the various ways that it can be used. I found the following:
a. A search for “John Muir” returns results for the naturalist or derivatives of that name (eg, “John Muir Elementary School”) exclusively throughout the first 10 pages of results, with the one exception of a “muirjohn” on twitter who is listed on the 10th page as a communications advisor for the city of Edmonton.

b. A search for “John Muir Volkswagen” returns results on the first five pages exclusively for the author of my item with one exception. On page three there is the first result which looks to have no connection to the author of my item. This one item also happened to download a virus to my computer.
On page seven is the first listing for learning about John Muir the naturalist while driving a Volkswagen (there are a number of sites such as this since many VW lovers are also nature lovers. “Retracing John Muir’s footsteps” is the title of this site).

c. According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir_(Volkswagen) the author of my item is a descendent of John Muir the naturalist. However, there is no further evidence of this assertion and the wiki article cites no source.

d. Searches for “How do I fix my Volkswagen?” and “Do-it-yourself Volkswagen” did not return any mention of my item on any result in the first three pages of either search. Most of these results were for discussion forums.

e. Under search “Volkswagen Repair Manual” the seventh item returned was my item from Amazon.com. These results were useful for finding Volkswagen repair manuals of all sorts.

f. Search for “Volkswagen Repair Manual Special Editions” returned a “30th Anniversary Edition” of my item on the first page of results.

g. A search for “Volkswagen counter culture manuals” returned hits for my item (thought not for any specific edition of my item) or the author of my item throughout the first page beginning with result number 2. Five of the ten results on the first page where for my item or my item’s author.

h. A search for “John Muir not naturalist” brought back the following website in position number two: http://www.sierraclub.org/JOHN_MUIR_EXHIBIT/frameindex.html?http://www.sierraclub.org/JOHN_MUIR_EXHIBIT/people/otherjohn.html
The title of this page is “Other John Muirs” and the third one on my list was the author of my item.

II.
I decided to look at JSTOR with the express purpose of trying to find mention of a connection between the author of my item and John Muir the naturalist. I quickly realized that in JSTOR there is no “subject” search possible. Default search is “full text” and there are also options for “author” “item title” “abstract” and “caption”. All results here are with the default “full text” search, which I know from experience sometimes provides incomplete results.
a. search for “John Muir” returned first page results (25 total) for John Muir the naturalist.
b. search for “John Muir” AND “Volkswagen” returned 71 results. I didn’t look through them all but only the very first result on the first page had direct relevance to my item, an article called “Independent Publishing: Today and Yesterday” (Muir published his book himself).
c. search for “John Muir” NOT “nature” NOT “environment returned 23 of 25 results on the first page explicitly for John Muir the naturalist. Nothing for my item.
d. under “Volkswagen” AND “repair manuals” 21 results were returned, none explicitly
for my item but five item titles were concerned with the history of technology or pollution/transportation issues (which to me means that they might mention my item).
e. under “Volkswagen” AND “counter culture” AND “repair manuals” 13 results were returned none of which mention my item in their reference pages although one treats the issue of technology and culture (“The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other” by Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker).

C.
Woldcat search:
1. Under subject search “John Muir” the first page did not return my item. Five items were explicitly related to John Muir the naturalist and five were obliquely or not at all related to the naturalist.
2. Under subject search “John Muir” AND “Volkswagen” the first ten results are editions of my item.
3. On the first page of results for subject searches “John Muir” NOT “environmentalist” (or “naturalist”) four results explicitly reference John Muir the naturalist (one is even authored by him). No mention of my item in the first 5 pages of results (but plenty of mention of John Muir the naturalist).
4. On the first page of results for subject search “Volkswagen Repair Manual” 7 of the 10 results were for Chilton repair manuals and only 1 (number 8) was my item.
5. Under search “Volkswagen” AND “manuals” AND “counter culture” 1 item is returned title “Classic Commercials of the 50s and 60s: volume 47”.


D.
Under LC subject heading “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc” 6 of the first 10 items were my item. Three were for Chilton’s manual and one was for an unfamiliar repair manual specifically for VW Golfs, Jettas and Cabriolets. The 10th listing was my specific edition (16th) although there is no mention of it as a “special edition” or “anniversary edition” anywhere in the listing.

E.
All of the first page results except for the VW Golf, Jetta and Cabriolet manual descriptors have only one descriptor: “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”. The manual for Golfs, Jettas and Cabriolets include three further descriptors: “Volkswagen Cabriolet automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”, “Golf automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”, “Jetta automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”.

However, following the link to author: “Muir, John 1918-” (still no correction for his death), 44 results return including a book on VW rabbits called How to keep your Volkswagen alive: or, Poor Richard's Rabbit book : being a manual of step-by-step procedures for the compleat idiot : Rabbit, U.S. Golf & Scirocco, the complexities thereof/ which is “Based on How to keep your Volkswagen alive, 1st ed., by John Muir (from the “notes” on the records page).” This item does not list as a descriptor “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc” but only “Rabbit automobile”.

The descriptor results for my item limit my information about the item. Only having one descriptor is like having a dead end. It is interesting that 60% of the items returned under this descriptor are for my item—it is somehow a unique item. Also, that there is a work whose title incorporates the words “Poor Richard’s Rabbit Book” into the original title for my item gives a clue as to the type of manual my item is: a do-it-yourself manual for non-professionals with limited funds.

Part III
A.
For reasons that will be apparent please see below. In brief, Google was far more helpful to me in locating this particular item and information about it and its author than was either Worldcat FirstSearch, Worldcat.org (which was better than Worldcat FirstSearch) or JSTOR (which was unhelpful in trying to find out particularly if my author was related to John Muir the naturalist as Wikipedia claimed he was).


B.
Introduction
In discussing the subject categories of my item and the relevant authority control issues associated with these categories I want to focus on three issues which this item raises for the cataloger and the searcher. First, how to distinguish between authors with the same name, particularly when one author of the same name is relatively obscure and the other author is very well known (even internationally recognized, as in my case). Included in this issue is the issue of how a user can ascertain whether or not two authors of the same name are related (as in my case, a very interesting question considering the older John Muir is a well known naturalist/individualist philosopher and the younger John Muir is a ‘hippy’ philosopher preaching a do-it-yourself mentality).
The second issue to be addressed is how a user can find information or a location for a special edition item. My item is a 25th Anniversary Edition with photos and an introduction by the author’s wife. There us no mention in Worldcat of this work as significant or unique from other editions.
The third issue is how to locate this item as a work of cultural significance. This issue is evident from the disparate results returned between Google and Worldcat/JSTOR when the item was searched for using the identifiers “Volkswagen manual counter culture” or derivatives thereof. Neither Worldcat FirstSearch nor JSTOR returned results which led to my item, whereas Google returned 1 out of every 2 results with references to my item or its author.
Issue 1
In my searches of Worldcat and JSTOR I was unable to effectively isolate John Muir, the author of my work, from John Muir the famous naturalist without adding the term “Volkswagen” to the search. My attempts at excluding John Muir the naturalist (or other appropriate descriptors) from my results list by using the Boolean designator “NOT” (as in “John Muir” NOT “Naturalist”) not only did not result in any returns of my item but also did not result in excluding John Muir the naturalist, who remained the predominant subject of the returned results.
One way to overcome this complaint that has been proposed in the scientific community is to assign individual authors an ID (AID) code. This system was proposed
by Farrokh Habidzadeh and Mahboobeh Yadollahie (2009) in their paper “The Problem of Who.” Not only would such a system aid in the assessment of any particular author’s contribution to science (particularly in the international community where there are multiple spellings for one name and multiple individuals with the same name), but the author’s also argue that “in this way, the key for search of digital databases would be the researcher's AID rather than name (p. 61).” Such a system—though practical in theory—is impractical in implementation on the popular level because it would require one coordinated system of ID’s for every author that has been, is, or will be searchable, and an awareness of such ID’s on the part of the public.
Issue 2
In cataloging systems with controlled vocabulary (authority control) there is no known method of recovering the specific edition (“16th Edition” or “25th Anniversary Edition”) of my item if one does not know the exact edition or that such an Anniversary Edition exists, unless the cataloger has entered this parameters in the descriptive fields (which the LCSH catalogers have not included as part of these headings). At issue here is what is called exhaustivity (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, pp. 310-313). The catalogers for my item decided that specifying the particulars of each edition or of special editions was unnecessary for this item.
Issue 3

Conceptual Connections and Information Poverty
There is a large disparity between information results in popular information environments (such as the internet) and professional information environments (professional KOS’s such as Worldcat FirstSearch of the Library of Congress). This disparity does not appear to be growing less severe, but more severe. It is not only that the popular information environment is growing at an exponential rate while the professional information environment is hindered by formalities and personnel issues. There is an essential difference in the type and quality of information returned in both environments. Understanding and exploiting these differences is becoming one of the most important keys to proficient information access services, however, as of the date of this paper there is little formal discussion focused on conceptualizing or enunciating these differences—specifically in the realm of subject description and authority control—even if there is a great deal of discussion on ways to exploit these differences. What this situation leaves us with is a deficit of approaches in conceptualizing these disparities.
The professional information environment is facing an information revolution. The internet is “democratizing” information in a way in which the traditional information profession was unable (though willing and trying) to do. However, the information revolution is not a “revolution” against the traditional information environment as such. The public is not “revolting” against an “elite” regime of tyrannical librarians who hold the keys to information access. Rather the public is fundamentally renegotiating its attitude towards information, and this renegotiation involves not only the way in which information is organized and retrieved but also the very physical space of traditional information access. In “The Library is Dead, Long Live the Library! The Practice of Academic Librarianship and the Digital Revolution”, for example, authors Lyman Ross and Pongracz Sennyeyb argue that among the many other challenges presented to the academic libraries of university campuses which “still operate under the assumption that their physical location is critical,” the reality is that “their placement on campus is progressively less important” in the age of digital technology (p. 146).” The authors also note that patron use of the physical library has drastically changed: “they (patrons) are buying coffee in our cafes, reading e-mail on our terminals, socializing with friends, or using group studies.” They are “are not using library resources or services (p. 146).”
With so much on their plates as a result of the digital/information revolution, it is no wonder that librarians and information professionals have not had the time to address some of the most demanding concerns regarding information organization and retrieval. Nevertheless these concerns are blatant and, for many users, intuitively obvious—demonstrated by the types of cultural shifts which Ross and Sennybab describe. The large disparities in information results which are received on searches in Google and Worldcat FirstSearch demonstrate that there is a type of information poverty being made apparent on the part of the professional information environment which is not a characteristic of the public domain, and yet there have been few attempts to treat some of the most underlying causes of this poverty at the point of authority control, let alone at defining the symptoms.
How do we measure information wealth? It is fine to argue that Worldcat has made libraries wealthier through its efforts and successes at international cataloging coordination. That is true. But libraries are still paupers compared to the internet when it comes to finding and realizing advanced forms of information connections particularly in the cultural domain. When it comes to authority control, it is the connections between subject headings and other descriptive fields which are poverty ridden in traditional KOS’s , relative, that is, to internet search engines.
My item is a case in point. A simple Google search for “Volkswagen manuals counter culture” returned 5 out of 10 results for my item. A .500 batting average in baseball is unheard of; in the world of information literacy I would think it indicates dead-on accuracy. According to Google, therefore, the description that I used for my book is shared by the general public. Yet Worldcat and JSTOR do not even register my item when I search them with the same descriptors. How is Google able to achieve conceptual, cultural, and informational connections which professional information sources are unable to facilitate, and what are the implications for this phenomena on our information organization tactics as a society?

Authority Control
The issue here is exactly the issue of authority control, or more precisely, what is called “the authority record”. Taylor and Joudrey (2009) define an authority record as “a compilation of metadata about a person, a family, a corporate body, a place, a work, or a subject. It includes evidence of all the decisions made and all the relationships among variants that have been identified (p. 252).” The difference between results which are generated by search engines such as Google and those which are retrieved using databases such as Worldcat Firstsearch is that Worldcat uses authority records which are independent from and exist outside of the parameters and particularly the results of any given search. This record is called an authority file (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, p. 254).
For search engines such as Google, however, the search results effectively are the authority file. There is no alternative authority exterior to the search results themselves, and each search generates a relatively unique set of results. In “Google and Beyond: Information Retrieval on the World Wide Web,” Richard Northedge (2007) describes the process by which Google arrives at search results. Because each search engine company’s particular method of arriving at search results are proprietary and secret, we can only know how Google arrives at its results through deduction, even with the assistance of Google’s results explanation pages. The way most search engines function, Northedge explains,
is to break down the page into its individual elements, usually down to word level, and to examine and cross-reference each of those elements. Significance is usually attached to the position of the element, with words in titles and subheadings often given more weight than those in ordinary body text (p. 194).
Google, however, utilizes an extra capacity for creating a page ranking hierarchy which is achieved through an algorithmic formula. This algorithm— known as “PageRank”—
relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’ (p. 194).
Google’s results, in other words, are a direct result of calculations based upon a user-created authority structure: the more popular the page is, the higher it is placed on the results list for any given search parameters. The authority of Google search results derive from the users, not from an exterior authority source created by an isolated group of individuals.
There are countless criticisms of the search engine system. Hunter R. Rawlings III (2007), who served as president of Cornell University during the years which saw the rise of Google, pointed to a number of the most bothersome faults in search engine technology (and of the internet as information source in general) in an address at the 151st ARL Membership Meeting in Washington DC on October 10, 2007. Pointing out that the system by which search engines operate attempts to strike a balance between “popularity and relevance”, Rawlings described the type of information retrieval that one can often experience using Google: “The result is that those pursuing knowledge on the Web tend to follow a "vein" of information leading along a narrow track, a track created by ‘measures of authority.’” And yet, ironically, those are the same words that could be applied to the Worldcat descriptor headings of my item, which was, namely, one: “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”. This ‘vein’ of information led me to a dead end (since the descriptor link led me back almost exclusively to the item). Google, on the other hand, produced results which indicated that, via the balance of “popularity and relevance”, the top 5 out of 10 websites agree that How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot is more than just a “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc” item. It is also a culturally distinct and significant artifact of the 1960’s generation. And that is not even to say that the other 5 results disagree.

Revolutionary Authority Control: A Lack of Literature
Hunter Rawlings’ analysis of internet information gathering leading us down a narrow track might be a relevant analysis for some items, but not for mine. In fact, I experienced just the opposite: traditional sources were narrow in their description and revolutionary sources were just that: revolutionary. One of the problems in approaching these disparities is that information professionals and scholars currently have no definitive manner of addressing them. A search on the “Library Literature and Information Full Text” database, for example, for such terms as “authority control, information, revolution” (or various manifestations of these terms); “Google, Worldcat”; “authority control, democratization, information”; and a number of other parameters meant to get at the heart of this issue resulted in next to nothing. A search for “democratization, information” on LibLit yielded the most promising results, but then only 33, none of which mention authority control. Am I using the wrong search parameters? Am I the only one who has faced the issue of the disparities between popular and professional cataloging results? Perhaps we are waiting for the dam to break.
What is at stake in the conflict between popular and professional information organization is exactly the issue of “authority”, as in “authority control”. Taylor and Joudrey (2009) point out that “the concepts of authority and control in a culture with an emphasis on individualism are not readily welcome (pp. 249-250),” but despite the arguments for the need for authority control professional librarians are being forced to take stock in the fact that “popular relevance” information sources such as Google offer up-to-date reflections of info org trends which are just not possible under the current authority control practices of information institutions such as the Library of Congress.
When we discuss “authority control” we inevitably come up against the notion of “controlled vocabulary”, and it is exactly these two notions which are being challenged by the information revolution. In a recent article called “Term selection: the key to successful indexing”, Zhang Qiyu (2009) reviews the golden rules of term selection for indexers creating catalog entries:
Choose your terms well, with respect for what's in the document and for the needs of the user. Identify the relevant, exclude the superfluous, spot the unsaid, make the connections, order it all in such a way as to catch the users attention and you will have achieved your goal: the creation of an index that will take users easily and directly to the information they are seeking from whatever the point at which they begin the search (p. 100).
The process Qiyu describes is a process which is more akin to art than science. Indeed, at the beginning of the article Qiyu refers to the “document or document collection” as the “indexer’s canvas” (p. 98). Nor is Qiyu unique in using an artistic analogy. Enid Zafran (2009) compares indexing to “power walking” in “Power Wording or How to Get Umph into Your Keywords”, and even an article such as Fred Leise’s (2008) “Controlled Vocabularies, an Introduction”, which treats controlled vocabularies as a science of “taxonomy”, cannot resist the urge to include poetic sentences such as: “Once a controlled vocabulary has been created, it cannot just be shelved and forgotten. It becomes a living thing which must be tended and cared for (p. 126).”
Traditionally, controlled vocabularies and authority control have been viewed as a service to the user, creating what Joe Matthews (2000) calls “consistent vocabulary, thus reducing extraneous or false retrievals or ‘noise’ (online resource).” In an era of “information scarcity” (as Michael Jensen refers to the decades—even centuries—before the digital revolution) such vocabularies served a specific and useful purpose. However, in an age of “information abundance” (Jensen 2008, p. 298) users question the validity of information authority which cannot deliver up-to-date and self-aware descriptors or classifications of items. The problem is made all the more acute when it is realized that what was at one time considered to be a science is really no more than a complex form of subjective decision making whose core functions resemble artistic creativity rather than scientific precision. In an environment where Google search results provide more open-ended and creative avenues of discovery, the “authority” of authority control is becoming more and more unwieldy and dismiss-able.


Conclusion
Until professional information catalogers find a method of conceptualizing and treating the information disparities which are evident between traditional and revolutionary KOS’s, amateur and even professional information seekers will continue to use general search engines as their go-to source for information selection. Libraries and traditional cataloging schemes will be used to find physical objects, but not to find the kind of nuanced, unique, and heuretic connections that many users find to be the most enriching aspects of research. When we approach the issue of “authority 2.0” (to adapt Jensen’s terminology) from the perspective of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot, there are a number of causes for concern for the future validity of authority control. Information organization which is vested in the hands of a small group of elite artist-types who have neither the broad specialization nor the capacity to deliver conceptions of cultural artifacts which reflect users’ needs in an up-to-date fashion is hardly “authority”, and it is to the credit of the librarian community that so much of the literature is focused on implementing new technology into the information landscape rather than preserving older and more traditional information organization paradigms. In this way libraries have been able to avoid the association of “authority” with “tyranny” when it comes to information retrieval, but they have not yet completely dodged the mounting suspicion of irrelevance.

Addendum
In a very useful article entitled “‘Have You Searched Google Yet?’ Using Google as a Discovery Tool for Cataloging,” Jennifer Lang (2007) argues that Google and other search engines are an excellent way for librarians to find information about an item which is incompletely presented to the cataloger (due to damage such as no book cover, partial presentation such as receiving a DVD or CD with no cover, etc. Lang also cites Google’s archive of cached websites and Google’s translation tool as useful for catalogers). Lang conducted an informal survey of professional librarians and found that of those responding to the survey “under the age of 40, almost 95% reported using Google in their cataloging, while a little over 85% of the catalogers over 40 reported the same (p. 8).” “Many respondents consider Google important for authority work,” Lang concludes, “and others reported using Google for the same reasons I do, including its translation and caching functions (p. 8).”
Lang’s experience is that Google helps her to supplement her information about any given item and thus helps her to properly catalog that item. My argument is that Google helps us to conceptualize an item in revolutionary and popular ways. Google aids the cataloger in achieving a greater degree of what Taylor and Joudrey refer to as “depth indexing (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, p. 310).” While Lang’s article and my comments to it are still “practical application” discussions, they at least take us closer toward discovering a meaningful way to discuss one of the most significant challenges to the librarian profession that has presented itself during these early years of the digital/information revolution.



Works Cited
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