New Directions in Information Organization

摘要

This book discusses current trends in the field of information organisation, with an emphasis on those occurring in the library sector. It is divided into three sections, which cover the three main areas of innovation: linked data, social tagging and next-generation catalogues. In the opening chapter, Sharon Yang and Yan Yi Lee describe how the new cataloguing code, Resource Description and Access (RDA), is aligned to the Resource Description Framework and the Semantic Web standards. The benefit of this alignment is not discussed in detail, however. The following chapter is a similar advocacy for RDA, as one might expect from its author, namely, Barbara Tillett of the Library of Congress and the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA. A little later in the book, Ziyoung Park and Heejung Kim make the case for linked data more broadly, outlining how libraries have begun to generate it. Nevertheless, Park and Kim admit that "in the current stage, we can't experience directly the possibilities that linked data possess". Perhaps the most interesting paper in the first section, though, is from Alan Poulter, who discusses the Functional Requirements of Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) model. He suggests that PRECIS (the indexing system implemented at the British Library in the 1970s and 1980s) would be a good candidate as a "test" vocabulary. With the related models of FRBR and FRAD now well established, there are signs that the knowledge organisation community is beginning to turn its attention to FRSAD, arguably a more challenging abstraction.