ETL505- Describing and Analysing Education Resources- Assignment 2 Part C

This subject, in which I have investigated a wide range of ideas and issues related to cataloguing, with a particular emphasis on school libraries, has fostered my understanding of information organisation as a broad field. In reflection, I endeavour to consider how the content learned has built on my prior knowledge and experience (The Learning Centre, 2010, p. 2), and to this end, I now recognise that my skills and understanding were limited before commencing my study in this area. The tasks and activities that have since developed my learning include:

• The content modules, covering information resource description, tools and systems, metadata quality and standards, vocabularies, classification, and the future trends in information organisation.
• Engagement with the range of literature about the subject, concentrating on the prescribed text, Information Resource Description: Creating and Managing Metadata (Hider, 2012).
• Participation in professional discussion with teacher librarians in the learning forums.
• The first assignment, comprising use of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) Toolkit and an investigation into the necessity and procedures of information organisation.
• The second assignment, enabling the use of the Schools Catalogue Information Service (SCIS) and WebDewey to assign subject headings for works on a range of topics and create call numbers for specific items.

 

As a teacher, student and teacher librarian in training, I was surprised to acknowledge my minimal knowledge of Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) at the outset of the latter assignment, and I completed WebDewey tutorials on the logical suggestion that the use of WebDewey is more easily facilitated with an overall grasp of the scheme (Mortimer, 2004, p. 84). The PowerPoint presentations provided (OCLC, 2013; OCLC, 2014a) for this purpose were instrumental in clarifying the classes, divisions and sections of DDC.

 

Earlier in the subject, I found it helpful to first consider information organisation at a base level, which was initially facilitated by defining its respective components. The term information pertains to an information resource (Hider, 2012, p. 17); and organisation as management, with particular reference to metadata (Hider, 2012, p. 8). More specifically, in terms of the information environment, it encompasses bibliographic control and bibliographic organisation. A primary mode of bibliographic control is library cataloguing (Hider, 2012, p. 13), making information organisation logically integral to the effective management of the collection (Kennedy, 2006, p. 1). In this way, cataloguing is largely a means of organising information, as a process of compiling a bibliographic record for an information resource by identifying and recording its attributes and information pertaining to its title, authorship, publication and contents. This process can be divided into two parts- descriptive cataloguing, by which the resource is described in sufficient detail to distinguish it from other resources, and subject cataloguing, by which the subject content of the resource is described (Harvey & Hider, 2008, p. 322). Reconciling these definitions together, and with their purpose, means that information organisation relates primarily to the organising of bibliographic information that users of an information centre need to quickly and efficiently find and select the information resources that allow them to acquire the knowledge they seek (Harvey & Hider, 2008, p. 4).

Within the school context, the information centre stated is the school library, and its users, of paramount importance (Winzenried et al., 2010, p. 230) typically comprise students and teachers. The teacher librarian is in the position of leading the school library, and information organisation is a key component of the role, reflecting a specialist professional knowledge of information, resources, technology and library management (ALIA & ASLA, 2004, p. 2). This realisation led me to surmise that information organisation is essential to the effective practice of librarianship (Harvey & Hider, 2008, p. 6).

In thinking critically about my learning to draw useful insights, and identify implications for my future practice (Foster, 2007, p. 3) in the school library, I recognise that as the contemporary information environment continues to expand, information organisation will continue to play a vital role in ensuring that the developments in knowledge and information are efficiently and effectively recorded, retained, used and preserved both for the present time and into the future. As a future teacher librarian, I intend to apply my new skills in this field in a practical way to facilitate my own contribution.

Note: References are at the end of Part B.