ETL505 Describing and Analysing Educational Resources. Critical Reflection.

In the school library environment, Teacher Librarians must consider the specific needs and interests of the school community, including students and teachers. An emphasis on providing quality and relevant resources to meet curriculum requirements is essential to create a collection of resources that is highly valued by the school community.

Although quality and relevancy are essential components of a good library collection, it is the ease of access to resources which is most salient. A good collection must be navigable, and in the 21st century digital environment of the Library, navigation must be done via computers. School libraries offer the ‘user’ a digital interface in order to locate, access and retrieve information quickly. These are known as OPACs, which provide access points to resources according to different ‘attributes’, such as author, title, subject, and publication name. OPACs work by using bibliographic control measures such as controlled vocabularies, the cornerstone of information organisation. The school library, however, cannot operate in a closed environment. Essentially, Teacher Librarians must marry external online digital resources, to the physical collection of the school library. This may entail Teacher Librarians developing e-portals containing access points to online resources and linking them to the existing OPAC or library website. Teacher Librarians may then assign metadata to the digital resources so that the ‘users’ are able to identify relevant resources quickly and efficiently without having to do a content based search using Google or other search engine.

Metadata is often imported into the school library catalogue or OPAC through third party providers such as Schools Catalogue and Information Service (SCIS), which service school libraries in Australia and New Zealand. This metadata is carefully controlled by SCIS through policy development that ensures consistency of metadata. SCIS Standards for Cataloguing and Data Entry (SCISSCDE) is an important document for Teacher Librarians to be familiar with to ensure consistency of ‘in-house’ assigned metadata to external digital resources, in addition to adjustments of metadata uploaded to the school OPAC in order to best serve the needs of the library’s ‘end-user’.

In the broader information environment the rise of content based searching has been meteoric. The advent of Google and Yahoo, among many others, have had the information organisation community discussing the relevancy of bibliographic control when users are simply content searching. According to Hider (2012), search engines are the most popular way of finding information on the web due to the instant and usually reliable results returned. However, Hider (2012) does warn, that content based online searching is not always reliable in returning results that are accurate, authoritative, relevant nor appropriate. As a consequence of the popularity of content-based searching Resource Description and Access (RDA), based of the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records (FRBR) has been developed. RDA is an attempt to provide bibliographic control when describing digital resources. Description of digital resources in the Web 2.0 environment on the other hand, has become democratic, open and uncontrolled in the form of social tagging, also known as Folksonomies.

The future of information organisation may involve OPACs, content-based searching, bibliographic control and Folksonomies. Essentially, Teacher Librarians will need to provide access to information in an interoperable environment. There does not appear to be any clear direction currently, only a conglomeration of different methods to access information. Hider (2012, p.198) suggests that the future of information organisation will largely depend on how society views information itself. In my opinion, information is power and the greater access we have to relevant, accurate, authoritative and timely information, the more powerful we are as a society.

 

References:

 

Hider, P. (2012). Information Resource Description: Creating and Managing Metadata.
Facet Publishing, London UK.

Schools Cataloguing and Information Services (SCIS). (2013). SCIS Standards for Cataloguing and Data Entry (SCISSCDE). Retrieved from http://www2.curriculum.edu.au/verve/_resources/SCISCatStandards.pdf     1/10/2014.