Will a single day go by when I don't think about my essay on Ontology?
So Ontology is the philosophy of how we organize information. Our solution to the organisation, essentially, is one that always involves ontology.
If you sort something, in some way, that is ontology. Even if you don't sort it at all. If you just let things randomly pile up, that is still a system, just a very poor one for finding something again.
Humans do this as a matter of course. We like sorting things. Forks in the fork draw. Spoons in the spoon draw. Knives in the knife draw. This works fine till you start to encounter a new way of eating. Say chopsticks. Or a new tool such as a Spork.
In a lot of games, sorting things helps you play the game better. You are also trying to find certain patterns to the things the game uses. Again this is an ontology.
Everything can be assigned a value. A category. When we get books we, Librarians often need to sort them in a logical order.
Physics books, Maths books, Philosophy books, Literature, Religion books. Etc.
Unfortetntly because some topics are more popular, easier to write about, considered more important, we have more of them and more sub-topics. Some topics have practically their own language. We learn about this in library sciences and communication studies.
Some fields even have their own ontology. Ways of organising things. Some organise by date, or author, or by when the book came into their possession, or by subject.
Organising by subject first often seems sensible for wayfinding. A user, let's call her Ada, comes to the library looking for a book on the subject she want. She searches for that subject. Finds the book, gets it and reads it. Done yes?
But not all subjects are created equal. And Librarians have had influences from the outside world. I.e. English, Colonialism, White Settlers, Importance of topics white people like, Shakespear, Christ, and so on.
This means there is a bias. No matter how hard you try, bias will happen. If no other, your own language will bring bias.
This is something #critlib has been trying to tackle. Our bias is there in the catalogue and it makes it harder for those "minority" subjects to be found.
Two topics I can name off the top of my head is transgender studies, and say paganism. Both are treated fairly badly by LCSH and similar subject guides.
I could go on to say how and why, but a lot of people who are more persuasive and certainly better at writing than me, have done this already, and I hope will go on doing so.
The thing is the hierarchical subject model makes sense. It is much easier, even in a small system to organise by a defined type. Spoons in spoon draw.
Start trying to talk about a dynamic ontology and you get blank stares. You get people thinking about why to change this system that has worked great and works when I put my spoons away.
So I realised the best way to think of it is by using an example. Minecraft came to mind.
You can build a really good sorting model in Minecraft. The game is designed around you making, crafting things in a seemingly infinitely resourced world. You need to store your stuff, so if you do that you need to organise it.
If you are good at redstone you can make a storage system that stores your stuff and your set. It can do this by comparing each item and seeing how it matches the other items.
This is close, but not exactly how a library database sorts things. It sorts things by using digital indexes and each item is added into that index. Much like a book that has a index. It comes in, sorts it into the deck, then you can find it.
Again this is fine if your set of things is a set of things that can be easily discriminated. A spoon that looks like a spoon. A larger spoon or a smaller spoon? A magic spoon? A plastic spoon? Etc.
This is where transgender people mix things up. We aren't the only things that do this though. In reality, things are only easily discriminated because we often make them that way.
Mass production makes all spoons look like spoons. Before mass production, everyone had their own set of spoons they made. Welsh Love spoons are a continuation of this culture. A spoon was a powerful message of love as if you could make a spoon you could provide for someone.
But each spoon was unique, created by the carver, firstly each individual husband, then each artisan, then each carver, then they started being made by mass production.
A digital system can deal with dynamic differences. Its just that a lot of the systems we have were designed when mass production was THE thing.
So the assumption was made that all books have certain properties, and as each outlier was made, a slight modification of the assumptions.
Each was given a subject. ASSIGNED a subject. MADE to fit in. Starting to sound like a similar story yet?
When we are born we are ASSIGNED a gender. Almost always we are told we fit into a binary between male or female. There is a lot of history behind this.
So it was pretty much assumed I was male when I was born. I was ASSIGNED a gender much like a book is ASSIGNED a subject.
We perform this act, as librarians, and the subject can almost NEVER change. It takes a great deal of effort for a library system to change any subject. Let alone authors names (don't get me started on this topic I will rant at you).
YET! subjects do change. What we call transgender people today were called transexuals, transvestites, and many other less kind words previously.
There are subjects that change a LOT over a short period of time. And there are subjects that have had less change and is fairly easily transferable between time periods.
So lately, in #critlib world, there has been a lot of discussion on how we solve this issue? Subjects that were assigned wrongly need to change. Much like how my gender needed to change.
Do we use tags? Do we seek out subject-specific dictionaries? Do we change them and hope our opinions are correct?
New systems are coming. New ways for us to organise what are now massive collections. Collections of millions, billions of items. We need a way for a person to find things in this sea of information.
Places like OCLC, LOC, NLA and many others are hopefully guiding us to a world where we can change a subject like we change our socks (or our gender).
But I don't know if what has been proposed will get us their or not? Dynamic ontology is a solution. One solution. It's one I think would work. But we need a system that can support it.
Will it happen? I don't know.
I just hope it does. My essay, tried, in academic ways, to argue that its the solution libraries need. How do we make it? I don't know, exactly. I have ideas, but I am only one woman.
I just hope that in some future world we can assign a whole bunch of books a subject A and then when we find out that subject is different and needs to be wider or changed, we can do that in a few minutes. We will still debate it, we will still argue because we are humans.
But the system being there to give us the solution when we know the answer? That's a future I hope that happens.
