Historical Libraries and Information Management Systems

Libraries of Timbuktu

__________ is located in modern-day Mali. Their historical collections originated in the 15th century when families and scholars began preserving and passing down manuscripts through several generations.

Librarians of Timbuktu

They secretly packed several printed copies out of __________ via small metal boxes to safer areas to protect themselves from enemy attacks.

Cuneiform Tablets

Clay inscribed with __________ script; enduring information technology as the tablets become stronger when burned/baked.

King Ashurbanipal

Ruled over The Kingdom of Assyria from 668 to 631 BCE. Kingdom located in Mesopotamia.

Library of King Ashurbanipal

The purpose was to collect and preserve all the knowledge of the known world.

Pigs of Sulawesi

Located in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, the information technology that is responsible for their survival are the cave paintings and early forms of storytelling.

Storytellers

Require skilled memory, timeless cultural knowledge, and an engaged audience with a good memory so that they can pass down these stories.

Library of Alexandria

Existed in Egypt during Roman times. What really destroyed it was politics, neglect, defunding, as well as violence and strife.

Transition to New Technologies

It reflects the challenges of adopting innovations and balancing tradition with progress.

Conrad Gessner

16th century Swiss naturalist and bibliographer. Known for 'Bibliotheca Universalis', one of the earliest attempts to catalog human knowledge.

Biblioteca Universalis

Made by Conrad Gessner to make a list of authors and their pieces.

Gabriel Naudé

French librarian, called the Father of Library management system. Modern libraries developed the way they did because of him. He wanted the libraries to be complete, accessible and searchable.

Vision of Universal Information

Complete (Comprehensive), Accessible (available to the public), and Searchable (users can easily find what they are looking for).

Queen Hatshepsut

Some collections might be incomplete or misinformed, and in her case, her paintings and monuments were removed and destroyed by her stepson.

Damnatio Memoriae

It's a Roman term used to call punishment for the living and the dead for crime, scandal, or disfavor. They would remove information on them from the public.

Maurice Halbwachs

French philosopher and sociologist who popularized 'Collective Memory.' This means that social groups remember the past collectively and pass that narrative on.

History and Memory-making

It influences which historical narratives are preserved and emphasized. Governments, education systems, and media all shape how events are remembered or forgotten.

Memorialization Conflicts

The significance of these statues may differ; later years people may have varied opinions on the importance of events.

Curriculum Conflicts

Powerful people can influence what is taught, shaping students' point of view on history as well as their morals.

Michel Foucault

Knowledge is shaped by power structure.

Right to Education

Right as humans to knowledge and skills that education provides; intellectual freedom and right to information.

Censorship

Active __________ restricts access forcefully; passive __________ leads to self-censorship.

Structural Racism

It perpetuates systems of inequality by erasing or distorting the lived experience of marginalized groups.

Jorge Luis Borges

An Argentinian translator, essayist, poet. The Library of Babel could not be searched because even though there are faithful catalogs, there are also many false catalogs or can't find catalogs.

Library of Babel

Complete and Accessible, but it is not Searchable, and that makes everything inside of it worse than useless. A vast collection of knowledge is useless if it is not searchable. Made by Jorge Luis Borges.

Libro de los Epitomes

Found in Denmark in a library at the Arnamagnaean collection at the University of Copenhagen. It was an unidentified book with no title, no author.

Library of Hernando Colon

Second son of Christopher Columbus, the unusual aspect of the collection was that he had an index.

Colophon

Cuneiform tablets from the Hittite empire included colophons with the scribe's name. A book spine.

Kallimachos

Was a Greek scholar known for creating the first library catalog.

Pinakes System

Used in the Library of Alexandria, did not provide a way to locate scrolls in the library (librarians needed).

Liu Xin

Related to the royal family, and he developed a writing called 'The Seven Epitomes'. This provided an analysis on objects in the library.

Finding Aids

Organizational tools that help people discover what they are looking for in collections. A catalog is a list of names of items in a collection, and an index is organized by topics in a collection.

Carl Linnaeus

He invented 'binomial nomenclature' which created hierarchies of plants and animals using index cards. He standardized them into the tool they are today. However, he's credited with 'inventing racism' due to his hierarchy ideas being used on people.

Dewey Decimal Classification

Provided standardized, organized, and hierarchical template for classification.

Melvil Dewey

Created Dewey Decimal Classification system, was criticized for sexual harassment and racial exclusion in his professional life.

Katherine Sharp

Founded the library school at the University of Illinois; her students 'went west' to jobs in libraries and schools.

Naomi Pollard Dobson

First African American graduate of Northwestern University in 1905. Librarianship was a profession opened to women, Black women were able to pursue careers in libraries during the time.

Charles Ammi Cutter

Introduced subject-based cataloging and created the Cutter Expansive Classification.

Expansive Classification

Developed by Cutter, it allowed flexible classification based on library size. It influenced the Library of Congress system.

Julia Pettee

Developed because of the limitations of the DDC. She found that the DDC was lacking authorship of historical religious texts which was often obscure or entirely lacking.

Special Library

A collection that serves a more narrow community of interest, like law, medicine, or religious studies.

Paul Otlet

Belgian lawyer, set out to catalog everything published in the world; created the Universal Bibliographic Repertory, an analog search engine.

Universal Decimal Classification

Developed by Otlet, could handle many kinds of media: videos, brochures, photographs, advertisements, letters, ephemera, etc.

Henry La Fontaine

Belgian lawyer; also a Nobel Peace Prize winner who saw organized information as key to global cooperation via the League of Nations.

The Mundaneum

Founded by Otlet and La Fontaine. It housed a museum, international organization networks, and answered global queries via telegraph.

Documentation Movement

Emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine in Belgium spearheaded it. This evolved into Information science because it shaped a multitude of fields such as library science, archival studies, and digital information management.

Suzanne Briet

A French librarian at the National Library of France, as soon as antelopes have begun to be observed, analyzed, and cataloged, and put on display, documents begin proliferating.

Biased Classification

Looking more closely at how we catalog and index information is important, because classifying creates hierarchies, while representing itself as only observing them.

Radical Cataloging

Hierarchical and biased classification can reinforce negative or exclusionary viewpoints.

Dorothy Porter Wesley

Librarian who criticized DDC for only having 2 categories for African American authors (slavery and colonism).

Whanganui River

Government sees the river as something to own, while the Maori tribe saw the river as their kin. The government ended up being understanding about their beliefs. A 2017 legal ruling stated that if the states want to take action that involves the river, they have to ask the tribe first.

Ontology & Epistemology

Ways of knowing and understanding the world vs Ways of classifying the world.

Indigenous Knowledge

Often sees humans as part of nature.

Wood Libraries

Buildings that housed collections of preserved specimens from trees, which had been crafted in the shape of book, it allows the viewers to study and know about the trees through direct experience.

Descriptive Metadata

Data about the data, data about an info source can become information again.

Knowledge Organization System

Take into account the kind of information that needs to be organized, the domain of interest, who will be using it, and what will need to be done with it.

Facet Analysis

The primary aspect is specific topics, and these are used to describe how the data was categorized.

Notation

Assigns numbers or codes instead of words to ensure unique identification and reduce ambiguity in classification.

Vocabulary Control

Standardizes terms to improve indexing.

Coordinated Indexing

Pre: if a 'chain' of topics is defined while the index is being prepared. Post: the searcher may input search terms in any order. It returns more results but also more wrong answers.

Metadata Schema & Standards

A ______________ might become a ____________ when it becomes widely used and is recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (or other such organization).

Metadata Domain & Community

Both terms pertain to the kinds of information being organized. An example is the Assyrian Collection in the British Museum in London.

Metadata Function & Purpose

Purpose refers to what the metadata is used to accomplish (ie copyright laws). The function refers to the specific task that the metadata is used for (ie sorts the kind of metadata).

Dublin Core

Means that the system should be able to be widely adopted and easily usable but still have all the core functions.

Darwin Core

An addition to the Dublin core standards but is more applicable to registering biodiversity/environmental information.

Mosaic Browser

Made at UIUC's NCSA and it allowed text and images to be displayed side by side.

Authority List

Contains standardized terms, names, and classifications for vocabulary control (e.g., controlled subject headings, name authority files).

Domain Analysis

Focuses on organizing information based on subject specific knowledge.

Information Infrastructure

Systems like libraries that enable knowledge sharing (Cataloging, metadata).

Racial Profiling

The act of stereotyping people by race in law enforcement, which can cause unjustified arrests.

Unconscious Bias

Implicit associations/attitudes that shape our perceptions; influences how we see the world via reinforcing social classifications.

Doctrine of Discovery

Land occupied by non-Christians was considered free to be discovered. This classified non-Christians as non-humans.

Cultural Genocide

To rid of all of a culture's information/knowledge such as religious practice, written documents, and (proof of) traditions.

Epistemicide

Refers to the destruction of people's ways of knowing which also refers to the ways that they categorize the world.

Solutionism

Technology can solve all problems, ignoring contextual knowledge such as ethics, Indigenous wisdom, and social complexities.

Kevin Bacon

He is an actor associated with the Small World Networks, can basically link any actor to another through him. Shows how everyone is connected.

Small World Network

Characterized by short paths and clustered nodes, seen in social networks and biological systems.

Radiated Library

A library made up of 'electric telescopes' that would allow people to answer their questions from wherever in the world despite information being stored far away; texts, images, and sound would be streamed across network.

H.G. Wells

Scifi writer and a futurist. He believed in a 'world brain' which was a decentralized, collaborative wikipedia-like encyclopedia that could function as its name says.

Friedrich Ostwald

Nobel Prize-winning German chemist. Like Wells - but with a station between information islands (libraries, museums, etc.).

Information Storage

Helps with information retrieval, the most powerful method was microfilm technologies.

Phyllis Mander-Jones

She led the Australian joint copying project, the longest-running microfilming project, preserving historical records over 10000 reels of microfilms.

Emmanuel Goldberg

He created the first microfilm documentation retrieval device. However, he was Jewish and his research was abandoned during WW2 - he fled to Paris, then Palestine.

Vannevar Bush

American Engineer. The first microfilm retrieval system (standalone micro film). Device -> personal information system.

J.C.R. Licklider

Worked for the U.S. State Department at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). He imagined a network through which all human knowledge could flow, available freely to all. He called it the 'Inter-galactic network.'

Douglas Engelbart

Developed online system to connect documents by hyperlink, mouse, and keyboard, worked at Stanford research institute.

Ted Nelson

He coined hypertext, hypermedia. Wanted a better web with tracking.

Hypertext and Hypermedia

Describes the links that make navigation between documents possible. Made the World Wide Web and HTML markup language possible.

Tim Berners-Lee

Created HTTP, HTML, and the first browser, making the World Wide Web.

Arpanet, Internet & the World-Wide Web

_________ is a network used within US State Department and first interconnected network; _______is the connected webpages (1.5 bil, 2 mill active); ___________ is the global interconnected system of computers and information.

Information Retrieval

Querying, selection, receiving / selection process.

Meta Tags and Web Crawlers

____________ are lines of HTML code that provide search engines with information about a web page's purposes and content, while ____________ are automated programs that scan websites and collect metadata.

Page-Ranking

Google's rank page based on page ranking, which considers factors like site visits, backlinks, and content relevance. It also uses E-A-T to evaluate quality.

Search Evaluation

Getting all relevant info (completeness) without getting only relevant info (accuracy) is difficult. The relevance varies by each user.

Citation Analysis & Bibliometrics

The number of times this specific source is referenced through other works; integrates mathematical processes.

Network Hubs

Highly connected nodes that link many others.

Net Neutrality

A political movement and an information world-view that maintains that internet providers should not block, slow down, or charge for access to content.

Search Neutrality

Their separation led to different intellectual lineages in the development of information networks.

Algorithmic Bias

Systemic errors in computer program at any stage, creating existing patterns of social inequality.

Bias on Wikipedia

Arises from a lack of diverse editors and systemic deletion practices, resulting in underrepresentation and skewed content that reinforces existing stereotypes.