Customer Reviews

The Organization of Information (Library and Information Science Text Series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Want to know what your computer people are babbling on about when they use phrases like "GILS" or "Dublin Core?" Tired of hearing explanations of TEI and metadata that only leave you more confused than when you started? This is the book for you. Yes, there's more to the book than this, but Chapters 4 and 5 (that's all the further I've gotten today--but I just had to write now) are worth the price of admission. Thank you, Ms. Taylor, for finally putting these concepts I've been hearing for the last 2 years into a framework that I can actually understand! My boss is now running across the hall to my office every time she hears me say "Oh, I get it!" so I can explain whatever my newest understanding is to her, too.

I used this textbook for a core cataloging course for my LIS degree. It provides a good foundation for different information systems. The author includes important discussion of Web technologies, like XML, and how they are used in conjunction with traditional library encoding systems like MARC. It includes sections on systems design that are not deep, but appropriate given the introductory nature of this book. Unlike some other reviewers, I had no trouble with acronyms, and other definitions: the book has a thorough index, in addition to a glossary.

This is an excellent textbook. It is well organized and clearly written, explaining difficult concepts in understandable language for students. It covers the history of information organization in libraries, archives, and museums, as well as tools such as inventories, bibliographies, catalogs and indexes, and methods and standards of codification; reviews the history and development of the internet; describes different kinds of databases; and discusses metadata as a theoretical and practical concept, reviewing different kinds of metadata schemes. I highly recommend it.

I used this book for an introductory lesson on descriptive cataloguing in library, archival and information science. It worked very well for giving an overview of the problems in just this interdisciplinary approach. A lot of examples are given and explained in an understandable way. There are some reduncancies but this helps for the understanding.

The customer who said that "Library of Congress Subject Headings are presented as a thesaurus" in this book is incorrect. Three kinds of controlled vocabulary are presented and distinctions are made among them. Thesauri are clearly distinguished from subject heading lists, and Library of Congress Subject Headings are presented under the subheading "Subject Heading Lists."

Generally the book provides good treatment of essential information organization issues. One caution, though, is the rather traditional presentation and description of thesauri on page 152. The reader is encouraged to explore thesauri other than those referenced in these pages, and to be sure to review the ANSI/NISO standards related to thesauri for a more complete treatment of the issues. A significant omission in this section is the lack of a reference to any of Bella Haas Weinberg's writings on this issue. Absolutely essential to include. Also, Library of Congress Subject Headings are presented as a thesaurus - this presentation runs the risk of confusing the user - to present topical "subject headings" in a thesaurus structure.

This text was required reading for an introductory cataloging class. I have found it to be difficult to navigate as an introductory piece. The writing is sub par and it is clear that this is a second edition work.

For example, the author will introduce an acronym and fail to identify what it stands for, or you will find materials that should be restricted to later chapters incorporated into earlier chapters, which creates a scattered organization feel.

Her work in Wynar's Introduction to Cataloging and Classification is of significantly higher quality and is more apropos for an introductory level class than this text.

All and all, I would not recommend this text fro an introduction to knowledge organization. Hope you never have to work with it in class... and if you do, pick up supplementary materials, you are going to need it.

I am currently using this text in a class and must say that Taylor could have certainly eased the transition into comprehending this book by putting a little more effort into it. There is a consistent jump from topic to topic, which makes the subject matter a lot less interesting than it really is. Taylor's persistence in creating a schizophrenic reader, by inserting un-necessary topics mid paragraph really hurts the potential that this book had. I've also noticed a poor level of editing and a general lack of clarity in discussing even simple terms. There has to be a better text out there regarding Organization of Information/Knowledge. Don't mis-understand me, Taylor knows her stuff, and has written well in the past, but this feels like an amateurish attempt to sound overly-technical, it really comes looking like a waste of paper. If there isn't anything better, it might be beneficial to whomever attempts it, just about anything else would be on par with this, regardless of who published it.

This book was the required textbook for a Master's Degree course in library science which I recently completed. I wish the instructor would have chosen a different book. This book is full of technical jargon that is very difficult to understand. Having worked in a library for the past ten years, I still found the terminology used in this book to be very hard to follow and comprehend. The examples that are given are difficult to understand, and the text itself is extremely difficult to read and digest.

For an introductory textbook, this book is very difficult to read and understand. I got very little out of reading it, and I sometimes found myself having more questions after reading the book than I did before. If you are a student that is required to use this book, I can only hope that you get more from it than I did.

This is the most boring, hardest to understand Library Science text I've had to read in my graduate career, and that's saying something. There's too much dense language, obscuring the meaning of what the author was trying to say. Consider, for example, that the author spends time talking about "metadata about metadata". The information in this book could be presented in a much more straightforward, concise, clear manner.