Saturday 8 September 2012

The Perils of Terminology (and Lunch)

For the last four or five years, librarians at Cambridge University have met once a month at lunchtime to discuss issues in library research, generally centred around a single paper or report. These meetings are termed "brown bag lunches" - after the generic, or American, term for the receptacles that hold the packed lunch that are consumed at the meetings. And I have become in some sense an honorary member of this group.

Which brings me to libraries and their terminology, and to the difficulty that users of academic libraries can have in understanding it. Last week I found myself at just such a lunch, munching chocolate tiffin and discussing a paper by John Kupersmith at the University of California, Berkeley entitled "Library Terms that Users Understand". Understanding terminology is more of a problem for many users, even academic ones, than some librarians realise. Students, in particular, can fail to realise that "Journal" and "Periodical" are used by different libraries to refer to the same type of document - and how about "Serial"? And to say nothing of "Database"... This was not such a problem in pre-Internet decades when users were more often face to face with librarians. The term "users" now refers just as often to users of library websites as to those seen walking around libraries.

After agreeing that users - and librarians - had difficulty working out what exactly was meant by the term "database", the librarians at the meeting - that is, everyone but me - spent some time discussing how they could make their websites more user friendly. Kupersmith's paper recommended avoiding acronyms and vague terms, and using "mouseovers" - now there's a term that not everyone will understand - to define any terms that are not immediately obvious. We heard of one library that has teamed up with another in Australia to provide a real-time "Ask a Librarian" service almost 24-7, and another that provided interactive maps showing the location of specific resources. Much as I admire Aidan's use of Gliffy to produce a map of his library, that is available only in hard copy.

Putting my scientific hat on, I noted that molecular biologists have problems with terminology too, but in a rather different way. While different libraries use different terms to refer to the same concept, biologists have a historical problem with the naming of genes. In the decades before the torrent of data arising from genome projects, it often happened that the same gene would be discovered at roughly the same time by several independent labs. Each group would give the gene a name, and endeavour to keep using that name to highlight their role in the discovery. Pity the poor students with three or more keywords to use when searching for papers on just one gene. One answer to this has been the Gene Ontology - a structured vocabulary for genetics that links the various terms together, listing synonyms for each one. This is only one example of many ontologies that are now widely used in biology.

I asked the librarians at the brown bag lunch whether they had any use for the concept of an ontology. They answered that they did - but they called it by a different name. And I have already forgotten what it is...

3 comments:

  1. Many thanks for providing the chocolate tiffin -- always goes down well....

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  2. Making the chocolate tiffin, indeed. As I say, it always goes down well.

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  3. We did a lot on ontologies/controlled vocabularies in my MA, librarians would probably call it a thesaurus (a slightly different use of the word from, for example, Roget's Thesaurus). But yep, controlled vocabularies are big in libraries!

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