Salutations!
My INFO 5300 Organization of Information class during the Fall 2022 semester was eye-opening to things I knew instinctively yet couldn’t articulate, as well as broadening for my horizons to what theoretical underpinnings support some cataloging decisions.
I connected effortlessly with the assertion that humans naturally organize information and laughed knowingly at the quip that people are either filers or pilers (Joudrey & Taylor, 2018, p. 2)! Collocation, that is “[organizing] to bring similar things or ideas together into groups…[such as] books on the same subject or sound recordings in the same musical genre” (Joudrey & Taylor, p. 3), resonated with me. Once I stopped reading the word as “collation,” putting pages in numerical order, and actually looked at it while remembering the definition provided, I realized collocation could be used to describe how my personal shelves are categorized; until now, I never had one term to explain why all my books on or by Laura Ingalls Wilder are together, followed by my dance/ballet books, with my DVDs grouped by genre and the actresses important to me. On my own, I connected the concept of collocation to a cataloger’s reliance on the Dewey Decimal System when working with a certain topic, such as the call numbers of all the juvenile books about pandas being J 599.789.
During further examination of Chapter 1 of Joudrey and Taylor’s The Organization of Information, I found the statement “controlled vocabulary ensures consistency in subject representation and allows for collocation” (p. 17), which validates my inclination. I was helping to train a new staff member yesterday, and we were looking at a MARC record with our director of youth services. We discussed how a child might want to search for “bunnies” in the OPAC, yet the Sierra catalog typically prefers the subject term “rabbits,” since that word is typical “librarian speak” as we call it. When searching for materials on raising pet rabbits, back in one of my elementary schools, I remember my young patrons would not get results for “bunnies” because Follett Destiny used only “rabbits.” Actually it seems more common nowadays than I anticipated for words like “bunnies,” “puppies,” and “kitties” to be the titles of some non-fiction books for children. It seems the publishing industry is becoming increasingly cognizant of childhood vocabulary trends. My public library’s OPAC yielded 206 different items across all branches and several formats featuring the word “bunnies” somewhere in the resource records through keyword searching; a search of “puppies” populated 559 results, while “kitties” offered a scant 40 results; the board book Bunnies by Gail Gibbons has its subject heading as merely “Rabbits–Juvenile literature.”
RLGing,
Sarah Hope
PS. Citation for textbook referenced: Joudrey, D. N. & Taylor, A. G. (with Wisser, K. M.). (2018). The organization of information (4th ed.). Libraries Unlimited.
