Another Look at Graduate Education for Cataloging and the Organization of Information

Knowledge organization landscape: A content analysis of introductory courses

“…Joudrey [21] explored the state of graduate education of cataloguing and knowledge organization education through a longitudinal study that started in 2000. As the author notes in a recent article focused on curricular aspects of cataloguing education, a terminological shift has occurred where the use of the phrase "cataloguing education" has been often replaced by the more encompassing phrase "organization of information (OI) education" [22]. Joudrey's study shows that the listings of organization of information courses has steadily increased over the years and, as for 2005, each of the ALA-accredited LIS programs taught at least one OI course, while the average offering was four.…”

KO and classification instruction objectives: Are we keeping up with the transformation of our field?

“…Well over a century later, it is remarkable that they still appear as core subjects in most LIS schools, although the terms cataloging and classification themselves appear less frequently in course titles. Combinations of words including information, knowledge, organization and access are now used in a majority of core course titles in which cataloging, classification and indexing are introduced (Joudrey 2008). Topics covered in knowledge and/or information organization courses may include also encoding standards, metadata, taxonomies, ontologies, and folksonomies.…”

“…In the past 25 years, cataloging and classification education has been at the core of several research projects. Joudrey (2008), Pattuelli (2010) and Hudon (2010), among others, published extensive reviews of research and literature in the area, covering roughly the period 1985-2010. This period saw the development of the Internet and the implementation of the Web, an exponential increase in the number of digital resources, and the substitution of traditional bibliographic data by various types of metadata.…”

Cataloging and Classification

“…In the second installment of his longitudinal study of cataloging education, Joudrey examined courses in organization of information (OI) in ALA-accredited graduate LIS schools in the United States and Canada. 171 He found that since 1998, there had been a 21 percent increase in the number of OI courses offered, though he reported that more than half of the courses included in the study fell "outside of what can be considered library cataloging courses," with metadata and organization courses likely to continue to grow in numbers. 172 Joudrey posited that the biggest threat to the future of cataloging might be the lack of qualified cataloging instructors, and urged, "Catalogers, it is time to get that PhD."…”