The Library Organization Problem Timeline

Names: Ronald Murray, Barbara Tillett, Thomas Baker, David Hay
Affiliation: Library of Congress
URL: http://www.dipity.com/rmur/Library-Organization-Problem/

Library institutions have, over their 4,000 year existence, developed solutions to the problem of organizing—through their descriptions—the myriad records of the world’s cultural heritage. Some resource description solutions have survived implementation in a succession of recording technologies and are expressed in contemporary print and digital media.

The mathematical and scientific ideas underlying library world resource description solution need to be resurfaced in order to inform and inspire Digital Public Library of America planners, system designers, educators, and other interested parties. In order to accomplish this, the project has taken a look behind book and card catalogs, flat-file and relational database records, XML schema, RDF triples, and web ontology languages in order to examine the mathematical, scientific, and the cultural ideas energizing cultural heritage resource description theory and practice. To present this data, the group has constructed the Library Organization Problem timeline detailing the histories of the fields of Library and Information Science; Mathematics; Ethnomathematics; the Physical, Biological, and Computer Sciences; and Arts and Literature.