Keeping Pace With Information

While working as a teacher librarian in the first five years of my teaching career, I was able to experience the transition from a non-automated library to an automated library, with the installation of new computers and each book receiving its first barcode. Since that time, I have gone into the classroom to teach. However, I have continued to watch as educational issues arise, revolving around technological advances and the resulting abundance of information that continues to change our society at an increasingly rapid rate.

Perhaps the greatest issue for me has been how to adequately prepare students for a successful future in this fast-paced 21^st century environment. This feeling I have discovered is also shared by many other educators, as seen in the Youtube video, 21st Century Pedagogy. I often felt a disconnection between the ways in which I was teaching and the world outside of our schools: a world our students would inevitably have to function in. In order to meet these new challenges, I decided to pursue professional development opportunities through course work at UBC.

However, even as I’m nearing completion of my Masters degree, specializing in teacher librarianship, I am continuing to see the countless ways in which technology is reshaping school libraries. Although, I took part in the automation process at a school library, it didn’t occur to me to pay attention to the way that information was added to the computer, regarding the bibliographic records of library materials. After reading Chapter 12 in Standard Cataloguing for School and Public Libraries (Intner and Weihs, 2007, p. 207-223), I became aware that the computer coding had been created to present bibliographic data in a way that could be read by the computer. While I have probably seen this information on the computer screen many times before, I didn’t think to give it much attention.

In order to extend my learning from chapter 12, I continued to search for articles relating to Marc records and came across many articles on cataloguing issues arising from the changing information environment of this digital age. For example, Sally McCallum (2000) wrote an article called Extending MARC for Bibliographic Control in the Web Environment: Challenges and Alternatives (Final version), and David M. Levy (1995) called Cataloging in the Digital Order. What is the future of cataloging in light of ongoing developments in digital technologies? After scanning these articles and many more like them, I can see that the changing nature of information continues to transform how we catalogue information for future retrieval (see the YouTube video Information R/evolution). In 1951, John Phillip Comaroni, author of A History of the Dewey Decimal Classification: Editions One through Fifteen, 1876-1951, wrote that the DDC “was a giant step in the direction of keeping pace with knowledge” (Intner and Weihs, 2007, p. 166). It seems that “keeping pace” is something that we must continue to do, even today (and in the future) in order to continue to keep libraries relevant to the society in which it serves. I’m looking forward to learning more about MARC records so that I’m not left in the dark as technology becomes an increasing presence in our lives.