I’ve managed to make friends on both sides of the country through this project, and I’m learning more and more that attempting to catalog and develop an organizational scheme and method is a never-ending project, even in a facility that has part or full time librarians.
A couple of weeks ago, I did some creative research through LibraryThing in hopes of locating someone using the tool to catalog their design firm’s library. Low and behold, I found many. The only challenge I had was finding contact information for these users. One of the LibraryThing users stuck out to me with its use of tagging and what appeared to be a cataloging strategy, and after getting in touch with the firm’s second or third man on the ladder, I got in touch with the person in charge of their library. And not only did I get in touch, she offered me a ton of great insights.
Since the library is not kept up except for what she’s done, she chose to utilize LibraryThing because of its ease of use and its affordable pricing model. The ability to tag and include notes on where materials are located has aided in centralizing the information about books. The link to their catalog is here. Clicking on the tags feature shows that there is a way to identify where the books are located (and as of now, I’ve been told there is only one location), the section they are in (what category), and finally, what subsection if any.
The organizational scheme of the physical materials evolved from researching how the industry markets and arranges design materials. For the Mulvanny library, it made sense to use very broad categories and then subdivide into subsections. A book on a particular region would be sectioned under regional and then subsectioned under the specific region. With LibraryThing’s ability to add tags, additional subjects can be added — a book on green architecture in Portland would be under the section of regional, with a subsection of Portland, and LibraryThing would include the tag “green.”
For the materials collection — which included not only materials samples, but also technical books, specs, and legal code resources — the organization was based on CSI MasterFormats and arranged in binders. This makes sense to think about implementing at fd2s after evaluating the results from the user survey; since the library’s print collection primarily got use as inspiration, why not separate the more technical materials and move them with the physical materials? Although I’m not certain this is the case, the user survey seemed to suggest that those who used the library solely for inspiration did not necessarily use the materials collection, while those who used the materials samples at a higher rate (those who “searched” or “took items to their desk for periods of time”) used the library more for reference. Perhaps sliding hard reference materials into the materials library would better distinguish uses and identify a method of organizing on the shelf.
I’ve been really stuck on the idea of using LibraryThing, and I think that after evaluting the user survey, it would be a great way to further the collection (or interaction with other design libraries). The point in using it is not social networking, but it’s hard to avoid the fact that being able to look at other “like” material in other user’s collections would spur an interest in maintaining and further developing an inspiring collection. Of course, that’s in the future, but it’s worth mentioning because that seems to be what user responses indicated.
I have been perusing some architectural and design book supplier websites to get an idea of organization schemes in such a specialized field. I’m waiting on putting together a good scheme until I can get deep into the collection itself and until I find out whether there would be a value in separating an interior design collection from a general architectural collection. I’m not sure right now if it would be merited or it would make sense to embody one within the other. Just for reference, a few of interesting sites I’ve been looking at for thematic grouping include: Prairie Avenue Bookshop, Stout Books, Hennessey Ingalls, and Northshire Bookstore. Two others include the British Royal Institute of Architecture and the Book Industry Study Group.
I’ve begun to develop a couple of prototypes for digital catalogs, and I plan to showcase both how a wiki would work and how LibraryThing would work. Since those two were the top picks, I thought those would be best. I may show how a php/mysql database would work too, but I fear that my technical skills would fall short on creating a useful output form for the catalog (that is, I could develop a great input tool for a database, but do not feel confident I could create a searchable output tool). I might see what OpenOffice’s Access database equivalent does, but I feel confident it will not be robust enough to enable really interesting and useful browsing in the same way the others may.
