As a brief student of linguistics and a long-time student of literature, I am fascinated by the ways in which we use language for everything from everyday endeavors to intellectual pursuits. Amazingly, language captures the practical need to communicate and the spiritual need to inspire. It does all this by representing sounds (phones/ phonemes) with symbols (letters/ words) and combining them to be more meaningful than they ever could be by themselves. As a library science student, I cannot help but notice the impact that language has on designing databases and successful searches. Its influence is both subtle and direct; quite plainly this chapter states that “how you store it determines how you retrieve it,” yet it also makes distinctions about how the language of metadata (data that describes data) is indexed and thus how it can be used to retrieve in specific information (Weedman, 2008, p. 115-117).
The chapter cites a Nobel prize winning scientist, Herb Simon, and his eloquent analysis of how information professionals create a “preferred state” or solution out of an “existing state of affairs” or problem (Weedman, 2008, p. 112). Language itself is a kind of “preferred state” created out of the need to communicate and later the need to persuade and inspire those around us. Language, like libraries, is also a unique signal that a society has reached a certain level of sophistication—one that must be reached before libraries are possible. Therefore, it makes sense that libraries developed systems that classified documents based on the language of metadata to solve basic search needs that evolved.
The chapter uses the National Information Standards Institute or NISO’s definition of metadata, which is as follows: “structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource” (Weedman, 2008, p. 116). Where the language of metadata becomes so intricate and important is in the type of indexing done to make that language searchable. A database can index metadata about subject, title, author, and so on alphabetically in various ways, two of the most intriguing being those of controlled vocabulary and natural language. Using controlled language means that someone inputs common search words (a cataloguer) that someone else (a user) can enter to find desired information while using natural language means that every word, whether it is in the title or just one paragraph, is indexed and searched through in order to find that same desired information (Weedman, 2008, p. 116-117). The intriguing aspect of the above methods of indexing is that they both make the underlying assumption that “a short string of characters” is equivalent to a specific meaning—a concept that language inherently supports by the mere fact that we created it for that purpose (Weedman, 2008, p. 118).
A new method of using metadata has recently developed that shows another inherent aspect of language: that it is constantly evolving and never static. “Social tagging” is a practice where users make their own labels or controlled vocabulary words for information and generate a kind of improvised searching language for other users (Weedman, 2008, p. 117). The chapter refers to the possibility that such an improvised tagging and searching language could evolve into a “voluntary controlled vocabulary” (Weedman, 2008, p. 117). That it could be voluntary yet controlled is a fascinating notion that encompasses both change in the language overtime, yet promotes that change within a particular set of constructs—again a common linguistics pattern.
The language of metadata influences the creation of databases and search strategies through its subtle nuances and reveals the perpetual truths of language, in general, reflected in those databases and strategies. This is not a surprising discovery given that language is the original packaging for information, a currency that is inherently full of worth to us as human beings.
Weedman, Judith. (2008). Information Retrieval: Designing, Querying, and Evaluating Information Systems. In Ken Haycook & Brooke E. Sheldon (Eds.) The Portable MLIS: Insights from the experts. (pp.112-126). Westport: Libraries Unlimited.
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