I fell in love with Mr Darcy as a teenager.

Colin Firth as Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy in 1995 BBC’s Pride and prejudice TV series. Courtesy of Jane Austen Centre, Bath. www.janeausten.co.uk

Not the Austen version of Mr Darcy, but Colin Firth version in the BBC mini-series of Pride and prejudice. His smouldering eyes, broad shoulders and clipped accent was enough to make this girl blush and we all know I am too brown to blush!

With that started the greatest love affair I’ve ever had.

I INHALED the TV series, read the book, devoured any adaptation,version and variation I could find. I looked for sequels, hunted for parodies and searched for spin offs. I realised that my infatuation had gone beyond just the Austen version. I watched and read anything that remotely was associated with this book including ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ and the Bollywood adaptation of ‘Bride and Prejudice”.

But this new subject of mine made me ponder how the various versions and adaptations would be organised. Then I came across an acronym – FRBR that boggled my mind.

FRBR – Functional requirements of bibliographic records is a conceptual model of thinking about resources that are similar (Hider, 2018). The model seeks to separate resources on different levels depending on their relationship to the original version. As a theoretical model rather than a standard, FRBR forces the cataloger to identify the line in which a new work differs enough from its original form.

In perfect truth, this whole concept was so puzzling to me at first. I struggled to understand how the pieces all connected together. Then whilst on my winter break I started to read another adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ but from Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy’s point of view. I thought that if I placed all the versions in a table, I would maybe understand it all a bit better.

IT WORKED!

Equivalent	Derivative			Descriptive
Original	Same work	Catalogued as new work
Original	Variations or Versions	Adaptations	Change of Genre	Reviews, criticisms, evaluations, commentaries
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, 1813.	Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Arawa Edition, 2016 Oxford University Press, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Penguin English Library, UK Edition, ebook	Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame Smith and Jane Austen Emoji pride & prejudice by Katherine Furman, Chuck Gonzales and Jane Austen Darcy swipes left by Courtney Carbone and Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice, BBC TV mini series 1995 Pride and Prejudice, film, 2005	Death comes to Pemberley by P.D. James The Independence of Mary Bennett By Colleen McCollough Bride and Prejudice, film, 2004 Bridget Jones Diary, film, 2001	A study guide for Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by Cengage Learning Gale, 2017. Pride and Prejudice SparkNotes Literature Guide by SparkNotes, 2014.

It made sense to me, that line between original work and versions be organised under the original author’s name but adaptations, parodies and commentaries need to be catalogued with citation to the creator that did the ‘new work’. But this is where tagging comes in use. Cataloging needs to be precise and organised so that the source can be easily identified and found. Tagging/Subject headings, when indexed, allows the user to search for similar items even though the author and or titles may vary. For example, on the right side of this webpage, you can see the tags that are linked to various blogs on this site. The tag allows the user to search up all related posts to that tag. It is less specific than a title and or author search in finding a resource.

I broke down three resources further to illustrate how the metadata varies between them. You can see that the tags “women in England – fiction”as well as some others would be useful in finding Austen adaptations.

Title	Pride and Prejudice	Emoji pride & prejudice: Epic tales told in tiny texts	Darcy swipes left
author	Jane Austen	Furman, Katherine. Gonzales, Chuck. Austen, Jane.	Jane Austen Courtney Carbone
SCIS no	1534030	1838651	1838656
ISBN	9780198329961	9781631063244	9781101940532
Publisher	Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010	New York, New York, Race Point Publishing, 2016	New York, Random House Children’s Books, 2016
Publication date	2010	2016	2016
series	Rollercoasters	Condensed classics	OMG classics!
Edition		Hardback edition.	1st edition
Subject tags	Women in england – fiction Social classes – fiction Family relations – fiction Dating (social) – fiction Brothers and sisters – fiction England social life and customs – 19th century – fiction	Women in England – fiction Austen, jane – adaptations Austen, jane – parodies Women in england – fiction Brothers and sisters – fiction Social classes – fiction Family relations – fiction England social life and customs – 19th century – fiction	Austen, Jane – adaptations Austen, jane – parodies Women in england – fiction Brothers and sisters – fiction Social classes – fiction Family relations – fiction E-books, England -social life and customs – 19th century – fiction

This whole exercise has been very useful for me to understand this task and subject. It also has helped me find some other versions of Mr Darcy. I am not yet quite up to the 50 shades of Fitzwilliam Darcy, but I am definitely getting closer!

Hider, P. (2018). Information resource description: Creating and managing metadata (2nd ed.). London: Facet.

But I digress.

This blog post is not about my dress acquisition nor my marital disagreements about my wardrobe organisation or Imelda Marcos tendencies.

Instead, this post is a prelude to the subject that I will commence tomorrow morning. ETL 505 will open my mind to how resources are cataloged. I will learn how the records are created and use that information to benefit the users within my community. This knowledge will also help me with giving constructive feedback to metadata specialists as part of my role as a TL.

Last semester in ETL 401 I learned about what the role of a TL encompasses as a whole. In ETL 503 I learned how important it was to correlate the resources within the library to the curriculum. This is simply because the point of a school library is to address the needs of the curriculum. This semester, it appears my learning is aimed more at the librarian aspect of a TL than the teacher component. As an information specialist and information services manager, my role involves ensuring that the collection is easily accessible by the student population using the information management system available.

To sum it up succinctly. I need to learn how a library is organised so that the kiddos can use it successfully.

The point of organisation is to easily find and locate an item when you wish to use it. How it is organised depends on who is doing the work, but the underlying point is ACCESS! If the item cannot be found and used when it is needed, then the system is broken. The resource is underutilised and the monies wasted. In school libraries this is a travesty when budgets are often stretched and funds scant.

Libraries are famous for their organisation.

Neenuvimalkumar – Pre computerised Library management system

Dear ole Mr Dewey revolutionised the information world with his Dewey Decimal System. Known famously as the ultimate in organisation and classification, DDS organises the information within a library into groups and then further divisions for specifics areas (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2018). Due to its comprehensive and adaptive nature, the system is universally used across the world (OCLC, 2019). A bibliophile in New York city can find a book about Bonnie Prince Charlie in the same location as they would in a suburban library in Melbourne’s suburbs.

But information isn’t so simple in this modern day. Gone are the days where libraries only stocked books and maps. A modern day library will have shelving of books, but will also have access to other formats such as videos, audiobooks, eReaders and images. All of these resources need to be catalogued and organised so that they can be accessed by the user. They also need to be differentiated within the catalogue records so that the user can easily identify that their request for ‘The Odyssey’ includes versions of the epic tale, even if the creator and format differs.

So as the last day of my uni holidays draws to a close I ponder the knowledge I will gain from this subject. I am a bit apprehensive as the assessment tasks are not essays but rather more practically based tasks. I am far better at blathering out epochs than being useful. So this may be a steep learning curve for me. Also, I burnt out a bit last semester so I am just doing the one subject now.

Bring on Session 2, 2019.

References

Encyclopaedia Britannica (2018). Dewey Decimal System. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/science/Dewey-Decimal-Classification

OCLC (2019) How one library pioneer profoundly influenced modern librarianship. Retrieved from https://www.oclc.org/en/dewey/resources/biography.html

Tag Archives: cataloging

50 shades of Mr Darcy

I fell in love with Mr Darcy as a teenager.

With that started the greatest love affair I’ve ever had.

Dewey this…

I was horrified. How on earth was I supposed to find my precious dress buried in the wrong spot???

Apparently my wardrobe organisation is too complicated to understand, and I have too many dresses that look exactly the same.

But I digress.

This blog post is not about my dress acquisition nor my marital disagreements about my wardrobe organisation or Imelda Marcos tendencies.

To sum it up succinctly. I need to learn how a library is organised so that the kiddos can use it successfully.

Libraries are famous for their organisation.