The Trouble with ISBNs

This is a post that I wrote for my work blog. ISBNs seemed like such a wonderful idea as a way to identify a unique work, but that was in the days of books being only in two formats, hardback and paperback. Now they could be anything, and the quantity of ISBNs are increasing rapidly. Perhaps it is time to have another think about them.

 As a Librarian and shuffler around of books I have found International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) to be really useful. Unlike what is portrayed in popular media the role of a librarian is not to stamp books and go "Shh" at people aggressively. It is our job to find things and to put things in the right order or place so that other people can find them too. I like to simplistically say that the purpose of a librarian is to sort things out into piles and that is a reasonable basic analogy of what we do. We take the things that hold knowledge, such as books, scrolls, documents, vinyl records, compact discs, digital texts, databases, e-books, anything and we make them "discoverable" by arranging them in ways that are  easy to find. So books can be sorted out into the type of knowledge that they contain, such as History, Geography, Religion, Science and so on. There are many ways that things can be sorted, which is why there are many classification systems - Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress, for example. A book is assigned a particular classification number according to the knowledge that it holds, its content, so there can be many books attributed to the same number. Of course the titles and authors are different. So, what if you want to find a particular book? This is where ISBN numbers come in handy. The number is an official International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard  which was introduced by the book trade in 1970 to identify one publication or edition of a publication published by one specific publisher in one specific format. It was set up to allow automated machine reading of books, or "book like items", such as maps. The thirteen digit number is made up from smaller number groups that have been mathematically calculated to represent different elements. Let's take one of the numbers from the books in the photograph above.
 
 The number above shows that it is an ISBN (preface), it was published in the UK  (geographic element), it was published by Ladybird Books (publisher or imprint) and it is this particular book (edition). In fact it is a hardback book titled The Shed. The machine readable part of the ISBN is the bar code, which can be scanned by a supplier, bookshop staff or library staff to identify that particular publication. ISBNs are issued through national agencies and held on their databases. This means that if you know that you want to buy a copy of the Ladybird Book of the Shed and you have its ISBN number you can type that in to Amazon or a library catalogue you can find out where to buy or borrow it.


 

So each ISBN number is a way of identifying that a printed, hardback copy of the title "The Shed" written by J.A.Hazeley and J.P.Morris was published by Ladybird Books Ltd, Loughborough in 2015. If the publisher decides to sell a paperback or e-book version, or the author wants to update or correct the words or change the illustrations in a second edition, then each one would have a different number in that edition element. Great, perfect for identification - by a machine. Just imagine that you are a  librarian you only want one copy of The Shed and you don't care whether it is hardback or paperback, or you are trying to make space on your selves and only want an e-book and all you have is a long list of numbers and you can't work out which is the e-version, which the paperback and which is the one with different pictures. You see, the "edition " part of the numbers is a unique grouping just for that instance of publication. It is not a code that means e-book, or hardback, or third edition. This is the problem with ISBN, they are just too unique sometimes.

What is needed is an identifier for the intellectual output of that book, whatever the format. Now, I am not very well acquainted with these, but in searching for information for this blog post I have come across International Standard Text Code (ISTC) identifiers. This appears to be a number allocated to the textural content of something, no matter what is wrapped around the outside, metaphorically. So, perhaps these are the numbers to use at a time when any piece of text could available anywhere in any format and the variety of format choice just keeps growing.

This blog was first published on 24th March 2017 in Evidence Base Blog https://ebasebcu.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/the-trouble-with-isbns/

What IS a Librarian? Yet More from Library Camp 2014

What IS a Librarian? I asked at the session which I facilitated at Library Camp 2014. Of course, being a librarian I knew what I was, and the jobs that I did, and the various roles and activities that other librarians do. My reason for asking was to try to find the refined essence of librarianship, the one thing that can be explained to people to show the special skill that a librarian has to have. Like a builder constructs buildings, a medical doctor treats ailments, an accountant looks after finances. There are many nuances to their jobs, but that is their raison d'etre, their reason for being, so what is a librarian's definitive description?

I hoped by the end of the session that we would come up with a sentence or short paragraph that can the define the main quality of librarianship that can be used on websites, campaigns, in literature, letters to MPs, anywhere that the real job of a librarian needs to be explained. In the end we came up with the thought that maybe one snappy definition was not necessarily enough, the phrasing needed to be suitable for the intended audience, but we only had a scant 45 minutes to pursue a basically philosophical argument. We did come up with a number of ideas that certainly identified the threads that make up the tapestry of librarianship, and some good sentences.

I did not do a statistical survey of the jobs of the 15 or so people that came along to the session, so I can't scientifically say that they were a randomised sample of library staff, but I do know that some were qualified librarians, others were not. Some worked in public libraries and others in academic libraries, but they all agreed about the following aspects of librarianship.

• Librarians are a conduit of Knowledge
• Librarians support and facilitate Knowledge creation in the community
• Librarians engender empowerment

Those three statements on their own are powerful thoughts. They demonstrate that librarians deal with the flow of  knowledge from one individual to another. We all thought that there was an educational aspect to librarianship: a librarian doesn't know all the answers, but knows where to find them and can teach other people to do the same thing (information literacy). We realised that there is a spiral of knowledge creation, where a librarian is a key component: a librarian helps someone discover knowledge, the individual gains understanding and then can impart that knowledge, which is collected and distributed by a librarian. This bit really could do with a diagram, I need to think about this.

Meanwhile, here are some of the statements that were constructed:

"Our business is helping people access information"

"A librarian serves and empowers users and communities by sharing, facilitating and supporting access to knowledge and information"

"A librarian is a conduit of information who supports his/her users, and through sharing and facilitating this knowledge, thus empowers them"

"A librarian is a facilitator who supports the user and shares knowledge with information to empower and server their appropriate audience"

Well, I think there is enough there to show that a librarian is a Knowledge Broker. It is not all about books.

It's about anything that can contain knowledge: people, computers, images, maps, data, objects and artefacts, anything.

I promised the people who came to my Library Camp session that I would blog about the session and perhaps write something about it, so I am sorry that it has taken me a while to get around to it, but now I have I am inspired to go into more depth, and write that article.