Library of Congress Cataloging Newsline
LCCN, Feb. 25, 2014 ISSN 2324-6464 LCCN: appreciating Barbara Tillett, part 2 by Melanie Polutta, with material from an interview of Barbara Tillett on November 14, 2012 Well, during our last posting about Barbara Tillett, we left her in California at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, busy with a variety of cataloging. But she has always had an inquisitive mind, and so she decided to study further in her chosen career as a librarian. To do this, she went on to pursue a doctorate, which turned out to be highly influential in cataloging. Here is the story of how she got there. ******* MKP: So, you graduated with the library science degree in 1970, but then you didn't do the PhD work until '87, so what led you to do the dissertation and the graduate work? BT: Getting bored doing the same work over and over and over again every day for fourteen years. I decided I really needed to use my "little gray cells," as Poirot would say [laughter (Poirot <http://lccn.loc.gov/sh89002630> http://lccn.loc.gov/sh89002630)], and get back into doing things I really loved in terms of the theoretical side of things, so I originally thought when I went to get my Ph.D., and I talked to Elaine Svenonius, as my advisor, that I wanted to design the perfect library system. MKP: Ooh, ambitious. BT: And I had great ideas, I still have great ideas, because I keep thinking, a topological approach with a network, graph-based, again building on my math background, I really think that that model would be a fantastic system for information discovery and I may. that may be something to do in my retirement, actually, getting back to that. But she [Elaine Svenonius] disabused me of that very quickly and said, no, the library world just needs some theoretical foundations first. We really don't have a good theory of what's underlying everything going on, so I chose bibliographic relationships to see what are all of the possible relationships, things can have to each other in the - bibliographic in the broader sense, I mean, anything in libraries, archives, and museums, they could be interconnected, the resources we collect. And so I was put into that path. And so that took me from - what was it? '80 or '81? to '87 to finish that. I was working fulltime - I do not recommend doing that at all. It was a stupid thing, I had NO life, poor Steve [her husband], how he put up with me during all those years, studying and writing and working - he's just an absolute angel. MKP: Yeah, and I can even remember doing the basics of Master's work, you never really feel like you've done enough. BT: Really, and there's just so much to explore when you're doing a Ph.D. student and it's so interesting and exciting and you want to spend more time doing it, but then I had my fulltime job and my Ph.D. was from UCLA - that was a three-hour drive from UCSD - so three hours up there, three hours back - it was just crazy. And they expected, there was one period of time where I had to take a temporary, sort of, leave of absence, or actually use up all my vacation time, from UC San Diego to physically be there right before I did the exams. MKP: Yeah, because a Ph.D. requires a certain amount of residency. BT: exactly, it was a residency requirement for UCLA. MKP: Wow. BT: But that was just insane. I don't, do NOT recommend that at all for anybody. That's just terrible. MKP: It does sound extremely exhausting. BT: It was, it was. It was. And it was, like, six or seven years of it. Do NOT do that. MKP: I will take warning. . BT: But it offered me the opportunity to take the bigger picture and see what the history of cataloging was. I had to do that in order to understand how they dealt with relationships along the way, so I basically studied all of the Anglo-American tradition of cataloging rules, with a little sprinkling out to Prussian rules and stuff like that. MKP: Did you study any rules outside of the Anglo-American tradition? BT: As I said, just the Prussian instructions, but they were very much interconnected at the time. MKP: Okay, so looking at the title of that Ph.D. dissertation, [Bibliographic Relationships: Toward a Conceptual Structure of Bibliographic Information Used in Cataloging] it seems pretty obvious to me that there is a linkage to what FRBR [Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records: Final Report] ended up being. BT: Absolutely, because when I finished, Tom Delsey, who was involved in the Cataloguing Section of IFLA invited me to come talk about my dissertation at IFLA, and very soon after that we launched into starting the FRBR process. Tom Delsey had been doing similar kinds of activities when he was working at the National Library of Canada, which is now Library and Archives Canada, and while I was doing my dissertation, I consulted with him as well as with the Library of Congress and came to do some research here as part of the background stuff. But they were doing that kind of modeling in Canada, as well as in Australia, so I met Warren Cathro in Australia and had conversations with him. And there was a little bit of that modeling and analysis going on here at LC, but not much. It was really happening other places, IFLA's Stockholm conference with Tom Delsey and Elaine Svenonius, and others deciding IFLA should explore a theoretical model. I was still working at UC San Diego, and I was hired as a consultant to IFLA, along with Tom and Elaine, and early on also Ben Tucker from LC, but then he retired, and he withdrew from that. MKP: He was the one from LC? BT: He was actually my predecessor here at LC as head of Cataloging Policy, which was an interesting turn of events. So the IFLA consultants for FRBR were me from the University of California, Ben Tucker from the Library of Congress, Tom Delsey from the National Library of Canada, and Elaine Svenonius from the UCLA library school -- basically coming up with the theoretical model. MKP: So you were the ones who basically wrote what turned out to be FRBR? BT: Yeah, I would really credit most of the writing to Tom Delsey... He's absolutely brilliant, though, I just have all good things to say about him, but trying to get through FRBR the book is pretty hard, pretty dense. MKP: It takes a while, to go back and read it more than once. Repetition helps. BT: [laughter] Somehow soaks in after a while. MKP: Well, I think it wasn't until the third time I heard you present on FRBR and RDA that certain ideas suddenly clicked, and I said, "Oh! That's what the expression is." BT: That's what it is really about, how you communicate those thoughts and ideas. MKP: And I still have to work at it sometimes, 'cause it's not a simple concept to get. BT: No, it's not. MKP: It makes sense once you interact with it. BT: And in fact, we had collapsed work and expression at one point, but then really decided that "expression" was important to have for lots of communities, like, think what would happen with Folger Shakespeare Library if they didn't have Expression aspects to distinguish among all of the various versions of "Hamlet" over time, for example, in different languages, in different variations of editions and versions. MKP: and taking it beyond the bibliographic world, think of, like, a painting, and the different versions, and prints, and copies. BT: Oh, my gosh, and the relationships that it has to those reproductions and translations, so that's where relationships come back in again. MKP: And that's one of those things that over time I begin to understand more, that the relationship is really, in many ways, the most important aspect of what FRBR offers. BT: Yeah, to me it's fundamental, and it's just the whole underpinnings of what we're trying to do to help people find things, is show them all the interconnections. It's kind of like Google, whatever, the early systems were doing, you know, you find something and it said, "oh you found this, maybe you'd like to see this," and you know, Amazon does that all the time. Other people bought this product, you may find these interesting, and so offers up other things to suggest to users what might be really interesting - because there is some relationship. ******* And so her life continues. After all this, she finally came to LC and engaged in the work of. _____ Erratum: In part one of this series, the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics was incorrectly referenced as Hawaiian Institute of Geophysics. We apologize for the error. Disclaimer: This message does not represent official Library of Congress communications. Links to external Internet sites on Library of Congress Web pages do not constitute the Library's endorsement of the content of their Web sites or of their policies or products. Please read our Standard Disclaimer. ( <http://www.loc.gov/global/disclaim.html> http://www.loc.gov/global/disclaim.html) LCCN is available in electronic form only and is free of charge. 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