lib-ir: Sociology & Collection Names

[Barbara Jenkins <jenkins@uoregon.edu>]

Brett and I had a short talk about this.  I recommend that we just
go with Papers, since Working Papers has such a sense of
"incomplete" in this discipline.  Once we have multiple
categories in a discipline they may need a collection definition, but I
think it isn't necessary right now.

Brett did suggest a potential sociology gatekeeper, Michael
Dreiling.  I will contact Michael in a few weeks, once classes have
calmed down and initiate a conversation.  If he is interested, he
can get a fuller picture by meeting with JQ and Carol. 
Barbara

At 06:17 AM 9/26/2003 -0700, you wrote:
> Brett (our sociology grad student)
> asks a great question.
>
> >I was thinking that it might be useful to have a collection
> under
> > the Sociology community called Papers, given that working
> papers,
> > within Sociology generally refers to papers that haven't been
> > published.  I know that within economics they have many
> working
> > papers, which serve as valuable resources for study.  So
> both
> > categories would be important to have available.
>
> > I have talked to a couple professors within the Soc. department
> and
> > there seems to be some interest in the project
>
> In a mature DSpace implementation we'd defer to the organization
> corresponding to the community to decide what collections it wants,
> but
> for now we need to offer guidance.  I don't think we want too
> many
> separate collections, since that will confuse our users, but there's
> a
> tradeoff between generic name (flexible) and specific name (gives
> useful
> information on what we are actually trying to collect).
>
> DSpace collections are primarily a tool for managing ingress of
> items
> since they can have access control.  But they also are visible to
> the
> patrons so they serve a categorization function.
>
> So, questions, mostly to Barbara as the instigator of a Sociology
> community, and to Carol since this is a cataloging/categorization
> question as well as a collection devel question:  What
> collection(s)
> should we initially have in the Sociology community?  Should we,
> for
> instance, rename "Sociology working papers" to be just
> "Sociology
> papers"?  Should we write a short collection development
> statement that
> expresses the intended types of works that belong in this
> collection?
> Should we have multiple collections in Sociology (I'd prefer not to
> at
> the moment)?  Are Brett's papers, which I gather span a range of
> topics,
> all appropriate for a "Sociology papers" collection (and do we
> care)?
>
> JQ

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Barbara Jenkins jenkins@uoregon.edu
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