An Open Letter to Heidi Tandy

[ivyblossom]

Dear Heidi,

FA is a very large archive. I'm not sure if there is an archive dedicated to one fandom that's as big as FA, in fact. Organizing and searching through that thing is complicated, just because of the sheer size of it. The focus right now is what's on what's recent; it's easier to find stuff that's brand new. That makes sense, but it's kind of piling everything on top of each other as it comes in, isn't it.

This isn't a new problem. Every time people start collecting information they hit the same wall. Back when the fandom had three fics it was no big deal, you could have them in any order you wanted. You could say, hmm, I think I want to look at that one, and everyone knew which one you meant. But the more you get, he more you need to organize and, dare I say it, catalogue it. Alphabetical just doesn't cut it; ask any student who's ventured into a library. What if your library collection went with the alphabetical system? You'd never be able to look up a call number and go look at see what's around it, there would be no browsing. There's no relationship between Adams and Adamson except that they sit close to each other alphabetically. One could write about nuclear physics and the other about pornographic scuplture. You wouldn't be able to use the system as a tool to help you find more of what you want, you see. You'd be at the mercy of the alphabet; where is that book? Where can I find that author? Meh, not useful, I tell you. Not when you've got serious volume, like many fanfiction archives do.

I have a modest proposal. Picture it: fanfiction, organized according to...

the Dewey Decimal System.

I mean, we'd have to tweak it a bit, but...imagine! You could search your digital bookshelf and find all similar fics together. You could highlight the new ones, or you could have a 'just in' section. Also organized according to Dewey, of course. But we could called the Ivy Decimal System, of course.

124: Harry/Draco
124.5 Harry/Draco, angst
124.534: Harry/Draco, "how they got together", angst
124.534973: Harry/Draco, "how they got together, angst, set in America
124.55, Harry/Draco, parody
124.55973 Harry/Draco, parody, set in America
130: Harry/Ron
130.5: Harry/Ron, angst
130.5973: Harry/Ron, angst, set in America
130.9999973 Harry/Ron, with Mary Sue, set in America

Come on, it would be beautiful! A masterpiece of organization! Subdivided by geography, style, length, whatever. And if someone comes up with a new pairing you just make a new heading, this is the beauty of the DDC! You could search it by subject, by pairing, by author...think of the possibilities! Your Snape/Remus sap fics grouped together, apart from Snape/Remus sappy fics set in America with a Mary Sue! It's how fics want to be arranged, can you hear them crying?

I hope you will consider my suggestion.

Sincerely,

Ivy Blossom, rabid aspiring librarian

Edited to add: This open letter is not a challenge or a criticism, nor is it a response to anyone turning down this idea. I was just thinking about this after cataloguing class and I wanted to tell Heidi about it, but she was not online. So I wrote her an open letter instead, because I thought some of the librarians and proto-librarians on my friends list might enjoy my inanity. That is all.

Comments

[jennilee.livejournal.com]

Wow. That sure would take a helluva lot of work. Sounds great though.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

It would be a serious project, yes. Maybe we could get funding for that. I would volunteer to catalogue it.

[tropes.livejournal.com]

Oh god.

As an aspiring librarian myself, I just have to say...

*HUMPS*

That is all.

[tropes.livejournal.com]

And, by the way, if there is a Harry/Ron, with Mary Sue, set in America, can we please burn it? Because I love multiplicity just as much as the next infobitch, but that's just wrong!

[ladylynx.livejournal.com]

OMG, I love you. You're so cute. LOL.

Ivy Decimal System, the wave of the fic future.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

It would be like the library of congress...everyone could copycat the cataloguing system, download the records, you know. We already have authority files and stuff...

I just can't manage to do anything and leave it separate from anything else I'm doing...did I mention that I wrote a paper about how the library of congress catalogues books about slash fanfiction? My prof must think I'm insane.

[undrockroll.livejournal.com]

like... there's a rhyme and reason to those numbers?? :o oh meeee... eep

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Heeehehehee. It's okay, you don't need to be one with Dewey. You can just rely on your trusty neighbourhood fanfiction librarian. :)

[cypress-vine.livejournal.com]

I like. Kudos to you on the idea. :P

[pornography.livejournal.com]

And all the Mary Sue fics would be left in the corner, covered in dust :P

[adi-das.livejournal.com]

AHAHAHA that's fucking hilarious XDDD *wanders back out now then* XDDD

[versaphile.livejournal.com]

I like the idea. I've had my own grapples with organization of fic with my recs sites, but I thought of that in terms of keywords. Back when I set up the recs sites, and now when I set up archives, I'm still itching for some definite formalized structure. I've tried moving back towards more traditional genre definitions, but that doesn't work right either. Fandom is definitely its own organizational beast.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

It's so true. It's crying out for Dewey, I swear to God. Though Dewey might not be quite precise enough for us. But I think we could do it, I swear. OMG RESEARCH PROJECT, YO. Noooo I'd never live it down if I came up with a HP fanfiction cataloguingi system...

[tromboneborges.livejournal.com]

Well, then, of course, we could truly treat FA as a digital library, build Dublin-Corr records for all the fics, and use our new bibliographic data to improve search over fics.

And hey, if we have DDC, a nice button that says, "find me fics near this fic."

*gets into the act*

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Oh this is so beyond Dublin Core, man. This is, like...digital library as close to the traditional library as can be imagined....until recently I was all about LCC, but yo. Dewey rocks out. I bet it wouldn't even be that hard, since there's already a lot of metadata collected on each fic...

SOMEONE STOP ME.

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

That's the coolest geeky idea evar. Because at the moment, you kinda have to know what you're looking for before you can find anything. *fangirls the Ivy Decimal System*

[clemencederoch.livejournal.com]

I love it! IloveitIloveitIloveit!!!!

[bloodybrilliant.livejournal.com]

The State!!!!

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Yeah! I approve!

[venivincere]

You're brill, you know that?

[kxo.livejournal.com]

Brilliant. This has to be the coolest, geekiest idea ever, and I love it.

[airemay.livejournal.com]

You are such a geeky librarian, but that's okay. <3 librarians.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Ahh...no no no. I just hope to become a geeky librarian. :) Hehehee.

[mawaridi.livejournal.com]

You know, that is so crazy that it's actually quite brilliant. Someone should do it. Really.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I think so too, really. It would be so handy. :)

[cincodemaygirl.livejournal.com]

*loves*

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

*loves more*

[anneliese.livejournal.com]

I think I love you.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I know I love you.

*smooches*

[folk.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a really damn good idea. Did you actually suggest this?

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Well...I thought I just did. :)

[lia-alexandra.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure you would any anybody (or bodies as it would take many people) to take on that task. Yes, it is a good idea. But, (and there is a but) you would have to re-organise the whole Dewey system, so why not just start at 1000 (which is where I believe the Dewey system ends). And then, even if you do start at 1000, you have to number every possible couple and feeling and where it's set, etc..

But I see you're point. It would be easier. Although, everyone would have to learn the 'Ivy' system, unless the search was kept for a while, which I believe is a good idea. And who is going to read every single fic and place it? What if they fly to America but was originally set in England? Things to ponder.

If someone did the 'Ivy' system, it would be wonderful. I just can't see anyone wanting to take on that task.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure you would any anybody (or bodies as it would take many people) to take on that task.

I've done stupider things. :)

Yes, it is a good idea. But, (and there is a but) you would have to re-organise the whole Dewey system, so why not just start at 1000 (which is where I believe the Dewey system ends). And then, even if you do start at 1000, you have to number every possible couple and feeling and where it's set, etc..

But what would be the purpose of starting at 1000? I mean, most of the Dewey subjects are irrelevant in this context. Basically what we need is a very very specific, and very very simplistic Dewey system with a fairly set number of subject headings. There are a million topics for fics, but only a limited number of ways that fandom tends to group those topics. So you could just pare a lot of that stuff down, but change things like, "subdivide by geog." into subdivide by something else.

But I see you're point. It would be easier. Although, everyone would have to learn the 'Ivy' system, unless the search was kept for a while, which I believe is a good idea.

First, no one would have to learn the system. No one understands Dewey, but the organization works. All people know is that when they go to a specific section to find a book, they find lots of others just like it around it. And that the subjects tend to progress from topic to topic as you walk along the stacks. No one needs to understand more than that, as an end user. If they find a fic they like they can jump out to the catalogue to see what's around it, and browse from there. And who said anything about getting rid of the search? All libraries have searchable catalogues; why get rid of a search?

And who is going to read every single fic and place it? What if they fly to America but was originally set in England? Things to ponder.

You don't have to read them all. The files already have metadata with them. Author, title, pairing, summary, keywords. You'd just need to extrapolate from those.

<333333333333333333

[xandria.livejournal.com]

Your brain scares me.

I love it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

X

Re: <333333333333333333

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

*flashes proto-librarian brain*

I know how you love to be scared. :)

[kerri]

This is such a brilliant idea! And it should be workable, too - it would take some work, yeah, since there would need to be some changes made to the Submission form, and of course the setup would have to change as well, but - yes. I used to work in a library, and this calls to me. Yay for good ideas.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Totally! They're already collecting metadata, they've got an abstract, they've got keywords, authority files....it's just ASKING to be catalogued. If I didn't think my prof would give me the weirdest look ever I would tell him all about it. :)

[contrariwise.livejournal.com]

::hearts::

Hm. Of course, to do it properly, a controlled vocabulary should be established and agreed upon, otherwise the catalogers will be all over the place, and the users won't have the slightest idea how to search. There are too many instances where a pairing is indicated with a first-name/last-name situation (Harry/Snape), or both (is it Sirius/Snape or Black/Snape?), and then there are some that are almost always first-name/first-name (Harry/Draco). Just to name one sticking point for the end-user.

It sounds like so much fun!

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I think that just because we'd go Dewey doesn't mean things would get more complicated for the end user. If we had general categories, and then 10 categories within each general category, people could browse more easily. And yes, there would have to be a controlled vocabulary for the ships, but I think that's nearly a given as it is now. We'd just need to standardize it for the site. There's no reason why we can't do subject, author, and keyword searches too. FA already has keywords included.

*defends original parody idea* WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME?

[citizenjess.livejournal.com]

I love it; ever since I got to college, the lack of Dewey Decimal-ness has been a constantly sore subject. It's such an understandable system; the simplicity would give way to how inherently cool it is, though, separating all the Harry/Draco w/Mary Sues from Hermione/Mrs. Norris in America 'fics. You have my vote!

[adinasauce.livejournal.com]

the lack of Dewey Decimal-ness has been a constantly sore subject. I SO feel you on that. I learned all about libraries when I was in Primary and Secondary school. So I thought I'd be fine in a college library. I was wrong. Apparently they don't think the 500's should all be grouped together, oh no, some should be on the third floor; and some should be on the second. YARRRGH. I bet the librarians at my school (who, according to the website, are hired from outside sources) are ready to shoot themselves.

No wonder they're always hiring.

[nostrademons.livejournal.com]

Heh. Cute. But as an avid bibliophile, MHO is that the Dewey system has some fairly serious problems, and is not something I'd want to impose on an electronic archive. In short, I think we can do better.

To start with, Dewey is fundamentally hierarchical. It divides all texts up into subjects, then subsubjects, then sub-sub-subjects, and so on. Then it imposes a linear ordering on them. This makes sense from a library's point of view - after all, you've gotta shelve these books somehow, and we can't have complex information topologies in our plain old 3-D space. (Though I just had this really cool vision of of a library with non-Euclidean topology, where stacks of books intersect based on converging subjects...it'd be like an Escher library!)

But information, at its core, does not follow a hierarchical pattern. Books and stories and other snippets of information fall into multiple categories, so you end up with a graph instead of a tree. I remember my first experiences using the library. I was looking for stuff on warships - but I found that the books of interest were spread far and wide. Current reference books like Jane's Fighting Ships were in the reference section. Historical narratives were in the 940.54s, primarily, but were spread throughout the 900s. I found a bunch in, I think, the 380s, which is God-knows-where (I remember it was near the porn section, though).

That's not very conducive to browsing. Ideally, I'd just be able to go to some information nexus and find everything I wanted about warships. But what if someone was looking for historical information on European history? Some of these books would belong in their nexus too. And what if someone wanted military weapons in general? They'd also need a subset.

(contd in next comment)

[nostrademons.livejournal.com]

Computer scientists have come up with a solution to this problem. It's called a relational database. FA has one, and will hopefully be using it for the fics in the eventual future. The idea behind a relational database is that information can have many different facets - different fields - and you can issue ad-hoc queries to put together different views, based on which fields you're interested in. So, in the example above, I could just issue the query SELECT * FROM books, subjects WHERE books.book_id = subjects.book_id AND subjects.name = warships; or something like that. Even better, if I wanted to find only books written by Samuel Elliott Morrison on World War II Warships, I could refine that to SELECT * FROM books, subjects WHERE books.book_id = subjects.book_id AND books.author = "Samuel Elliott Morrison" AND subjects.name = "warships" and subjects.name = "World War II". Computerized library databases work like that.

(Incidentally, you might note that your computer's filesystem works exactly like the Dewey Decimal System...you have a hierarchy of directories, starting at the root, where you have folders to put your files. If a file belongs in two different categories, you need to create a Shortcut to it, which is basically what the card catalog does. But the next version of Windows will work much more like the database I just described. You attach attributes to your files, and can then query at will for whatever attributes you like.)

To give you a sneak-peak into the forthcoming FA system, it'll store data on ships, characters, genres, and eras, along with more mundane stuff like date published, hit counts, and title and author. Then you can search by any combination of those. So, you could say "Give me all post-Hogwarts romance fics that feature Harry/Hermione or Ron/Hermione where the main character is Hermione", or "Give me all Ron/Draco fics that take place in their 5th-7th years and involve lots of angst". I think (though I haven't read the spec recently) that you could even do stuff like "Give me all fics featuring Ron or Harry at Hogwarts that are not Ron/Hermione but are romance".

The one thing I don't like about such a relational database is that the attributes themselves are fixed. You can specify any combination of ships/genres/eras/characters, but we have to make the decision that ships, genres, eras, and characters are what are important. If a new attribute came along, say, stylistic devices, we'd have to modify the software by hand to incorporate that. And such a modification would be fairly painful.

As a little on-my-own research project, I'm investigating tuple spaces as a means to solve that. A tuple space is sort of like a relational database, but it doesn't impose the same constraints on records. Basically, tuples can have whatever attributes make sense for them. This makes adding a new attribute fairly easy. But then there are problems in searching, if everybody makes up their own attributes. Sometimes the extra constraints on relational tables really do make things easier.

BTW, I prefer Library-Of-Congress to Dewey. Dewey suffers from having only 10 major subject areas, so when computers came around, they had to shove them in the 001s, which is I believe next to the occult. LOC offers up to 26^2 main subject areas, which is much more appropriate IMHO.