Commonwealth of Data

One of the funny things that's come up in my readings is the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (A. A. C. R.). The idea behind it was that people should be able to read and decode any catalogue/library entry, by use of a common format. The fact of the existence of these standards might sound dry as a bone to you (and it was to me too), except that I learner a few cool facts, which got me thinking.

As well as providing a standard format, it also standardised features of the language. From my training as a TESOL teacher, I know that the difference between British English and American English is as different as say French and Quebecois. These rules standardised which spelling is used for what, and which punctuation is used.

Then there are the countries where it applies. Originally of course,it was a collaboration between the British Library and the Library of Congress, based on initial standards from the British Museum. Canada naturally joined in too, and so did Australia, and (West) Germany. To my knowledge, Ireland and New Zealand didn't adopt these rules.

These rules were also brought into line with the International Standard Bibliographic Description (I. S. B. D.), published in 2007. These rules and standards were brought about by collaboration instead of regulation, which could be why they are not widely used outside of the concerned profession. The organised network which drew these up recognises wider applications for information transfer and protection (copyright).

With my previous work in market research, I also came across standards for statistical classifications between Australia and New Zealand. Given that, I wonder if formulation and implementation of rules like this should be a role for the Commonwealth of Nations. The Commonwealth is a natural place to co-ordinate and harmonise information transfer, short of a authority like UNESCO. We already have applications that can link libraries from Australia to Uruguay, as I discovered using public libraries in Melbourne. Using intergovernmental panels could not generate extra goodwill and cohesion amongst their member nations, and strengthen professional networks. It would also make institutions like the Commonwealth more relevant.

What's in the name?

Thanks for checking out my new 'blog, which I intend to use as a personal catalogue of my investigation of information management. It's a surprisingly broad area, which was a bit of a surprise to me when I first started looking at it last year. People originally called it "library science", which I had never thought of as a career path before. After all, there's the old saying that if you love books, don't work in a library, because you'll never get to read them.

The other possibilities are quite broad: I previously worked in an I.T. company selling equipment for 'big data' storage and processing, so that's not something which is going away. Public catalogues and archives are used by all sorts of people, for all sorts of things. I even used the earliest maps of Ipswich from Queensland's State Archives to make Christmas presents last year.

To introduce you to my thinking, then, I want to go through my surprisingly inspired thinking for the name of this blog.
First of all, you might notice that it's a Latin pun: Libera mea, "liberate me".

When I was reading and writing for I.T. blogs, I thought a bit about why people still refer to "libraries" for data. This word itself also has a Latin origin, ultimately from liber, the inner bark of trees [paper]. Because the only people concerned with books for a long time in my cultural/historical context were the Catholic Church, the word libraries stuck, replacing previous English words like "book-hoard" or "book-house". Fun fact: the word libricide was also briefly in use, for the destruction of books, and knowledge generally.

[Side benefit, I get to say that I needed to play a computer game for uni. work. Hopefully, that tradition holds up!]


If you ask me, catalogue [for those of us who aren't American] is a much better word for handling records of various types. It comes from Greek: variously translated as "a reckoning list", "a complete count", or a "record of words". Then again, describing myself as a "cataloguing student" would be even more boring than library/data scientist, or data/information management.

Why libram? It turns out not to be a real word, in an academic sense. It was invented as a deliberately arcane word for a heavy book, since being popularised by media like Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft. It struck me as being very appropriate then, to describe a digital/virtual record; in a literal sense, it is not a real, physical object.

I didn't have much interest in blogging honestly before coming up with this title. Here's hoping it's enjoyable for each of us, as we delve into Libram Mea in Terra Australis, my digital rants and data-dumps.