Teaching Associate Professor David Dubin, Postdoctoral Research Associate Jacob Jett, and Adjunct Lecturer Bobby Bothmann presented their research at the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (NASKO 2021), which was held virtually on July 9-11. The theme of this year's symposium was "Resilience, Resistance, and Reflection: Knowledge Organization at a Crossroads."
The researchers presented their paper, "To Map or Not to Map: Rethinking Crosswalk Agendas," in which they review developments in cataloging during the last fifty years that have led to competing explanations for works of authorship, art, and design, and standards proposed for describing their complexities.
"Colleagues of ours believe that sharing records between databases using these different accounts (IFLA’s Library Reference Model and the Library of Congress's BIBFRAME) will require systems for translating records from one model to the other, but we suggest that LRM and BIBFRAME may instead play complementary roles in bibliographic description, even without a translation map or switching language," said Dubin. "In our presentation, we focused on conceptual analysis as a tool for using models like LRM and BIBFRAME in systems design, and we responded to critics who have expressed skepticism of the usefulness of conceptual analysis."
Dubin's research interests include the foundations of information representation and description, and issues of expression and encoding in documents and digital information resources. He teaches courses on information organization and access, and information modeling. Dubin received his PhD in information science from the University of Pittsburgh.
Jett's research is primarily focused on information modeling issues with a special focus on ontology, controlled vocabulary, and schema development for Semantic Web infrastructure. He earned his PhD in library and information science from the iSchool at Illinois, where he also completed his master's and Certificate of Advanced Study work.
Bothmann is the catalog and metadata librarian at Minnesota State University, Mankato. At the iSchool, he has taught courses on bibliographic metadata. He holds a master's in library and information science from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and a master's in geography and English technical communication from the Minnesota State University, Mankato.