Context
Created
March 2024
Assignment
Classification - Analyze
Roles
- Described the attributes and details of an existing classification system: Vancouver Black Library’s (VBL) Bespoke Classification Standard
- Analyzed and reflected on elements including:
- Strengths
- Fitting Use Cases
- Gaps and Issues
Sample
Peer Review Feedback
Hi JJ! Fantastic topic you chose! I think this might be the first VBL one I've seen and I'm really glad to have a chance to take a look at it through your introductory comments. Great points about the adaptability of the resource as well as its strengths. or think this is a really useful system and I especially like your call-out to Adler! I think the places you could/would want to expand and edit are obvious (mostly drafting it out more) so I won't go into that as much, I just wanted to say that I hope you do expand this more as this could be the start of a really fantastic article or research project! let me know if you have any questions or if there's any ways I can help you.
Learning Significance
What does the activity mean to you?
When I first started volunteering at the Vancouver Black Library, I both appreciated and felt overwhelmed by the overlapping and detailed cataloguing instructions, systems integration and conscientious content schema I encountered. That was my first exposure to doing any cataloguing work, and I'm grateful to have slowly experiment and learn the basics in that setting. It wasn't until I got the opportunity to intimately research, analyze and articulate the less obvious history, infrastructure and design choices at VBL through this assignment that I recognized the impressive labour, care and expertise behind it all. The word limit was a challenge given the breadth of details I could have included, but I'm glad that parament kept my writing concise and digestible. In addition to sharing my submission with VBL community volunteers, I also passed it along to two iSchool friends interested in the collections management and cataloguing insights it might provide.
Having this completed this analysis, along with my Standardizing Zine Metadata – xZINECOREx submission, tackling the VBL Zine Cataloguing project feels like an inviting and rewarding next step to explore this summer. I would also like to reconnect with Bri to explore how I might expand this submission further into an article or research project, as per their suggestion.