School of Information Management & Systems   Spring 2000.   Michael Buckland.
245 Organization of Information in Collections

Assignment 2: Describe Four Books   Due at class Jan 31.

Describe your choice of any four of the following books which are in the Computer Lab.

The Example of Miss Edith M. Coulter
The Explorers Ltd Source Book
Handbook of Homemade Power
The Loom of Language
The Spider of Brooklyn Heights
Tao Te Ching
The Works of "Saki"

Forget or disregard anything you knew or imagined about cataloging rules or metadata standards.
For each of your four books, you choose which features of the books you will describe and you should describe them however you wish to. Do it your way! This is an ungraded assignment.

Supply on paper using the following format: On the left, specify the feature (attribute) and on the right supply your description, followed by a brief explanation of why you think that feature (attribute) worth describing and (unless obvious) why you chose to describe it that way.

Postscript: Use, for each book, whatever features YOU think appropriate for that book. YOUR PERSONAL choice of features, not what you imagine my choices would be, nor the choices in any standard set of rules. This is an ungraded assignment. All you have to do is to bring what you have done to class and hand in what you have done. It would surprise me if everyone made the same decisions. The objective is get you thinking about what the options are and to provide a basis for some informal class discussion about describing documents, BEFORE worrying about what different official standards prescribe.