School of Information Management & Systems.   Spring 2002.
245 Organization of Information in Collections.   Michael Buckland.

Assignment 3: Describe Four Books.   Due at class on Feb 6.

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

The Diligent Destroyers.
Handbook of Homemade Power.
Romanian Rugs.
Seven Famous Greek Plays.
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!

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.

Format: Please use a format with the following components:
Feature ("Attribute"):   Year.
Description ("Value"):   1668.
Explanation, comment (if needed):   Julian calendar.

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. Keep any notes you make, as they are likely to be helpful in a later assignment.