Joseph Parker

Joseph Parker

LIS 530

3/7/2026

Organizational Golden Rules

Thinking about what to prioritize when creating guildies for a catalog, collection, or other resource was an interesting exercise because it not only allowed for some perspective into how other organizations are already doing it but some reflection into what we want to bring into our own practice. We were looking at a scenario where people were researching historical measurement methodologies. When building our “golden rules” I pushed for verifiability as a top priority deviating a bit from what we looked at in the IFLA^[1]  document because I think that without it none of the other aspects are useful. User experience is important but useless if the users cannot feel a level of trust that the resources they are being provided, especially in this case where we are working with both historical and scientific records, are verifiable. Allowing users access to the information that allows them to determine authorship, publishing, important dates, and other information relegated to provenance and methodology allows them to gain this level of trust.

It was also interesting to do this in a group setting because even in a small group there were different priorities in these rules. Like Fienberg^[2] noted it is very easy to get into the mindset that your practices and ideal procedures are logical and make complete sense until you look at someone else's and realize that they are thinking the exact same thing. Working on this assignment, and other assignments for the program, opened up the opportunity to connect with these other perspectives. Seeing the ways in which the materials and the assignments have been interpreted by others has not only made me more willing to go back and take a second look, to explore more of the ideas under this new light, but it has also helped me to realize that i too should be making sure my own perspective gets into the discussion. Reflecting on group work for another class I came to the idea that good collaboration comes from a willingness to speak up for yourself and a willingness to be wrong. I think that applies especially to schema and large scale organizational structures like those we explored for this assignment. Through these conversations, and disagreements, we can make better sense of our own ideas and their connections to others, find areas to compromise, and better realize where we are unwilling to compromise and why. This type of collaboration is also a great way to anticipate the issues end users might have and so having more perspectives and voices allows us to better anticipate user experiences and attempt to address them. Talking through our ideas and prioritizing the needs of our audience I think we ended up with a pretty reasonable set of standards that could be applied in a special collections environment to allow for this type of researcher to be comfortable and find the resources that they are looking for.

---