Over the weekend I spent some time trying to figure out how our library vocabulary is changing, and in the end, there are some over-arching themes as well as some underlying trends.

More specifically, I harvested the totality of ITAL (Information Technology and Libraries). And then, to the best of my ability, I sliced the collection into 5-years chunks. I then fed each chunk into my Reader. Part of the Reader's output includes word clouds illustrating the frequency of words. Two are attached.

Both clouds include words like "library", "information", and "data". But I was more interested in prominent words in one set and not another. For example, the earliest chunk (1971-1974) included the following words:

  number; time; file; automation; computer;
  marc; system; catalog; book; will; records

But the newest chuck (2016-2020) did not include those words but it did include different ones:

  digital; web; https; search; research; users;
  content; technology; university; doi; metadata

Based on a tertiary glance, the older literature surrounded MARC records, but the newer literature is: 1) more academic, and 2) has embraced the Internet. Similarly, "cataloging" has morphed into "metadata".

Fun with distant reading.


Data sets

[1] 1971-1974 data set - http://bit.ly/3jaawTy
[2] 2016-2020 data set - http://bit.ly/3thRgIp


-- 
Eric Lease Morgan
Digital Initiatives Librarian, Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship
Hesburgh Libraries

University of Notre Dame
250E Hesburgh Library
Notre Dame, IN 46556
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w: cds.library.nd.edu