Library and Information Science Editing and Proofreading Services

A collection of oral history recordings is catalogued under the county where the interviews took place. Ten years later, a researcher looking for accounts of a particular industry finds nothing, because nothing was indexed by industry. The recordings are preserved, described and completely unfindable by the question people actually bring to them. That was a decision, taken once, in a cataloguing meeting.

We edit what library and information science researchers and practitioners write — classification and metadata schema documentation, cataloguing policy and local practice notes, information retrieval studies, digital preservation and repository policies, user studies and search behaviour research, collection development and management policy, systematic review search methodology, and theses, articles and conference papers. Our editors work on the classification decision and what it does to retrieval.

Classification decisions are retrieval decisions made in advance, and the failure is a scheme documented as a structure without its consequences. Every choice about where something sits determines who will find it and who will not. We work through these so each significant decision is recorded with the alternatives considered and why they were rejected, since the person revisiting this in a decade needs the reasoning and not just the outcome; so the retrieval consequence of a decision is stated — which queries it serves and which it defeats — because a scheme optimised for one kind of enquiry silently fails another; so local practice and its departures from the standard are documented explicitly, given that undocumented local rules are the commonest cause of inconsistency in a catalogue; so the granularity of description is set against the use expected and the cost stated, as item-level description of everything is rarely affordable and collection-level description hides items; so controlled vocabulary and free text are distinguished with what each is doing; so the treatment of names, variants and historical terminology is stated, since terms that are current now will not be searched for later; and so the schema documentation includes what it does not describe. Documentation written this way remains usable long after its authors have moved on.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including internal policy, unpublished research and collection information. We are editors rather than librarians or information scientists, and we offer no view on schemas, standards or cataloguing practice. What we can do is make the consequences of each decision explicit.