MIK-TradsPractice-REV-030807-p. 1
Traditions of Practice in Information Organization[*]
Francis Miksa © 2003 All rights reserved.
Introduction
The enormous growth of the information entity universe, particularly since the invention of printing, has made it increasingly difficult to exercise control over the information objects in it. This growth has in turn spawned a series of continuing efforts to devise tools of information organization that make access to the objects possible. The tools themselves have taken the form of artifacts and technologies (lists, catalogs, computerized retrieval systems) and organizational schemes (classification schemes, cataloging rules) that have taken on lives of their own as they have been refined. The efforts to produce such tools and practices are described here as information organization traditions of practice.
A tradition, following the ideas of Edward Shils, is so named because it consists of systems of technology, beliefs, and practices handed down from the past to the present and which in the course of being handed down have been modified to one degree or another as new applications for them have been encountered.[1]
Since virtually all in the modern world who use information entities organizes them in one way or another or is the recipient of organizational practices for them provided by someone else, the total possible number of information organization traditions will necessarily be very great.[2] What is referred to here, however, are information organization traditions which have gained special significance during the modern period in terms of the large numbers of people involved in them, the development of bodies of knowledge pertaining to them, and the effect they have had on the social institution of access to information. Seven such information organization traditions will be briefly described here: Bibliography, Library Cataloging, Indexing and Abstracting, Documentation/Information Storage and Retrieval, Archival Enterprise, Records Management, and Museum Information Organization. These seven are not the only information organization traditions, but rather constitute what appear to be the most important, at least from the standpoint of the control of information entities as described here. The purpose for describing them is to portray the general landscape of information organization so that some idea of the breadth of that work will be more apparent.
Bibliography as an Information Organization Tradition.
Bibliography is the first of the modern information organization traditions to have developed having come into prominence during the 16th century. Conrad Gesner (1516-1565) is generally spoken of as the first notable modern bibliographer, but since his time an unbroken procession of bibliographers of equal or even greater stature have labored in the tradition.
Enumerative Bibliography. Bibliography arose as a response to the invention and spread of printing and the growth of a literate general population in Europe. Its basic purpose was to enumerate (i.e., to make lists of) printed books in order to establish control over a realm that was already expanding rapidly. In short, bibliography wished no more nor less than to identify and describe what had been and was being printed. Making such lists in turn fostered a vocabulary of technical and specialized terms (e.g., edition, printing), schemes of arrangement for the lists (e.g., alphabetical, systematic), and a grammar of book description. For this reason this most basic emphasis in bibliography lends itself to the name “enumerative.”
When enumerative bibliography began, the activity of the bibliographer appears to have been more involved than simply describing books and listing them, the task that is central to the idea of enumeration. Bibliographers also had to expend a great deal of energy simply establishing that any particular book had come into existence. At this early point in time book printing was not only widely dispersed and sometimes even secretive, but was without almost all of the social arrangements that were later established for book distribution and trade. Bibliographers could not therefore simply depend on public notices of some kind to inform them that a new book had appeared. Instead they had to follow out every hint (many by word of mouth alone) that some new book had been created, hunting it down sometimes by traveling and asking around, and at other times by depending on networks of scholars, printers, authors, and others to inform them about it or send them a copy of it. In short, at this early point in the development of printing, bibliographers were closely involved in the book trade itself and often traveled in authorship circles. Their work consequently included aspects of authentication and even, in some instances, aspects of approval or disapproval of books.[3]
This intense intimacy with all aspects of the growing book industry gradually lessened over time as book distribution channels became more regularized and widespread and as reading among the general populace became more widely practiced, tolerated and encouraged. Thus, by the nineteenth century the activity of bibliography increasingly became confined to the authoritative listing and description of books alone and did not involve the bibliographer in the industry in the same fashion as had been notable earlier.
During the nineteenth century, bibliography also began to develop in more than one direction. Its initial emphasis on enumerating published books continued, but this focus eventually developed in both more general and more specific directions. Its more general direction entailed the development of national bibliography, an attempt systematically to list all of the past and current books published in a single country, whereas its more specific direction entailed listing books by topical themes often in disciplinary and sub-disciplinary areas. National bibliography in turn became of interest to governments, in many instances gaining public monies for its endeavors. It has also often involved cooperation among a wide range of agencies, both public and private, the latter including not a few notable book publishers and sellers. In contrast, special bibliography has often become the province of scholarly and specialists working in individual fields of endeavor.
Also during the 19th and for much of the 20th centuries enumerative bibliography has found itself under enormous pressure not only from what by any measure has been an unrelenting and growing avalanche of new publications, but also from the appearance of new forms of publications. The latter included general and thematic periodicals, the transactions, conference proceedings and other publications of professional and learned societies of all kinds, anthologies of all kinds of written genres, printed music, cartographic and other graphic materials in increasing numbers, productions in other media (e.g., sound recordings, motion-pictures, and other objects of all kinds), academic dissertations and theses, and government publications, to name only some.
Since the late 19th century some of the pressure on enumerative bibliography to keep up with the crush of new publications has been relieved by the appearance of the Indexing and Abstracting and the Documentation/Information Storage and Retrieval traditions of information organization (both described elsewhere). Some of the pressure has also been accommodated by specialization within enumerative bibliography itself—for example, through specialties focused on the newer media and the creation of special kinds of bibliographies (discographies, filmographies, printed music bibliography, etc.). A special sub-emphasis within enumerative bibliography also developed to keep track of the growing literature of bibliography itself—the bibliography of bibliographies. Enumerative bibliography also did not remain the only expression of this tradition of practice despite its enormous development. The field also fostered two other forms of endeavor that are included within its borders—Analytical Bibliography on the one hand, and Reference Bibliography on the other.
Analytical Bibliography. Analytical bibliography, also called critical or historical bibliography, developed during the late 19th century as an effort to account for all of the variant versions of works of authors considered especially notable and, with respect to important individual texts, to determine what constituted the basic or ‘ideal’ copy of the text. The first notable effort of this kind appears to have been directed at the works of William Shakespeare and included attempts to determine authoritative texts for his various dramas. This form of bibliographical endeavor includes listing and describing books but also goes well beyond that activity into the realm of textual criticism and even textual interpretation. Its name itself speaks of its intense emphasis on the examination of all aspects of individually published books including their physical features and publishing history. It continues today as a very scholarly specialty within the larger arena of bibliography, and is now witnessing efforts to apply its techniques to the close examination of electronic texts.
Reference Bibliography. Reference bibliography, in which normalized systems of reference and citation are established that enable authors to refer to other works as part of their texts, appears to be a development principally of the 20th century. The practice of one author citing works of other authors has long been practiced, of course, first in the form of “scholia” during the manuscript writing period, and since the invention of printing in the form of footnotes (or, more recently, endnotes).[4] But, the manner in which one refers to other authors, including how much bibliographic detail is necessary or desirable, was for the most part the province of the individual author working in concert with his or her publisher and not a matter of widely held formally devised practices.
The situation began to change at the beginning of the 20th century, however. No formal history of the development of citing and reference practices has apparently been written, but a preliminary investigation seems to suggest the following as important to it.
First, the development of scholarly specializations, including those related to university graduate education in which the publication of scholarly work was encouraged and where citing the works of others in such efforts came to be expected, began rapidly to expand scholarly publishing. One of the principal realms of such publishing was the rise of university presses and it appears to have been primarily among such presses and also in part among government agencies that sponsored research (e.g., the U. S. Geological Survey) that the first efforts were made to standardize practices with respect to writing and editing, including patterns for citing and listing other authors. Instructions aimed at facilitating standardization began to appear around the beginning of the 20th century in the form of printing style manuals.[5] Manuals for students derived in part from those earlier printing style manuals subsequently began to appear during the 1930s. However, it has only been since WWII that what was previously a matter of occasional works turned into a flood of manuals and sets of instructions of one sort or another. Some of the latter were associated with specific disciplines, academic and research specialties, or with specific scholarly journals. Others were aimed more specifically at large areas of academia with some—for example, Turabian’s Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (based in great part on the University of Chicago Press Manual of Style), the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, and the Modern Language Association’s Handbook for Writers of Research Papers—becoming very widely used. Citing and reference formats are only one aspect of such manuals, of course, but the fact that this aspect of bibliography is included in the manuals speaks of its growing importance.
A second aspect of the rise of citation and reference bibliography is more specific to the nature of scholarship in the 20th century—that is, to the belief that citing the sources from which one has drawn evidence for the ideas in the text or from which one has borrowed significant ideas for the text is an important aspect of scholarship. Certainly, clearly referring in notes to sources from which quotations have been taken or to sources about which an author wishes to comment had long been practiced. However, in the 20th century, the need to cite sources of ideas and evidence, item by item developed far beyond anything previously practiced. No one has definitively established how and why this practice became so important. But, one possible reason for why this became the case may well have been the development of public acceptance of and esteem for science (taken in its broader sense, not simply as, for example, the natural sciences), and with that public acceptance and esteem the widespread adoption of a mental model of how science operates—that is, as both an objective activity of publicly referring to evidence for one’s conclusions and a straightforward activity that builds sequentially on the findings of one’s predecessors in an area of work. In short, science became thought of and described as an open process of inquiry in which evidence and preceding work was a valuable part of the authentication of its results. Anything less than that would run the risk of sounding like opinion rather than the robust scientific demonstration of fact. Thus, the need to cite one’s sources in ways that superseded past practices.
Certainly, by the 1950s, especially in the realms of the natural and biological sciences, technologies, and many of the social sciences, citations came to be viewed as unusually important aspect of scientific communication. Further, with the invention of citation indexes, citation and reference bibliography came to serve not only as a window into aspects of that communication, but also as indicators of others aspects of science as well—for example, of the primacy of discovery or of research productivity. Whatever the specific reasons, however, by the end of 20th century extensive citation of evidence and sources had assumed a position of importance in the world of scholarship and research and with them the necessity of formalized reference bibliographical practices.
By way of summary, throughout its development, bibliography has served the broadly educated person by enumerating what has been published or cited, with analytic bibliography being increasingly aimed at specialist scholars concerned with determining basic texts in a definitive way through the close analysis of individual publications, and reference bibliography serving as an aid to scholars and writers of all areas of study. Within this development, however, bibliography has also been more or less oblivious to enumerating information entities simply because they have been accumulated by one or another special agency collecting them. For that more specific work a different modern information organization tradition arose early on called library cataloging.
Library Cataloging as an Information Organization Tradition.
Library cataloging, which has the task of enumerating or listing the information entities accumulated by a library so that they can be retrieved from the library’s collections, can actually be traced back in time to the ancient world. As in the case of bibliography, however, it was not until after the invention and spread of printing that its form as a modern information organization tradition came into existence.
Although modern library cataloging developed some of its practices from its long historical past, it was also greatly influenced by the rising field of bibliography. In fact, there is a sense in which library cataloging can legitimately be called bibliography as applied to library collections, its bibliography-like listings differing from those in bibliographies chiefly by being confined only to those information entities a particular library had acquired. There has always been a certain crossover between the two fields because those who have made library catalogs have also been responsible as well to acquire information entities, the latter task necessitating the use of the tools of bibliography. Crossover has also occurred because library catalogers tended at first to be learned bookmen just as bibliographers tended to be learned bookmen. However, library cataloging ultimately developed in different directions than bibliography. This was caused by the special needs of libraries as lending institutions, by the generally wider range of kinds of information entities a library tended to collect, and by the incompleteness of the publishing record manifested in the collections of institutions that acquired some but not all editions of particular items.
Although modern library cataloging began to manifest itself as early as the sixteenth century, it was not until after the middle of the nineteenth century that it began to take the characteristics by which it is known today. Its growth at this latter time exactly paralleled the rise of the modern library movement. That movement was originally an effort to enhance the mental cultivation of the general public. In this respect, the original focus of library cataloging was on books, books being the basic building blocks of such collections. Not just any books were to be acquired and cataloged, however. Instead, the librarian aimed to choose only the best books available and to arrange them systematically as was befitting a collection intended to represent the universe of knowledge. Library cataloging also emphasized making catalogs that would efficiently and effectively serve the needs of the agency's clientele. Differences between the educational levels of the clientele led to a belief in turn that systematic catalog arrangements or catalogs that included systematic features were more amenable to scholarly users whereas alphabetical arrangements were more suitable to those with less education. The special needs of a library also included accommodating a wider array of searching strategies than was typical of bibliographies.