....or, bibliographic
ignorance and the cost to resource discovery
Wilson (1968) asked us to image a Supreme Bibliographic
Council given the task of evaluating bibliographical situations in order “to
estimate the degree of bibliographical control needed” by individuals or groups
based on both the complainants and non-complainants. In doing so, the council would realize that
the “situation of the uncomplaining was as bad as, or worse than, that of the
complaining.” Nearly 50 years later, what sort of power does bibliographic
control have when faced with the reality of what Wilson described as
‘lamentable bibliographic ignorance’?
What service does a library aim to give its users based on
assessments of user information needs, including their bibliographic
ignorances? Bibliographic control itself
seems to be making progress but that progress is ignored or abandoned for both
financial simplicity and less complexity. At the same time, people demand
easier and faster access to all information resources, in all their complexity.
For example, instituting linked data using Resource Description Framework (RDF)
so that we may one day have a “semantic web” requires more complex information
organization practices then we have ever employed. Yet, that type of
information work is underfunded or outsourced, or ignored completely, often because
of complaints about information systems that are too cumbersome, too complex, too
slow, etc., or the assumption that search engines are better and have access to
everything. This even though most anyone using one would be hard-pressed to
identify the depth and breadth, or even origin, of the resources retrieved (or
not retrieved) by said engines, let alone their validity. Studies have even
shown that some groups of people lack, or are losing, the ability to judge the
relevance of information retrieved to their own information needs. This is not
to say that all information gleamed via a search engine is useless but a
recognition that different information needs often need a variety of different
resources is lacking.
At the same time, as scholars, scientists and practitioners,
how costly is our bibliographic ignorance to the growth of knowledge? From a
scientific and scholarly standpoint we expect our libraries and institutional
repositories to keep a record of research and published works so that we may
know our scientific and scholarly histories, theories, etc. We need this record
to understand that our present advances, in whatever direction they are headed,
may proceed without devastating or costly mistakes. In other words, that we
make forward progress by putting that knowledge to use. However, how do we put
to use that which we may not have access to, or that which we are ignorant of
even existing?
Wilson (1968) addressed the power of bibliographic control in
his essay Two Kinds of Power, which holds
an almost mythical status in library and information science—even though at
times it reads as if addressing an entirely different world. It begs the
question, what kind of power does bibliographic control have today? Is bibliographic
control losing power? At the very least it seems the type of control it currently
has is shifting towards an entirely different configuration. Wilson stated in
1977 that we needed a ‘reorientation toward the functional’ and while the
global cataloging community has finally created functionality models (e.g.,
FRBR, FRAD) in order to ground its information systems in the logic of the entity-relationships
database model, the systems themselves have not made the leap to reflect these changes
due to, for one thing, a lack of communication between the organizers and the
system developers. This speaks to a profound disconnect between what
bibliographic control is intended to accomplish and what it actually has the
power to accomplish. This is especially important in terms of evaluating and
solving bibliographical situations and the information needs (and bibliographic
ignorance) of its users, both complaining and non-complaining.
Wilson, P. (1968). Two kinds of power : An essay on
bibliographical control. Berkeley, Los Angeles : University of California
Press.
Wilson, P. (1977). Public knowledge, private ignorance:
Toward a library and information policy. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press
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