Elaine Svenonius - The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization

William Y. Arms, series editor

Gateways to Knowledge: The Role of Academic Libraries in Teaching, Learning, and Research, edited by Lawrence Dowler, 1997

Civic Space/Cyberspace: The American Public Library in the Information Age, Redmond Kathleen Molz and Phyllis Dain, 1999

Digital Libraries, William Y. Arms, 1999

From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World, Christine L. Borgman, 2000

The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, Elaine Svenonius, 2000

Elaine Svenonius

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Instant electronic access to digital information is the single most distinguishing attribute of the information age. The elaborate retrieval mechanisms that support such access are a product of technology. But technology is not enough. The effectiveness of a system for accessing information is a direct function of the intelligence put into organizing it. Just as the practical science of engineering is undergirded by theoretical physics, so too the design of systems for organizing information rests on an intellectual foundation. The topic of this book is the systematized body of knowledge that constitutes this foundation.

Much of the literature that pertains to the intellectual foundation of information organization is inaccessible to those who have not devoted considerable time to the study of the disciplines of cataloging, classification, and indexing. It uses a technical language, it mires what is of theoretical interest in a bog of detailed rules, and it is widely scattered in diverse sources such as thesaurus guidelines, codes of cataloging rules, introductions to classification schedules, monographic treatises, periodical articles, and conference proceedings. This book is an attempt to synthesize this literature and to do so in a language and at a level of generality that makes it understandable to those outside the discipline of library and information science.

A book on the intellectual foundation of information could be written in several ways. It is therefore useful to state the scope of this one, contrasting what it is not about with what it is about. First, it is not a how-to-do-it cookbook of methods used to organize information. The techne or practical skill of information organization is a function of changing technology, whereas its intellectual foundation, which encompasses theory, is relatively impervious to change. To ground the discussion of theory, however, particular devices and stratagems used by different technologies are introduced by way of example. Thus, general statements involving abstractions are frequently followed by a detail or a graspable image.

The book does not focus primarily on how users seek information but rather on the design of organizing systems. Systems for organizing information must be designed with the user in mind, but sometimes overlooked is that the objectives and principles that undergird these systems constitute a hypostatization of users' needs. The specifications relating to user satisfaction that are embodied in these objectives and principles have been developed and refined over a period of 150 years. They are not only historically determined but also empirically warranted. Moreover, they are more stringent than can be imagined by most users or, for that matter, inferred from most studies of information seeking behavior.

This book is not primarily about how the computer is used to organize information, although the topic is discussed, since recognizing the impact of technology on information is unavoidable. The digital revolution has affected how information is embodied and what is used to organize it. It has forced a general reexamination of how the carriers of information are identified and described. Using automation to achieve the objectives of systems for organizing information has opened avenues of research and development that have significantly enriched the body of knowledge that constitutes the intellectual foundation of information organization.

The book is not written for the novice who is about to begin a job as a cataloger and wants an instant understanding of its mysteries. It is not a catechism of rules, a compendium of practice, or a training manual. Instead, the book takes a scholarly approach and looks at the rules used to describe information entities - not to spell them out but to consider their intellectual source and grounding or lack thereof. It looks at principles that have been used to guide systems design, asks why decisions were made as they were, and considers problems that were encountered and overcome. Oriented thus, the book is directed toward two groups of people: those who are interested in information organization as an object of scholarly investigation and those who are involved in the design of organizing systems.

This book does not enumerate various systems for organizing information, though meritorious features of these are referenced by way of example, but strives to express what these systems have in common - to speak in terms of generalities rather than particulars. One of its central aims is to look at information organization holistically and thereby to raise discourse about it to a level general enough to unify the presently compartmentalized approaches for achieving it. Specifically, it endeavors to integrate the disparate disciplines of descriptive cataloging, subject cataloging, indexing, and classification. A difficulty in carrying out this aim, and indeed in writing the book, has been to reconcile different ways of referring to similar concepts, principles, and techniques. To deal with this difficulty - and to limit jargon generally - an effort has been made to eschew where possible discipline-specific terminology and to resist the temptation of inventing new terminology.

Finally, this book is not an idiosyncratic view on how to organize information effectively. Rather, it reflects practice and theory as developed within the discipline of library and information science. It adopts a particular conceptual framework that views the process of organizing information as the use of a special language of description, called a bibliographic language. This framework is rooted in a tradition that originated nearly a hundred years ago and has been used since then by theorists to introduce rigor, unification, and generality into theorizing about information organization.

The book is divided into two parts of five chapters each. The first part is an analytic discussion of the intellectual foundation of information organization. Chapter 1 introduces and defines what is meant by an intellectual foundation and the concepts of information and document. It establishes a conceptual framework that identifies the central purpose of systems for organizing information: bringing like things together and differentiating among them. It considers the function of principles in the context of systems design and concludes with an illustration of some of the problems encountered in the design of organizing systems.