Ack. It's been far too long since I last sat down to this.
All right. Let's pick up with the firm idea that our realm of information is one of textual descriptions, graphic depictions, and sound recordings, in either paper or digital format. Documents, in short.
While we must keep in mind that many of these books and articles are necessarily secondary sources (describing a thing or event which would be primary), we must also understand that, for the most part, the primary sources are out of our purview. As I described in last week's post, a book extrapolating an allosaurus's diet from its jaw and tooth structure will often "cite" a skull in some museum somewhere, but a library cannot be expected to keep said skull in the reference section.
Besides its size and general unwieldiness, the skull is not in the library for one main reason: It is in the museum. There is only one fossil to go around, and it belongs at the end of the allosaurus neck in the Jurassic exhibit, menacing museum patrons with its massive teeth. Documents qua documents, though, have the advantage of being merely carriers for the information recorded upon them.
For example, the first line of Dante's Inferno is "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" ("Midway on our life's journey"), whether you're reading the original as penned by Alighieri himself or my sixth printing of the Noonday press edition translated by Robert Pinsky and bound in 1997. Now, certainly the original is far more valuable (I doubt I could get $2 for mine on the open market), but that is for reasons completely separate from the words themselves. The original is both a primary document and an immensely valuable artifact (assuming it still exists).
Now, there are documents that are disputed. The order of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for instance, is still debated today. In these cases, an original could be said to be more valuable in a purely documentative sense, since it would lend insight into the intended sequence. But once said information is gleaned and written down, the original once again becomes a mere curiosity. A curiosity that is worth more than everything I own combined, I will admit, but a curiosity nevertheless.
The point of all of this is that, as librarians, something can be a copy of a copy of a copy, and, so long as it is faithful to the original, it can serve its purpose in our collection. In this glorious age of print, a library is constrained by space more than any other factor in building its collection. Admittedly, there are limited print-run books and out of print books and fancy-dancy books whose price as objets d'art far exceed their informative value, and some libraries are so strapped for funding that even paperbacks stretch the budget. By and large, though, a modern library can possess any book it wants.
Now, things have come a long way since the days of Hellenistic Egypt. No longer can everything that is known and written down even be hoped to be collected under one roof. Even the massive Library of Congress falls short of that goal. In the age of digital information, though, perhaps this ideal could be renewed. Through databases and metadatabases, and with the constant transcription of books and journals to the internet, perhaps, one day, everything that is known and written down could be accessed from a humble personal computer from anywhere.
Regardless, that revolution is not yet compete. For the foreseeable future, at least, it is the library's task to select a few representative scraps of the record as a whole in the hopes that they will suffice to serve their clientele. So before we even have a stack of books to organize, we must first attend to the primary, central question: What books do we include in the library?
It is with that question that I will begin my next post (hopefully in a more timely fashion than this one).
Sources:
Buckland, M. (1997). What is a “Document”? Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 48(9): 804-809.
Buckland, Michael (1991). Information as thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 42(5): 351-360.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
What is Information?
Before we can talk about the organization of knowledge and information, we need to know what they are. They're fairly abstract, ambiguous words. Michael K. Buckland, in Information as Thing, identified three core meanings of the word "information."
Information-as-process is simply the act of informing. When one person communicates a fact to another, this activity could be called information. Information-as-knowledge is the datum or data being imparted in the information-as-process. Both of these are interesting, but they're kind of hard to file away on a bookshelf.
This brings us to information-as-thing. Buckland identifies this as the physical embodiment of the informing process. These manifestations, especially in the form of books and recordings, are what we concern ourselves with as librarians. As with any useful definition, though, this inclusion of the written word under the umbrella of information is not without controversy. F. Machlup (1983, p. 642 as quoted in Buckland 1991, pp. 351-352) states that "any meanings other than (1) the telling of something or (2) that which is being told are either analogies and metaphors or concoctions resulting from the condoned appropriation of a word that had not been meant by earlier users." Were we to allow this objection, though, we would simply invent a new word for this excluded informative material and categorize that.
The real power and utility of information made manifest in the form of books, recordings, and other physical things is that these objects (or files, in the digital age) can be filed in and retrieved by information systems. It is here that the distinction of knowledge vs. thing comes into play. Knowledge cannot be checked out from the library. The book is merely a representation (information-as-thing), but it is a representation that can be used (information-as-process) to learn data (information-as-knowledge).
So what qualifies as information-as-thing? What is informative? Buckland states that we should judge information sources as we judge evidence. In other words, What does it teach us? How unique is it? How relevant is it? In this way, objects are only informative (and thus only qualify for our attention as librarians) if a) they have something to say, and b) we are aware of their having something to say. A book of gibberish has no reason to be in any library, unless, say, the book is revealed to have been the last mad writings of Friedrich Nietzsche before he fell to syphylitic fever. Only then does the book gain significance and warrant inclusion in a collection.
Objects other than books and documents can be considered information. Just as a book about a 17th-century sailing ship can inform a layman about the structure of its sails, so too can a model of said ship or a preserved bit of rigging. Indeed, one could say that the rigging is the primary source, and the book and model based upon it are merely secondary. Of course, such informative objects as the artifact and the model are more at home in a museum than a library, but this only serves to highlight the connections between the two institutions. The Great Library of Alexandria was, after all, only part of the Mouseion. Nevertheless, we can safely discard such things as models and skulls from our purview, though it is worthy to note that a book might be included in a library not only for the words on the page, but only for the significance of the book itself (as in the hypothetical case of the Nietzsche scribblings above).
So, ultimately, we end up at the commonsensical answer that we could have given before this lengthy sojourn into esoterica. What goes into libraries? Books. But defining just what we are dealing with in this rigorous manner not only serves to satisfy the Philosophy major in me, but will also serve us well in setting rules for dealing with objects existing on the hazy boundaries of books and information. In my next post (hopefully to come Thursday or Friday), I will complete my thoughts on information. Next week we'll finally get down to brass tacks and start examining some methods of organization.
Source: Buckland, M. (1991). Information as thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 42(5): 351-360.
Information-as-process is simply the act of informing. When one person communicates a fact to another, this activity could be called information. Information-as-knowledge is the datum or data being imparted in the information-as-process. Both of these are interesting, but they're kind of hard to file away on a bookshelf.
This brings us to information-as-thing. Buckland identifies this as the physical embodiment of the informing process. These manifestations, especially in the form of books and recordings, are what we concern ourselves with as librarians. As with any useful definition, though, this inclusion of the written word under the umbrella of information is not without controversy. F. Machlup (1983, p. 642 as quoted in Buckland 1991, pp. 351-352) states that "any meanings other than (1) the telling of something or (2) that which is being told are either analogies and metaphors or concoctions resulting from the condoned appropriation of a word that had not been meant by earlier users." Were we to allow this objection, though, we would simply invent a new word for this excluded informative material and categorize that.
The real power and utility of information made manifest in the form of books, recordings, and other physical things is that these objects (or files, in the digital age) can be filed in and retrieved by information systems. It is here that the distinction of knowledge vs. thing comes into play. Knowledge cannot be checked out from the library. The book is merely a representation (information-as-thing), but it is a representation that can be used (information-as-process) to learn data (information-as-knowledge).
So what qualifies as information-as-thing? What is informative? Buckland states that we should judge information sources as we judge evidence. In other words, What does it teach us? How unique is it? How relevant is it? In this way, objects are only informative (and thus only qualify for our attention as librarians) if a) they have something to say, and b) we are aware of their having something to say. A book of gibberish has no reason to be in any library, unless, say, the book is revealed to have been the last mad writings of Friedrich Nietzsche before he fell to syphylitic fever. Only then does the book gain significance and warrant inclusion in a collection.
Objects other than books and documents can be considered information. Just as a book about a 17th-century sailing ship can inform a layman about the structure of its sails, so too can a model of said ship or a preserved bit of rigging. Indeed, one could say that the rigging is the primary source, and the book and model based upon it are merely secondary. Of course, such informative objects as the artifact and the model are more at home in a museum than a library, but this only serves to highlight the connections between the two institutions. The Great Library of Alexandria was, after all, only part of the Mouseion. Nevertheless, we can safely discard such things as models and skulls from our purview, though it is worthy to note that a book might be included in a library not only for the words on the page, but only for the significance of the book itself (as in the hypothetical case of the Nietzsche scribblings above).
So, ultimately, we end up at the commonsensical answer that we could have given before this lengthy sojourn into esoterica. What goes into libraries? Books. But defining just what we are dealing with in this rigorous manner not only serves to satisfy the Philosophy major in me, but will also serve us well in setting rules for dealing with objects existing on the hazy boundaries of books and information. In my next post (hopefully to come Thursday or Friday), I will complete my thoughts on information. Next week we'll finally get down to brass tacks and start examining some methods of organization.
Source: Buckland, M. (1991). Information as thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 42(5): 351-360.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Greetings and Salutations!
Consider a letter. "E," for instance. Its particular lines, separately meaningless, impart certain limited bits and pieces of information. Its presence in a word gives us hints as to the word's pronunciation. The "E" may sound like "Eeeee" or "Eh," or it may not sound like anything at all, but it is guaranteed to not sound like an "M."
It is only in the context of a word that those three horizontal lines and single vertical one have real meaning. "Bell," for example, nails down the letters' pronunciations and carries with it a meaning all its own. Upon seeing that word, some of us may picture a cracked monolith in Philadelphia while others can imagine a tiny jingler on a Christmas cap. But only the ignorant (or excessively imaginative) will picture, say, a nimbus cloud.
In the context of conversation, of sentences, vague words are given concrete meanings and new questions are raised through the words' interplay. It is therefore in the very structure of language itself that information and knowledge are first organized. Through a process of stringing together otherwise meaningless tiny markings, one's thoughts are codified and made manifest in a recognizeable fashion.
Many millions of people have set down their thoughts in this fashion over the years. The sheer bulk of written information would be impossible to amass in a single building, let alone digest by a single mind. How does a library determine which books are necessary and which are superfluous? And how does a user dig through the stacks of books to find the information he needs?
It is these practical questions of organization, along with the theoretical definitions of information itself, that I will tackle here on The Empty Shelf. It's weighty stuff, and kind of dry, but it's stuff that every librarian will have to tackle sooner or later. So I hope you'll join me as we peer down the rabbit hole!
It is only in the context of a word that those three horizontal lines and single vertical one have real meaning. "Bell," for example, nails down the letters' pronunciations and carries with it a meaning all its own. Upon seeing that word, some of us may picture a cracked monolith in Philadelphia while others can imagine a tiny jingler on a Christmas cap. But only the ignorant (or excessively imaginative) will picture, say, a nimbus cloud.
In the context of conversation, of sentences, vague words are given concrete meanings and new questions are raised through the words' interplay. It is therefore in the very structure of language itself that information and knowledge are first organized. Through a process of stringing together otherwise meaningless tiny markings, one's thoughts are codified and made manifest in a recognizeable fashion.
Many millions of people have set down their thoughts in this fashion over the years. The sheer bulk of written information would be impossible to amass in a single building, let alone digest by a single mind. How does a library determine which books are necessary and which are superfluous? And how does a user dig through the stacks of books to find the information he needs?
It is these practical questions of organization, along with the theoretical definitions of information itself, that I will tackle here on The Empty Shelf. It's weighty stuff, and kind of dry, but it's stuff that every librarian will have to tackle sooner or later. So I hope you'll join me as we peer down the rabbit hole!
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