More Thoughts on Documents

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.