Introduction - Human Information Retrieval - page 10

ent in the system itself. Under certain historical conditions and levels of
technological development, selection power is produced by activities such
as cataloguing, classification, description of objects for databases, and
searching catalogs and databases, all of which can all be comprehended
and understood as selection labor. Thus, selection power is not conceived
abstractly, apart from real world circumstances, but operates in relation
to considerations of human labor (particularly mental labor), the costs of
that labor, and the possibility of transferring particular forms of mental
labor to information technology, now primarily computational technolo-
gies. A fundamental proposition is developed: selection power is produced
by selection labor.
Selection labor is characterized as a form of mental labor and theoreti-
cal minima are established for a given collection of objects. The separation
of selection labor into description and search labor with the premodern
technologies of writing and printing on paper is noted. Similarly, the
author acknowledges that description and search activities reconverge
with computer-based, or modern , technologies and also acknowledges the
possibility of sustaining analytical distinctions between them.
Chapter 3: Description and Search Labor
Selection labor separates historically into description and search labor
and can be analytically decomposed. The activities of description and
searching are then more fully characterized empirically as components
of selection labor. As forms of mental labor, description and search labor
participate in the conditions for labor and mental labor. Concepts and dis-
tinctions that apply to physical and mental labor are indicated, introduc-
ing the necessity of labor for survival, the idea of technology as a human
construction, and the possibility of transferring human labor—including
mental labor—to technology. Distinctions specific to mental labor, par-
ticularly between semantic and syntactic labor, are introduced. The high
cost of human mental labor is also indicated.
Exemplified by cataloging, classification, and database description,
description labor is more formally understood as the labor involved in
transforming objects into searchable descriptions; it includes interpreta-
tion. Search labor is understood as the human labor expended in search-
ing systems. Direct human labor has diminished progressively for both