Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
or labor. UNESCO regarded itself as born into “appalling post-war bibli-
ographic chaos” (Murra 1951, 47), and the distribution of responsibility
to the national agencies required to produce national bibliographies and
allied works on a shared model was conceived as both the remedy for the
chaos and the path toward universal bibliographic control. The growth
of
WorldCat
(WorldCat 2007) indicates a more recent and less explicitly
noticed movement toward universal bibliographic control—particularly
regarding monographic literature rather than journal articles—prompted
more by internal dynamisms in the process than by imposition and by the
possibility of sharing the costs of human description labor by distribut-
ing the products of that labor as catalog records. Later sophisticated dis-
cussions more directly concerned with selection power also distinguished
bibliographic control from bibliographic organization, with organization
as the means of control (Wilson 1968), reinforcing the sense of selec-
tion power as a property of human consciousnesses enabled by—but not
directly inhering in—organization imposed on data.
Indexing values index terms for their discriminatory power, similar to
classical logic's concern with differentiae. Discriminatory power could
also be regarded as an essential component or organizational factor of
enabling discriminatory control or selection power. The technological
constraints of written and printed documents, and the need to reduce the
cognitive labor of the searcher, compelled briefer and more concise index
descriptions than the object described —with some exceptions, such as
concordances.
Cybernetics, emerging in its modern form during the immediate post-
1945 period concurrently with the formalization of bibliographic con-
trol and partly concerned with information technologies envisaged for
enhancing bibliographic control, also emphasized control and navigation
(Wiener 1954). Cybernetics was understood to embrace the “complex of
ideas” represented by
the study of language … the study of messages as a means of controlling machin-
ery and society, the development of computing machines, and other such autom-
ata, certain reflections upon psychology and the nervous system, and a tentative
new theory of scientific method. (1954, 15)
In the subsequent development of cybernetics, emphasis on control did
not always separate human and machine discrimination. The etymology
