Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
reduction in technologically imposed storage constraints. Fullness and
exactness can be distinguished analytically and substantively from dis-
criminatory power and informativeness; they may not enhance selection
power, but they may aid specificity in searching.
The social division of mental labor between clerical and intellec-
tual roles has been transformed progressively into the division of labor
between human work and machine processes, with syntactic labor dele-
gated to technology. While contrasts between late-nineteenth-century and
current practice arise from the development and adoption of information
technologies—the progressive transformation of communal labor into the
products of primarily universal labor—continuities follow from the pre-
dominantly symbolic nature of the signs described (Warner 2005b).
A particular feature that combines continuity and change involves
transformation from social division of labor into division of labor between
human and machine, with syntactic labor transferred to machine process.
This pattern might have implications for the nature of expertise in search-
ing information systems. At one extreme, understanding the forces that
determine a system's construction may not correlate with effective search-
ing of systems.
2
The changed relation between language of discourse and
language of representation between premodern and modern information
systems is acutely relevant: a semantically assigned language of representa-
tion need not be the entry vocabulary, although later recourse could be made
to it for its generic scope.
Prima facie
, expertise in the language of discourse
likely will be stronger among domain than information specialists.
A few other writers have considered the costs of human description
labor involved in creating records for catalogs, although not fully within
the conceptual framework developed here, and these considerations can
provide empirical data to inform the argument. The costs associated with
creating a catalog that meets
WorldCat
standards have been estimated
at about US$40 (Hayes 2000, 76). This amount represents the cost of
human semantic description labor, and the use of
WorldCat
records by
participating libraries represents distribution of the products of labor.
Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) accounts show no value, either
for
WorldCat
or for OCLC's direct costs for creating the records (Hayes
2000, 76). Failure to recognize the cost of direct and accumulated intellec-
tual labor embodied in catalog records and catalogs represents a “serious
