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of the products of semantic description labor and the type of product.
Some level of human semantic search labor is inescapable. An underlying
value, embodied in real-world systems and influencing practice, is selec-
tion power.
Different aspects of variation have different costs and effects. Although
not without cost, expanding the scope of syntactic description processes
has limited costs and may enhance human capacities. In contrast, seman-
tic description labor is costly. The presence of the products of semantic
description labor may enhance selection power and reduce search labor
and their absence can limit selection power and incur high levels of search
labor.
Decision Considerations
We can construct decision considerations from the contrasting costs and
effects of the two aspects of variation. The low costs of syntactic descrip-
tion processes and the possible enhancement of human capacities favor
their instantiation. Restrictions on the scope of machine description proc-
esses may be only a transitional stage, with developments inhibited by
inherited beliefs and attitudes, particularly in library rather than broader
information contexts. The primary consideration in making decisions con-
cerns semantic description labor and the associated distribution of human
semantic labor between description and searching. Because description
labor is more amenable to deliberate control than search labor, the specific
consideration would cascade from deciding whether to apply semantic
description labor at all, to determining which type (including exhaustivity
of description), to resolving whether to draw upon any existing products
of semantic description labor. Therefore, decision considerations relate
primarily and directly to human labor, secondarily to machine processes,
and only slightly to the materials consumed in the products of labor and
processes.
Value of a Labor Theoretic Approach
We identified a historical dynamism for information practice that dis-
tinguishes modes of information: primarily oral, written literate (pre-
modern), and computer technologies (modern). Excepting the recently
