Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Studying practice can yield a highly specific focus for theoretical under-
standing. The elements of practice can be arranged along a continuum
that ranges from contingent to inescapable. Contingent elements are
understood as those that vary across contrasting cultures and practices.
Conversely, inescapable elements strongly influence both library and
information and Internet cultures and practices. Isolating the inescapa-
ble—and attempting to understand it—may yield the basis for a synthesis
of the contrasting cultures. Any such synthesis likely will require a painful
effort of deliberate articulation; even then, synthesis will remain incom-
plete at this stage.
Contingent Elements
It is possible to group significant contingent or variable elements into
meaningful categories that reveal underlying analogies between con-
trasting cultures. Human description labor and its strongly semantic ele-
ments appear in the library and information sphere. The products of that
labor—bibliographic records and the distinctions embodied in different
fields of those records—can be exploited directly in searching. In addi-
tion, human description labor is highly and unquestioningly valued in
theoretical discussions. Documents discovered by Internet search engines
may contain humanly assigned metadata, but it is not necessarily avail-
able for direct exploitation. A significant development, both analogous
and contrasting to human description labor, involves exploitation of the
traces left by semantically motivated human searching, which produces
effects analogous to those obtained from description labor (for instance,
grouping of material).
Generic capacity—grouping material—occurs in both cultures but it
is produced by contrasting methods. Library and information practices
characteristically offer generic capacity by incorporating the products of
human description labor (for instance, subject descriptors or canonical
forms for authors' names). Evidenced by Google Scholar (2008), a con-
trasting method involves a computational collation of an article's variants
through similarities in pattern. The sense of generic capacity common to
both cultures is the minimal sense of gathering together; the more elab-
orate, humanly assigned structures are developed more frequently by
library and information practices. The ordering of results represents one
form of gathering, and practices in both cultures offer intelligible—or at
