How the Information Infrastructure Has Changed in the Digital Age - Evolving Global Information Infrastructure and Information Transfer - page 82

eBooks and other digital documents can more easily be identified and retrieved by
using keywords to retrieve documents. As an example, OCLC's WorldCat provides
searching by keyword, author, and title; a search can be narrowed by adding
year, type of work (fiction, nonfiction, biography, thesis/dissertation), format (article,
book, musical score, etc.), and language. WorldCat also indicates which nearby
libraries own a particular item, and it lists libraries worldwide that own that item.
Most libraries of all types now have online catalogs that provide access to their
collections by author, title, subject, and keywords. As a result, the catalogs are
available on phones and tablet computers for easy access nearly anywhere. While
systems for bibliographic control have changed and more information is provided,
the old systems developed in the bibliographic paradigm can still be used, aug-
mented with the more comprehensive search capabilities available through com-
puters and digitization. However, in the emergent paradigm, new technologies and
communications systems in the digital age relegate the notion of bibliographic con-
trol to antique status.
Organization by Disciplines
Each discipline has its own dominant paradigms that indicate what's important
and what isn't, and that outline major questions to be addressed. When a student
majors in a subject, the initial classes are taken up with an explanation of the major
paradigm and research methodologies in the field.
Whereas bibliographic control was an attempt by the library profession to or-
ganize all information using a general classification scheme, organization by dis-
cipline enables usage of the language and terms peculiar to a discipline. In the
1850s a cultural shift occurred when disciplines, fields of specialized study, identi-
fied themselves as science. First, the sciences subdivided into such areas as bio-
logy, chemistry, and physics. The social sciences followed, as a consequence of
the social sciences establishing theories of human behavior. Each discipline in the
social sciences and sciences developed a unique culture, using terms specific to
their field. The fields developed different research methods, citation practices, and
research paradigms; they developed different expectations for promotion and ten-
ure in the university system.
The different cultures of academe and their different vocabularies required their
own unique vocabularies for accessing information in their respective fields. Com-
puters have enabled the searching of databases by using terms unique to a discip-
line, and documents can be searched without using a thesaurus as a guide to the
vocabulary of a field.