Personal Expressive Bibliography in the Public Space of Cultural Heritage Institutions

Through their composition, arrangement and description, collections of objects and information resources, including those held by libraries, archives, and museums, tell a form of story; principles of selection, organization, and description produce an interpretive frame that shapes the meaning of each collection. Within cultural heritage institutions, however, such effects may run counter to longstanding goals and values. While interoperable information management systems, for example, facilitate universal access, the goal of interoperability constrains the generation of distinctively expressive descriptive systems. User-supplied collections of citations, however, are free to exploit a wider communicative potential of collecting and describing than those from the institutional perspective, and can provide an intriguing counterpoint to it. This article examines three means by which such personal, expressive bibliographies may communicate differently from institutional collections: through eclectic goals for collecting and describing, through a unique authorial voice, and through engagement with emotional experience. Expressive bibliographies that display such characteristics exhibit the combination of control and ambiguity that Umberto Eco (2009) calls the poetry of lists.