The power to name: Representation in library catalogs

HA Olson - Signs: journal of women in culture and society, 2001 - journals.uchicago.edu
HA Olson
Signs: journal of women in culture and society, 2001journals.uchicago.edu
Alarge body of research and recorded experience has documented biases of gender,
sexuality, race, age, ability, ethnicity, language, and religion as limits to the expression of
diversity in naming information for retrieval. These limits, of course, have direct, practical
consequences for users of libraries who, in their searches for information, can be aided or
impeded by the arrangement of the catalog and the physical locations of books. Library
users seeking material on topics outside of a traditional mainstream will meet with frustration …
Alarge body of research and recorded experience has documented biases of gender, sexuality, race, age, ability, ethnicity, language, and religion as limits to the expression of diversity in naming information for retrieval. These limits, of course, have direct, practical consequences for users of libraries who, in their searches for information, can be aided or impeded by the arrangement of the catalog and the physical locations of books. Library users seeking material on topics outside of a traditional mainstream will meet with frustration in finding nothing, or they will find something but miss important relevant materials. Effective searching for marginalized topics will require greater ingenuity and serendipity than searching for mainstream topics. Certainly libraries, like other institutions, reflect the marginalizations and exclusions of the society they serve. After twenty-five years of studying, doing, managing, and teaching cataloging and classification, I find the problem both acute and systemic but also amenable to change. In this article I will examine the presumption that universal languages are necessary and desirable in naming information for its retrieval, explain how that presumption constructs information, and suggest local, dynamic, and partial techniques for ameliorative change. My approach, adapted from Drucilla Cornell's philosophy of the limit (1992), identifies the constructed limits of systems for naming information and tries to make these limits permeable.
I use the term naming information for the creation of document representations. In this process, terms or notations assigned to reflect the document's subject are organized into a database such as a library catalog. Evelyn Fox Keller states that" naming nature is the special business of science. Theories, models, and descriptions are elaborated names. In these acts of naming, the scientist simultaneously constructs and contains nature"
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