Facets: A Fruitful Notion in Many Domains

Abstract

This special issue of ‘‘Axiomathes’’ is devoted to a technique originally developed within library science: facet analysis. During discussions with Roberto Poli, it was realized that facet analysis shares interesting features with analytical methods in several other fields, including philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. For these reasons, in an interdisciplinary spirit, we believe that facet analysis is a relevant topic for the scope of this journal. It is hoped that readers will be persuaded by this after examining the present contributions. Facet analysis has a historical, even legendary, birthdate: it was conceived by the Indian librarian Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan in 1925, while he was studying at University College London (a key place for library classification research still today). The circumstances under which this happened, and Ranganathan’s relations with English scholars, are reconstructed in Clare Beghtol’s paper. Ranganthan’s revolutionary idea was that the subject of a document, like ‘‘prevention of rice diseases in Madras in the dry season’’ to take his classical example, can be expressed by analyzing it into its facets (rice, diseases, prevention, Madras, dry season), translating each of them into a separate notation, and reassembling notations according to the standard citation order of their categories. This procedure is called analytico-synthetic. It is considered the alternative to the older enumerative systems, where any possible subject must be listed in the schedules, which therefore tend to become extremely long (the Library of Congress Classification consists of 42 printed volumes). The first expansion in facet analysis applications occurred when Ranganathan’s techniques, first conceived for a general scheme of knowledge, were applied by the members of the Classification Research Group (CRG) to the more specific domains of special libraries and documentation services, such as education, canning, or