Theoretical Principles of Information Organization in Librarianship

Abstract

LET us concur with the premise that the raison d'atre of librarianship is service.' Leaving aside the less appealing servile meanings of the word, our premise implies that the objective of librarianship is not to create new and original knowledge, experience, and impressions of the mind and the senses; rather, it is to mediate such knowledge by facilitating its communication between and within individuals, societies, classes, and other echelons of mankind. This fundamentally social function of librarianship has, of course, important economic overtones. The essence of library service has been described in terms of its custodial and interpretive functions involving, as fundamental activities and skills, the collection of certain records of human knowledge and work and their organization for storage and use. The justification of the library activities of collecting, organizing, and storing rests on the implied anticipation of use of these materials, although librarianship traditionally has not considered it its duty to generate the impetus for use. The concept of library service is a changing one; it responds to quantitative factors as well as quality demands. In the course of time, the access services to the physical items have reached beyond the collection stored under the local library roof. Increase in volume of recorded materials has led not only to the development of co-operative acquisition projects and to a fine network of interlibrary loan channels. The heavy traffic in interlibrary loan, and the development of economical image reproduction and reduction techniques and media which again enable libraries to own comprehensive collections of materials regardless of volume, continue stressing local availability and access. On the horizon, however, are developments such as image telecommunication and even a partial replacement of the physical item by non-conventional information storing and sharing devices. The symbolic representation of physical items-the access tool-has changed equally significantly. Interlibrary loan presumes the existence of adequate union catalogs in book form. Functional bibliographic control is so prodigious an undertaking that it, itself, cries out for organization; yet the planned practice of duplicating complete collections on microform and placing them in a relatively large number of libraries (as demonstrated by the library complex of the aerospace agencies and industry) lends an even greater importance to bibliographic control: today, indexed announcement lists or abstracting journals concomitantly serve as tools of access to the physical item and hence fully replace both the card or book catalog and the shelf list. Many other examples of continuous change in the library service of providing access to materials could be cited; our aim is to show that librarianship is not a static profession. At the same time, the impetus for dynamic changes in service has not always emanated from