The traditional future: A computational theory of library research

College and Research Libraries

Volumn 69, Issue 6, 2008, Pages 524-545

  Abbott, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 57849150023     PISSN: 00100870     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5860/crl.69.6.524     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. By "library research" in this paper I refer to research conducted by disciplinary experts (such as musicologists, literature professors, historians, and political scientists) that is primarily based on materials collected in libraries. I do not mean research about how libraries themselves function. The paper is, in fact, a theoretical essay about the latter topic (with respect to a particular group of users-disciplinary experts), but to address that topic I need a term for the ensemble of discipline-based expert research conducted in libraries. "Library-based scholarship" is correct but cumbersome. So I shall use the phrase "library research" throughout, opposing it implicitly to terms like "survey research" or "ethnography."
2. There are only a handful of how-to volumes about library research in my university's 7.5-million volume library: perhaps a dozen simple manuals directed at college students as well as Thomas Mann's more advanced Oxford Guide to Library Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), which, although absolutely superb as a guide to identifying and finding materials, does not cover the library research process as a whole. There are, of course, many books designed to teach the reader how to look for expert information on some topic. Such books exemplify what is perhaps the dominant assumption behind much information thinking - that truth (or the "true" expert judgment) is out there somewhere in the library, and the task is to find it with minimum difficulty. Typical titles are Student Guide to Research in the Digital Age: How to Locate and Evaluate Information Sources and Find It Fast. Such books obviously offer no help in theorizing how it is that expert library workers create knowledge in the first place; they assume that knowledge ex ante, out there for the finding.
3. Examples are T.L. Martinson, Introduction to Library Research in Geography (1972);
4. A.E. Simpson, Guide to Library Research in Public Administration (1976);
5. R.K. Baker, Introduction to Library Research in French Literature (1978);
6. L.F. Place et al., Aging and the Aged: An Annotated Bibliography and Library Research Guide;
7. L.L. Richardson, Introduction to Library Research in German Studies (1984);
8. S.E. Sebring, Introduction to Library Research in Women's Studies (1985);
9. and J.M. Weeks, Introduction to Library Research in Anthropology (1991). (The latter five are all in a Westview Press series of Guides to Library Research.) Generally aimed at advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students, all of these books are in effect slimmed-down, specialized versions of the ALA Guide to Reference Books (which indeed is mentioned in all but one of them), usually coupled with some useful advice about the idiosyncracies of the Library of Congress classification system and other indexing tools. The same is true of Downs's old standard How to Do Library Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966 and later editions). None of these is really a manual for an expert or even an advanced student, although, paradoxically, every one of them contains a far larger range of reference tools than would be in the working knowledge of even the greatest experts in the specialties involved. This paradox captures nicely the enormous difference between "finding information" and "doing research."
10. If there is little about the method of library research, there is even less about its theory. At time of writing (26 April 2007), a check of Google revealed five uses of the phrase "theory of library research." One of them is in a tongue-in-cheek guide to the simplest forms of library usage for Duke University chemistry majors. The rest are references to the work of the present writer. There are twelve entries for "library research theory"; all appear to be artifacts combining the last words of one sentence with first word of another-"...library research. Theory...." For a recent review of the sociology of science, see S. Sismondo, An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004). The standard journal in the field is Social Studies of Science. The reader will scan it in vain for articles on library-based knowledge.
11. K.R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (New York: Basic, 1962);
12. T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970);
13. Sismondo, An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies. According to the Popperian model (Popper 1962), science proposes conjectures, which are then tested against real-world data and either refuted or not. Knowledge at any given time is made up of non-refuted conjectures. Kuhn (1970) insists that "real-world data" are to some extent theory-defined, and that "paradigms" (bundles of theory, data, and practices) are not able to see their own refutation, as Popper's theory requires. See Sismondo 2004 for an introduction to these theories.
14. I apologize to those for whom "data" must be plural. My usage here (singular for data seen collectively and plural for data seen as disparate facts) is standard in the social sciences at this point.
15. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 33-65.
16. There are attempts to change this at present, but they face enormous difficulties because of the incommensurability of datasets and, more important, of their internal structure. Generalized data archiving is at present in the same situation as were books around the time of the standardization of the LC classification; the metadata standards we seek at present are the equivalents of authoritative standards for descriptive bibliography.
17. Several "standard research" readers of this manuscript have objected that "of course we also have and do those things" (that is to say, the kinds of sources, practices, and structures I argue characterize library research). As an empirical statement, this is of course true. Standard researchers do plenty of pattern searching and random access and other things that I shall argue characterize library research. But these are not part of the ideal they teach their students nor are they part of the organizing reality of their research programs or of the criteria by which they judge proposals when serving as members of funding panels. In those activities, they are quite clear about enforcing the formal picture given in the preceding section. In fact, then, their reason for claiming that "we do it too" is to assert overall jurisdiction over "scientific method" and to assert that their brand of it is the only one. It is the central assertion of this paper that that claim is false.
18. Keywords, in the classical sense, are a short number of (subject) index words that are assigned by a human coder to a particular text. They may or may not occur in that text, and they are, typically, part of a controlled vocabulary that enables the retrieval of effectively concentrated bibliographies. Since they are often assigned by authors themselves, they amount to authorial steering of future readers. Obviously, keyword indexing in this sense contains far more information for the scholar than does indexing by simple words that occur in a text, even when this latter is supplemented by quantity information. I use the name "concordance indexing" for this latter type of indexing by words in the text-which confusingly has been called keyword out of context (KWOC) indexing even while the original sense of "keyword" still survived. There is nothing "key" about the keywords in KWOC indexing. Calling concordance indexing "keyword indexing" is like calling oleomargarine butter.
19. D.W. King and C. Tenopir., "Using and Reading Scholarly Literature," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 34 (1999): 423-77;
20. C. Tenopir and D.W. King, Towards Electronic Journals (Washington, D.C.: SLA, 2000);
21. C. Tenopir and D.W. King, Communications Patterns of Engineers (Piscataway, N.J.: IEEE Press, 2004). There is an enormous and quite rich literature in information science on reading, much of it summarized in King and Tenopir (1999) and Tenopir and King (2000, 2004). The vast majority of it concerns scientists, engineers, and physicians, whose use of published information is radically different from that of the humanists and social scientists who are the library researchers here discussed. More disturbing, however, most of this work presupposes a theory of knowledge as independent bits of information that has been systematically dismantled by sociologists and philosophers of knowledge and science over the last fifty years. It applies only to that part of knowledge that consists of sheer facts, what will here be called Rankean facts (see footnote 15). As a model of more general knowledge systems, the "knowledge bits" theory is clearly inadequate.
22. R.E. Rice, M. McCreadie, and S.-J.L. Chang, Accessing and Browsing Information and Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). There is a substantial literature on browsing in information science. Its approach is generally more individualized and psychological than the approach taken here. Also, it does not generally focus on browsing by experts and therefore does not focus on the centrality of antecedent knowledge in the browsing process.
23. J.R.M. Butler, The Passing of the Great Reform Bill (London: Longmans, 1914).
24. W. Whewell, The Philosophy of Inductive Science (London: Parker, 1847);
25. C.B. McCullagh, "Colligation and Classification in History," History and Theory 17 (1978): 267-84;
26. A. Abbott, "Event Sequence and Event Duration," Historical Methods 17 (1984): 192-204;
27. E.O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Knopf, 1998). The term "colligation" (from Whewell) did have a faint afterlife, in the literature on the philosophy of history. The Whewellian approach has been more recently revived by E.O. Wilson.
28. L. Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. The standard source on Ranke's historiography is Krieger. His translation of what he calls "the most famous statement in all historiography" (1977:4) is: History has had assigned to it the task of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of ages to come. The present study does not assume such a high office: it wants to show only what actually happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).
29. A computer science colleague has objected that checksums are widely used to verify the stability of computer files and that, in fact, computer files therefore have greater stability than texts. True enough. But that argument ignores the problem of the creation of a central and credible verifying authority for such checksums and the defense of such an authority from political and secret manipulation, one of the many hurdles to be surmounted before the online world can have the credibility and authority provided willy-nilly by the physicality of print. The issue can be seen as a more general ideological one. The ease of updating in the online world leads us all to indulge ourselves in the core fantasy of a society founded on the ideology of progress - that the present is always better than the past. There is, in fact, no a priori reason to think this is true (or false). But our devout belief in its truth leads us to rewrite the past with complete abandon. The physical nature of library artifacts prevents that.
30. A. Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
31. A. Abbott, "Seven Types of Ambiguity," in Time Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
32. Allen Renear (personal communication) has reported some empirical work confirming this prediction.
33. F. Rodell, "Goodbye to Law Reviews," Virginia Law Review 23 (1936): 40-41. A classic case of the technology-induced degradation of a knowledge system is law reviews, which were overwhelmed with pseudo-scholarship in part because of citation indexing. Fred Rodell's still-famous article has lost none of its sting in seventy years: "And then there is the probative or if-you're-from-Missouri-just-look-at- this type [of footnote].... It is [this] probative footnote that is so often made up of nothing but a long list of cases that the writer has had some stooge look up and throw together for him.... Any article that has to be explained or improved by being cluttered up with little numbers until it looks like the Acrosses and Downs of a crossword puzzle has no business being written."
34. This is the effect nicknamed the "Matthew effect" by Merton in a famous article. The Salganik-Watts Web-based experimental studies look at teenagers' piling-on to arbitrarily labeled "good bands." R.K. Merton, "The Matthew Effect in Science," Science NS 159 (1968): 56-63;
35. M.J. Salganik, P.S. Dodds, and D.J. Watts, "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market," Science NS 311 (2006): 854-56.
36. M.L. Burton, "Mathematical Anthropology," Annual Review of Anthropology 2 (1973):189-99.
37. L.I. Boneva, "A New Approach to a Problem of Chronological Seriation Associated with the Works of Plato," in Mathematics in the Archeological and Historial Sciences, ed. F.R. Hodson, D.G. Kendall, and P. Tautu (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 173-85.
38. A. Abbott, "The University Library," Appendix to the Report of the Provost's Task Force on the Future of the University Library, University of Chicago, 2006. Available online at www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/about/abbott-report. html and www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/about/abbott-appendix.html. [Accessed 29 September 2008].