Bringing Political Upheaval and Cultural Trauma into Order: A Document-Theoretical Approach to the Social Significance of Bibliographic Classification Systems

Abstract

This paper explores the ability to define bibliographic classification systems as socially significant documents in a way that goes beyond their immediate function in the information retrieval process. It does so in dialog with theory on documents and documentality, and knowledge organization theory. Two examples show how development of new classification systems address social and cultural structures in periods of rapid social and cultural change and crisis. The first example discusses the design of a classification system for Swedish public libraries in the late 1910s, and the second addresses the re-formulation of the Holocaust experience in American Jewish library classification practice in the 1950s and 1960s. Results indicate that social significance to classification systems influence the definition their institutional context in relation to wider social issues and movements. The character of this influence suggests research on documentality needs to address the relation between form and content in documents defined as reifications of social acts.

The informative potential of bibliographic classification systems – reflections on a discussion in the French Documentation Movement

“…How far can we go in defining this relation that indeed in itself is a defining property of what can be considered a document? In this article, I will use as an example the bibliographical classification system, a kind of document that I have previously discussed in relation to situated political and historical environments as a way of defining a context-document relation that exceeds its instrumental function as a tool for organizing collections of documents in a library, or representations of such in a bibliography (Hansson, 2021). The discussion will be guided by three main questions:…”

“…How far can we go in defining this relation that indeed in itself is a defining property of what can be considered a document? In this article, I will use as an example the bibliographical classification system, a kind of document that I have previously discussed in relation to situated political and historical environments as a way of defining a context–document relation that exceeds its instrumental function as a tool for organizing collections of documents in a library, or representations of such in a bibliography (Hansson, 2021). The discussion will be guided by three main questions:How can a document-theoretical approach be of use in defining bibliographic classification systems as autonomous documents?Based on this definitional foundation, in what way does the mid-twentieth-century French Documentation Movement help us progress our understanding of bibliographic classification systems not only as autonomous but as socially significant documents?…”