The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization
By Eugene E. Kim
This month's review is about philosophy, and why you—whether you're a Web developer, Web user, or overall Web junkie—should care. It starts with a question posed by Elaine Svenonius in The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization. Svenonius asks, was Lewis Carroll the same person as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson? For example, if you were to search for books written by Lewis Carroll, would you want the search engine to return books written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson as well?
According to the second edition of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, the answer is no. A search for books written by Lewis Carroll would return Alice in Wonderland, but not Euclid and his Modern Rivals. For the latter, you would have to search for books written by Dodgson. Whether or not you agree with this rule, we can all agree that organizing information can be confusing. And the mountain of bits steadily accumulating on the Internet and in our email and Web browsers is only making the task harder.
Fortunately, a small segment of our population, librarians, has been dealing with the problem of information organization since 2000 B.C. Who better to turn to in our time of need than people with thousands of years of accumulated expertise and experience?
The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization
By Elaine Svenonius
The MIT Press, 2000, 255pp.<>
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