Three texts - a fable, a call-to-arms, and thoughtful reflection on the most basic task of librarianship – classification. Each work was published in English between 1962 .
Central to each work is the idea of the collection – whether expressed as the book, the work, the library, information, or the Universe – and the various affordances of a collection including organization, control, classification, librarianship, and the use of a collection.
For Borges, the labyrinthine library is the setting for a fable about the Universe and the human struggle to make sense of the patterns found it in as expressed in the volumes of the infinite hexagonal library. It evokes through linking the familiar with the absurd to concentrate the essence of humanity’s process of gaining knowledge of the world into a single fable of singular depth and richness. The collection must be interpreted and knowledge teased out by the efforts of the librarians over time. The rational, the mystic, and the absurd coalesce around various librarian social practices and behavior shaping myths about the Crimson Hexagons and the Man of the Book.
For Shera, the central concern of the collection is how to organize the collection using a system of “bibliographic classification based upon epistemological principles” (Shera, 333) as expressed in the faceted colon classification scheme propounded by S.R. Ranathangan beginning in the 1930s. Writing during the first flowering of the artificial intelligence age, Shera is heavily influenced by the early pioneers of computational information processing like Herbert Simon and Ulric Neisser and is lead the conclusion that the brain is a symbol processing computer and can be modeled adequately using a machine technology. Hence, the double meaning knowing of his book’s title, Knowing Books and Men; Knowing Computers, Too. Shera concludes with a rather strange apotheosis of librarianship into the center point of intellectual life. As he writes, “Of all the disciplines, it is the broadest and richest – the most interdisciplinary. It reaches to the very center of man’s intellectual achievements, and seeks to understand the relations of the parts to the whole of human knowledge” (Shera, 336). And yet, we remember Aristotle and his works not his extensive library at the Lyceum. Shera overreaches here to make the point that library school training in the 1960s needed to move beyond DDC and LOC and embrace the new opportunities made possible by the computer and the faceted classification system.
Finally, Patrick Wilson offers a philosophical reflection and dissection on the nature of classification as expressed through the idea of bibliographic control and expands the category of collection objects from the older notion of the physical book to the idea of the work – which he defines in almost Wittgensteinian terms as “a group or family of texts” (Wilson, 9). And he refutes the dream of Shera’s biobliographic control centered on disembodied information by arguing persuasively for the contextual embodiment provided by texts as the unit of bibliographic control which keeps the author and their authority central to human knowledge production and organization.