Common usage as warrant in bibliographic description
| Pages | 49-66 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2019-0094 |
| Published date | 08 October 2019 |
| Date | 08 October 2019 |
| Author | Brian Dobreski |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Common usage as warrant in
bibliographic description
Brian Dobreski
School of Information Sciences,
University of Tennessee Knoxville, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA
Abstract
Purpose –Within standards for bibliographic description, common usage has served as a prominent design
principle, guiding the choice and form of certain names and titles. In practice, however, the determination of
common usage is difficult and lends itself to varying interpretations. The purpose of this paper is to explore
the presence and role of common usage in bibliographic description through an examination of previously
unexplored connections between common usage and the concept of warrant.
Design/methodology/approach –A brief historical review o f the concept of common usa ge was
conducted, followed by a c ase study of the current bib liographic standar d Resource Descriptio n and
Access (RDA) employing qual itative content analysis to ex amine the appearances, del ineations and
functions of common usag e. Findings were then co mpared to the existing lit erature on warrant in
knowledge organizatio n.
Findings –Multiple interpretations of common usage coexist within RDA and its predecessors, and the
current prioritization of these interpretations tends to render user perspectives secondary to those of creators,
scholars and publishers. These varying common usages and their overall reliance on concrete sources of
evidence reveal a mixture of underlying warrants, with literary warrant playing a more prominent role in
comparison to the also present scientific/philosophical, use and autonomous warrants.
Originality/value –This paper offers new understanding of the concept of common usage, and adds to the
body of work examining warrant in knowledge organization practices beyond classification. It sheds light on
the design of the influential standard RDA while revealing the implications of naming and labeling in widely
shared bibliographic data.
Keywords RDA, Cataloging, Warrant, Knowledgeorganization, Bibliographicdescription, Common usage
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Among knowledge organizing institutions, libraries have developed a distinct system of
organization known as bibliographic description, more commonly referred to as
cataloging. The chief goal of bibliographic description is the creation of a catalog of
records representing the resources in a library’s collection. Beyond traditional
bibliographic resources such as books, maps and periodicals, this description
process also entails the representation of other entities of interest, including persons,
groups and works. Representation here is focused on controlling the labels (i.e. names and
titles) that are used both to refer to these entities and as a means of accessing
records in the catalog in a consistent manner. Identifying entities of interest and
redirecting various name forms to one preferred label reflects a kind of terminological
classification task. Previous literature has noted a relevant design principle that
ostensibly guides this task within standards for bibliographic description:common u sage,
which dictates that certain vocabulary in a description should reflect the predominant
usage of these terms (Svenonius, 2000).
The first explicit appearance of common usage in a set of rules for bibliographic
description occurred in the work of Charles Cutter (1876). Common usage here referred to
the language of the typical end user, an objective that was well-intentioned though difficult
to put into practice due to the vague, intuitive nature with which it was presented. Since
then, common usage has remained an important principle in standards for bibliographic
description, but variations in its interpretation over time illustrate the difficulties of
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 76 No. 1, 2020
pp. 49-66
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-05-2019-0094
Received 21 May 2019
Revised 7 September 2019
Accepted 15 September 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
49
Common usage
as warrant
determining common usage and conceptualizing it as referring to a single, coherent
terminological form. Relying on cataloger intuition for consistent results is a dubious
prospect, particularly within increasingly lengthy and complex standards for bibliographic
description. More concrete, empirical interpretations of common usage may be employed
to address this, though even so, catalogers are still faced with the reality that multiple
common usages exist in the ways we name persons, groups and works (Svenonius, 2000).
How these usages are addressed and negotiated in bibliographic description is worth
further examination, an examination that can be effectively cast through the analytical
lens of warrant.
Within all systems for organizing knowledge, certain decisions must be made
concerning which concepts are relevant for inclusion and how they are to be labeled. The
sources of justification for these choices may be referred to as warrant (Olson, 2004).
For instance, in determining when to include a new term into a thesaurus, knowledge
organizers may look to terminology used in formal publications as warrant. Historically,
one of the most prominent types of warrant has been literary warrant: basing
terminological forms on those common in published literature (Hulme, 1950). Many other
types of warrant have been noted, however, including cultural warrant, scientific warrant
and use warrant (Martínez-Ávila and Budd, 2017), each playing various roles of more or
less importance in certain systems. Overall, warrant has served as a means of
understanding the relationship between knowledge organizing and sources of conceptual
and terminological authority; that is, what sources are appealed to for justification, and in
the process, what perspectives on labeling receive privilege.
Though warrant has frequently been examined in relation to classifications, other
areas of knowledge organization have received less scrutiny (Kwaśnik, 2010). This is
indeed the case for bibliographic description: terminological activities in bibliographic
description have not been fully explored in relation to the concept of warrant, despite the
apparent ties between this concept and the concept of common usage. As procedural
documents, standards for bibliographic description must, to some extent, operationalize
the intuitive concept of common usage through appeals to specific sources of authority;
what types of warrant are reflected in these appeals? Bibliographic description sees
knowledge organizers working to form a bridge between the language of information
resources and the language of users (Svenonius, 2000). As bibliographic data become
shared more widely online beyond the catalog, however, these negotiations on naming
have broader implications besides bridging a specific set of users to a specific collection.
In realizing the principle of common usage, the placement of warrant in standards for
bibliographic description is a design choice with the capability of either obscuring or
incorporating various perspectives on naming, both within the catalog and beyond, and is
worthy of further scrutiny.
The present work is intended to shed new light on the connections between common
usage, warrant and bibliographic description; specifically, this study seeks to employ
warrant as a conceptual lens in more fully understanding the role and implications of
common usage. In addition to an exploration of the historical background of common usage,
a case study utilizing the contemporary, international bibliographic description standard
Resource Description and Access (RDA) is presented as well. Content analysis of the text of
this standard is employed to develop an initial framework capable of conveying the
meanings of common usage in RDA, and to relate these meanings, where possible, to
established conceptions of warrant. Findings from the present work provide insight into
how an influential standard for bibliographic description operationalizes common usage
across an array of resources and environments. More broadly, results yield new
understanding of how systems for bibliographic description employ warrant, address a
plurality of usages and privilege certain perspectives over others.
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