Det labyrintiska biblioteket : en studie över kunskapsorganisatoriska diskurser i verken Everything is Miscellaneous och Organization of Information

The aim of this master thesis is to explore which meanings that can be ascribed to knowledge organization in the field of library- and information science. This I do through studying two works that deal with this subject, namely Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger from 2007 and Organization of Information by Arlene G. Taylor and Daniel N. Jourdrey, from 2009. My theory and method are derived from Michel Foucault’s discourse theory, which means that I explore the language structure of the two texts; which statements the texts maintain and which statements they fence off. In this way I am able to distinguish which discourses of knowledge organization the two texts externalize. According to Foucault, madness has, through history been regarded as ”The Other”, something foreign, and therefore to be excluded, while order instead is the history of ”The Same”, something familiar and therefore to be maintained. Gary P. Radford argues, in his article Flaubert, Foucault, and the Bibliotheque Fantastique: Toward a Postmodern Epistemology for Library Science (1998), which emanates from the Foucauldian theory, that the library as an institution mirrows these notions of madness and order. The analysis of the two texts, in the light of Foucault’s theory of discourse, reveals that the text Organization of Information externalizes a discourse that maintains the order, ”The Same”, while it at the same time tries to exclude the disorder, ”The other” from the discourse. On the other hand the text Everything is Miscellaneous does the opposite, it keep up the disorder and at the same excludes order from the discourse