Bringing political upheaval and cultural trauma into order : a document-theoretical approach to the analysis of the social significance of bibliographic classification systems

Knowledge organization systems, whether intended for use in libraries or bibliographic services, has a complex relation to the time and environment of their construction. In a famous paper from 1982, Eric de Grolier describes library classification systems as “cultural artefacts”, based on an analysis of the relation between classes and the size of catalog entries in 29 historically significant systems. His analysis displays a relation where systems mimetically represent knowledge production as seen in literature production. However, at the end of his paper, de Grolier indicates something more; that classification systems not only reproduce knowledge production, but also have the ability to anticipate future trends by formulating styntactic and semantic priorities in relation to current cultural and social developments. However, how it is possible to further analyze such abilities is not considered. Efforts to develop a deeper understanding of the relation between such developments and bibliographic systems have since been undertaken from various perspectives, although most, with a few notable exceptions, have done so by returning to a discussion on warrants initiated already in the first decades of the 20th century. This presentation and subsequent paper will address this issue by analysing the question of how it is possible to “read” a bibliographic classification system, not just in a way which establishes traditional perspectives such as literary, scientific, institutional or cultural warrants, but in a way that present the system, seen as an autonomous form of document, as part of a specific cultural, political or social environment and its development. This is being done through a discussion of social anthropologist Jack Goody’s concept of “écriture” as formulated in his critique of Ferdinand de Saussure’s ideas on the relation between written and spoken language, and philosopher Maurizio Ferraris formulation of documents as “inscribed acts”. Though widely different in scope, these two entry points prove fruitful in understanding bibliographic classification systems in a new way, exceeding the fundamentally mimetic relation between system and warrant usually assumed in classification research. The theoretical discussion is complemented with two empirical examples relating to dramatic social change and cultural trauma. The first example is the 1921 edition of the Swedish national classification system created for public libraries. This system was constructed when a new public library infrastructure was created in Sweden as part of the dramatic processes that led to the formal institutionalization of democracy during a period of social and political turmoil in the late 1910s and early 1920s. The second example relates to the need for Jewish libraries to make sense of the Holocaust within their collections and bibliographic work. The American Elazar system for Judaica libraries was constructed in the 1950s as part of the American initiated reformulation of Jewish cultural identity following the annihilation of the European Jewry in World War II. Concluding remarks address the methodological question on how to create an analytical framework for a reading of classification systems as socially significant documents in relation to cultural and social development. Suggestions are made on the basis of a revision of the author’s previous research, developing a methodology relating to French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s effort to establish a ‘hermeneutics of historical consciousness’