# The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries potx

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The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging,  
and Scholarship in Research Libraries  
By  
Thomas Mann  
Prepared for AFSCME 2910  
The Library of Congress Professional Guild  
representing over 1,600 professional employees  
www.guild2910.org  
June 13, 2007  
No copyright is claimed for this paper.  
It may be freely reproduced, reprinted, and republished.  
___________________________________________________________________________  
Thomas Mann, Ph.D., a member of AFSCME 2910, is the author of The Oxford Guide to Library  
Research, third edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Library  
Research Models (Oxford U. Press, 1993).  
The judgements made in this paper do not represent official views of the Library of Congress.  
______________________________________________________________________________  
Abstract  
The paper is an examination of the overall principles and practices of both  
reference service and cataloging operations in the promotion of scholarly research,  
pointing out important differences not just in content available onsite and offsite, but also  
among necessary search techniques. It specifies the differences between scholarship and  
quick information seeking, and examines the implications of those differences for the  
future of cataloging. It examines various proposals that the profession should concentrate  
its efforts on alternatives to cataloging: relevance ranking, tagging, under-the-hood  
programming, etc. The paper considers the need for, and requirements of, education of  
researchers; and it examines in detail many of the glaring disconnects between theory and  
practice in the library profession today. Finally, it provides an overview of the whole  
“shape of the elephant” of library services, within which cataloging is only one  
component.  
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What is involved in providing library service to the academic community? Is our  
purpose merely to provide “something quickly”? What, exactly, is wrong with promoting  
that end as our goal? What is the role of reference work? How does library cataloging fit  
into a larger scheme of necessary services? What is the larger scheme of which  
cataloging is only a part? What should research instruction classes strive to cover? What  
is a good outline for a basic research class? Does anything need to be explained at all if  
our “under the hood” programming and federated searching capabilities are adequate? In  
short, what idea of “the shape of the elephant” of research, and of library resources as a  
whole, do we wish to convey to an academic clientele?   
Users of public and special libraries have different needs; my concern in this  
paper is the future of research libraries. Much of what the latter do, of course, spills over  
into public and special library practices.  
A wide range of important issues and distinctions is involved here:  
• Differences in content available onsite and offsite   
\- copyright restrictions on what can and cannot be digitized  
\- digitized sources restricted by site licenses or password use  
• Differences in search methods available onsite and offsite  
\- the variety of search methods, beyond keyword access (e.g,  
controlled vocabulary searching, citation searching, related  
record searching, browsing classified book stacks, use of  
published bibliographies), available onsite: their different  
retrieval capabilities   
• Differences between cataloging (conceptual categorization at  
scope-match level   
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, vocabulary standardization within and  
across multiple languages, systematic linkage of categories) vs.  
relevance ranking of keywords, tagging, folksonomies, etc.  
\- the need for search methods enabling recognition of relevant  
sources whose characteristics (and keywords) cannot be  
specified in advance  
• Differences between scholarship and quick information  
seeking   
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\- relationships, interconnections, contexts, and integrations vs.   
isolated facts or snippets  
\- the need for successive, sequenced steps (with feedback  
loops) vs. “seamless one-stop shopping”  
• The problems of federated searching  
\- misrepresenting the full contents and search capabilities of  
individual databases  
\- masking the existence of non-included sources  
• The inadequacy of the open Internet alone for scholarly  
research  
\- its inability to provide overviews of “the whole  
elephant”—i.e., not showing all relevant parts, not  
distinguishing important from tangential, not showing  
interconnections or relationships, not adequately allowing  
recognition of what cannot be specified  
• The need for education of users, not just improvements in  
“under the hood” algorithms  
\- education not just on how to use subject headings, but on how  
to do keyword searching itself   
\- education on multiple search techniques other than keyword  
or subject-heading searching  
• The need for increased one-to-one connections with reference  
librarians, not just the digitizing of more material for direct   
full-text searching   
• The disconnects between library theory and practice   
\- the assumption that library catalogs/portals should  
“seamlessly” cover “everything” to begin with   
\- the assumption that library catalogs—or any other access  
mechanism—can operate efficiently without any prior  
instruction or point-of-use reference intervention   
\- knee-jerk dismissals of enduring cataloging principles only   
because they originated in times of earlier technologies  
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\- disregard of the importance of vocabulary control and cross-  
referencing because it cannot be accomplished by algorithms  
\- disregard of the significance of scope-match subject  
cataloging as the major solution to the problem of excessive  
irrelevant retrievals at the “granular” level   
\- disregard of the importance of shelving books in classified  
order, on the assumption that everything relevant can be  
identified online   
\- disregard of the extensive web of integral interconnections  
between LC subject headings and LC class numbers in  
providing access to book collections  
\- disregard of the increased utility of precoordinated strings of  
subject terms, and catalog browse displays of them  
The problem with any discussion of such issues lies in the complexity of their  
interrelationships. It=s like trying to pin down a warped piece of linoleum—flattening a  
bulge in one area immediately causes other bulges to pop up elsewhere. I cannot claim to  
have a system that flattens all the lumps, but I am concerned that many of the more  
important problems facing scholars are being ignored because a “digital library” paradigm   
puts blinders on our very ability to notice the problems in the first place.   
I think the best way to clarify what I mean is to provide a concrete example, as a   
kind of central spine (I’m changing the metaphor) to which all of these issues are   
attached; I will discuss the various offshoot “ribs” as they arise in a real-world research   
situation. A major problem with much of the discussion in our profession these days is   
that many of us are indeed speaking from different paradigmatic frameworks. The only   
way to determine which is the better frame is to examine which one works best “at   
ground level”–i.e, which most readily enables the library profession to serve its scholarly   
clientele in ways that solve the full range of their problems.   
Getting a researcher efficiently from what he or she asks for to what is available in   
a research library is a much more complex operation than most non-librarians realize; it is   
also more complex than too many library managers themselves seem to understand. Most   
of it cannot be done remotely through searching the open Internet, no matter how much   
under-the-hood programming underlies the utopian “single search box.” As the following   
example will illustrate, the work involved also escapes description in quantifiable or   
measurable terms; but when it is done properly it nonetheless makes an enormous   
difference to the quality of the research that gets done. (It also justifies the expense of   
investing in costly resources that would otherwise be overlooked by most researchers, but   
which can indeed be brought efficiently to their attention.)   
I am going to insist on differences between what I=ll call “scholarship,” on the one   
hand, vs. “quick information seeking” on the other. Obviously there is a spectrum of   
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continuities between the two–no one disputes that–but there are also big differences that   
are too often swept under the rug. Scholarship requires linkages, connections, contexts,   
and overviews of relationships; quick information seeking is largely satisfied by discrete   
information or facts without the need to also establish the contexts and relationships   
surrounding them. Scholarship is judged by the range, extent, and depth of elements it   
integrates into a whole; quick information seeking is largely judged by whether it   
provides a “right” answer or puts out an immediate informational “brush fire.” Because   
of the range of elements involved, and the complexity of their integration, book formats   
are unusually important for scholarship (especially outside the hard sciences); more than   
any other medium, they allow an amplitude of coverage in ways that screen displays   
(especially of lengthy texts) make much more difficult to grasp.    
For scholarly inquiries, the extent and depth of relationships matter–indeed, they   
are crucial to any judgment of the quality of the research product. Judging the result of a   
“quick information” search does not require an assessment of whether–or how   
successfully–it integrates the information discovered within larger expositions or   
narratives; the adequacy of an overall argument or survey does not arise in the same way   
it does in scholarly inquiries. There is a tendency in much current library literature to   
conflate “knowledge” and “understanding”–levels of learning that require   
interconnections to be made–with “information”; but they must be distinguished.   
The example: Tribute payments in the Peloponnesian war   
A graduate student came into the reading room where I work and asked, “Where   
are the books on ancient Greece?” It was evident this was a new user who was not   
familiar with closed stacks policy of the Library of Congress. I explained that particular   
books or other resources had to be identified through subject searches in the computer   
system (or other sources) and requested through call slips. Equally important, I turned   
this explanation of the stacks policy into a reference interview which elicited the fact that   
what the student really wanted was information on “the system of tribute payments   
among the Greek city-states during the Peloponnesian War.”   
The student said he had already done Google searches. Today, a search on   
“tribute” and “Peloponnesian” produces these results:   
Google: 78,400 Web sites   
Google Book Search [full texts of some digitized books]: 674 hits   
Google Scholar [full texts of some digitized journals]: 2,030 hits   
In each case, even months ago (when the retrievals were somewhat smaller), the student   
was overwhelmed with too much information: he “could not see the forest for the trees”   
or discern if he was finding the best relevant sources. A search on Wikipedia turned up   
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nothing right on the button, although it does have brief articles on th “Peloponnesian   
League” and “Peloponnesian War” that have the word “tribute” in them.   
Most researchers–at any level, whether undergraduate or professional–who are   
moving into any new subject area experience the problem of the fabled Six Blind Men of   
India who were asked to describe an elephant: one grasped a leg and said “the elephant is   
like a tree”; one felt the side and said “the elephant is like a wall”; one grasped the tail   
and said “the elephant is like a rope”; and so on with the tusk (“like a spear”), the trunk   
(“a hose”) and the ear (“a fan”). Each of them discovered something immediately, but   
none perceived either the existence or the extent of the other important parts–or how they   
fit together.    
Finding “something quickly,” in each case, proved to be seriously misleading to   
their overall comprehension of the subject.    
In a very similar way, Google searching leaves remote scholars, outside the   
research library, in just the situation of the Blind Men of India: it hides the existence and   
the extent of relevant sources on most topics (by overlooking many relevant sources to   
begin with, and also by burying the good sources that it does find within massive and   
incomprehensible retrievals). It also does nothing to show the interconnections of the   
important parts (assuming that the important can be distinguished, to begin with, from the   
unimportant).   
In this Peloponnesian case, my thinking was, first, to try to guide the student to an   
intelligible overview of the relevant literature, so that he could indeed see “the whole   
elephant,” and not just “something” on the topic. This is the most important function a   
reference librarian can serve in a large research library.   
My first thought was of encyclopedia articles (rather than whole books or journal   
articles) because their very purpose is to provide concise overviews of topics, with   
manageably small bibliographies of highly-recommended sources (rather than printouts of   
“everything”). So I started by searching an obscure subscription database, Reference   
Universe, which indexes all of the individual articles in over 12,000 reference sources; it   
is particularly good in its coverage of specialized subject encyclopedias. (As with so   
many subscription services, the title of the source does not begin to convey what it can   
do—even if the reader, working on his own, did come across this title in the Library’s list   
of proprietary database subscriptions, he still would probably not have bothered to   
explore it.) The indexing in this file immediately identified an article o “Tribute lists   
(Athenian)” in a highly reliable source, The Oxford Classical Dictionary. This volume   
was right in the Main Reading Room reference collection; its article provided exactly the   
concise overview of the topic that the student wanted—without knowing how to ask for   
it, or even that it was possible to ask for a concise overview. The article also mentioned   
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at its end that “the standard work on the tribute records is B.D. Meritt, H.T. Wade-Gery,   
and M.F. McGregor, The Athenian Tribute Lists, 4 vols. (1939-53).”   
Whenever there is a “standard work” on a topic, it is better to find this out sooner   
rather than later in the course of one=s research (as many grad students–myself among   
them–have discovered “the hard way”). Armed with this information, I showed the   
reader how to search the computer catalog for that standard work. The LC cataloging   
record for the book then provided crucial information for the next step of the search–i.e.,   
the record found through a known-item title search indicated that its most promising   
subject category is “Finance, public–Greece–Athens” (i.e., not “tribute” AND   
“Peloponnesian”). A search under this standardized LC subject heading retrieved a roster   
of directly relevant works whose keyword variations could never have been specified in   
advance:   
Tribute Assessments in the Athenian Empire (1919)   
Studies in the Athenian Tribute Lists (1926)   
Treasurers of Athena (1932)   
Athenian Financial Documents of the Fifth Century (1932)   
Athenian Assessment of 425 B.C. (1934)   
Documents on Athenian Tribute (1937)   
Vorschlage zur Beschaffung von Geldmitteln, Oder, Uber die Staatseinkunft    
(1982)  
Finances Publiques et Richesses Privees dans le Discours Athenian au Ve et IVe   
Siecles (1988)   
Pathogene Syndroma sto Demosionomiko Systema tes Archais Athenas (1991)   
Money, Expense, and Naval Power in Thucydides   
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History 1-5.24 (1993)   
Money and the Corrosion of Power in Thucydides (2001)   
Poroi: A New Translation / Xenophon (2003)   
Advantages of controlled vocabulary use   
Note several things about this retrieval:   
A) Again, not one of these titles would have been retrieved by a keyword   
search on Atribute@ combined with “Peloponnesian” (let alone “ancient Greece”–the   
words initially used by the researcher before I did the reference interview).   
B) The works found through an LC subject heading search in the Library=s   
catalog include both current and older works–from 1919 through 2003–together in the   
same set (not just recent, in-print works).   
C) The works found through an LC subject heading search in the Library=s   
catalog also include both English and foreign language sources–German, French, and   
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Greek–together in the same set, without the searcher having to specify any foreign   
language terms. (I should note that this subject heading was not the only one relevant to   
the topic.)   
D) The retrieval was of manageable size, not overwhelming.   
E) The works identified were actually owned by the Library, immediately   
accessible without the delays of borrowing or interlibrary loan. (The Principle of Least   
Effort needs to be kept in mind: because sources that are readily available are more   
attractive than those requiring greater time or effort to secure, we need to make high-   
quality sources as readily retrievable as possible–while we continue to operate in the real   
world, where paper-copy books are essential to scholarship because copyright and site-   
license restrictions will never vanish; nor is it likely that future scholars will readily read   
300-page texts online. If our goal is to promote scholarship, then “least effort” on the   
researchers’ part means “most effort” on our part, in our acquisition efforts, in creating   
high quality cataloging, in providing proactive reference service, and in assuring the long-   
term preservation of our material.)   
F) Each of these books is substantially about the tribute payments–i.e.,   
these are not just works that happen to have the keywords “tribute” and “Peloponnesian”   
somewhere near each other, as in the Google retrieval. They are essentially whole books   
on the desired topic, because cataloging works on the assumption of “scope-match”   
coverage–that is, the assigned LC headings strive to indicate the contents of the book as a   
whole. (Any single assigned heading may not, by itself, indicate the content of the entire   
work, but any heading will at least indicate the subject-content of a substantial portion of   
it. Scope-match cataloging aims to summarize the major overall content of a book, not its   
individual chapters or smaller subsections. It is the antithesis of “granular” level   
indexing, as provided by the book’s index pages or by keywords from the entire text.) In   
focusing on these books immediately, there is no need to wade through hundreds of   
irrelevant sources that simply mention the desired keywords in passing, or in undesired   
contexts. The works retrieved under the LC subject heading are thus structural parts of   
“the elephant”–not insignificant toenails or individual hairs.   
To change the metaphor for a moment, consider a mosaic picture of an   
elephant made up of thousands of small individual colored tiles. Keyword retrieval in a   
full-text database is like searching at the granular level for individual tiles; if you specify   
that you want all of the gray pieces (needed for the legs, sides, ears, tail) and all of the   
white pieces (tusks, teeth) they can indeed be retrieved together in one set. But searching   
at this level cannot retrieve the image as a whole with all of the parts properly   
interrelated; it cannot combine just some of the grays into legs or ears or tails, to the   
exclusion of other gray pieces that belong elsewhere. Nor can it exclude tiles from   
thousands of other entirely different pictures (rhinoceroses, skyscrapers, dirigibles),   
which are also retrieved because they happen to have gray and white pieces within their   
own makeup. For these purposes you need the equivalent of “scope match” cataloging,   
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which both defines what “the whole” object is to begin with and sets conceptual   
boundaries on what is or is not a legitimate part of that whole. Within these scope   
boundaries various keywords (from titles, contents, or full texts) are contextually   
relevant, but outside of them the same words become irrelevant “noise.” Merely giving   
more weight to certain words tagged as metadata, so that they will be ranked by the   
software as more important within an overall keyword retrieval, will still not assemble an   
overall picture with any scope boundaries, or segregate structural from tangential   
elements within the picture, let alone separate the elements within the desired picture   
from the same elements appearing in entirely different pictures.    
Pictures, of course, don’t contain cross-references to other illustrations; so   
here the analogy breaks down. But controlled-vocabulary LC subject headings, unlike   
mosaic tiles or keywords, are indeed linked to broader, related, and narrower terms to   
establish a road map of relationships to other conceptual headings–a mapping frequently   
crucial to scholarly overviews that is not provided at all by “ranked” metadata terms, or   
provided reliably by democratic tagging. Moreover, this cross-reference network itself   
functions in a way that refers users to other headings that are themselves at scope-match   
(rather than granular) conceptual levels–a level that is also lost when precoordinated   
LCSH subject strings are decomposed into their individual “facet” elements.   
The point needs emphasis: some theorists have a knee-jerk aversion to   
scope-match subject cataloging because they unthinkingly regard it as simply a carry-over   
from card catalog days. (Cards could not provide granular-level access without making   
catalogs much too physically large.) What they apparently lack is any experience in   
dealing with actual researchers, for whom this level of cataloging solves the otherwise   
intractable problem of retrieving so much chaff with keywords that the whole books they   
want become buried indistinguishably in huge retrievals–e.g., Google Book Search’s 674   
hits combining “tribute” and “Peloponnesian.” Keyword searching at granular levels   
“overshoots the mark,” as does faceted searching of LCSH elements that must be   
combined into wholes by searchers who barely know which keywords to enter in the first   
place, and who also often don’t know what the “whole” is until they recognize it in a   
precoordinated string. (Would any searcher working entirely on his own know that   
“Finance, public” needs to be chosen to begin with, and then combined with “Greece”   
and “Athens”? As a reference librarian, I can say it is much easier to teach how to find   
the precoordinated string than to teach how to think up all of the individual facets that   
need to go into a Boolean combination.) Increasing the granularity of searching to   
keyword levels, and robbing LCSH “facets” of their conceptual contexts in   
precoordinated strings, are both practices that directly undermine the scope-match level of   
traditional indexing–but it is precisely this feature of cataloging that brings about the   
quick retrieval of the “elephant’s” structural parts (the whole books on, or substantial   
treatments of, the topic). These are the books readers want to find first, unencumbered by   
the clutter of thousands of irrelevant hits having the right words in the wrong contexts,   
outside the desired conceptual boundaries.    
Note that neither I nor anyone else is arguing against granular levels of   
access being provided in addition to scope-match; it is the replacement of one by the   
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other that is objectionable. We need both.   
Scope-match cataloging hits the bull’s eye at the level of retrieval most   
needed for distinguishing structural from ephemeral relevance to a topic. While it is true   
that the subject-content of a book (or other record) as a whole can indeed be indicated by   
a combination of individual index elements (“Finance” AND “public” AND “Greece”   
AND “Athens”), researchers have much more difficulty thinking up all of the terms that   
go into such combinations; it is much easier for them to simply recognize strings that   
have already been combined. (“Least effort” is a reality–again, it’s easier for them on the   
retrieval end if we do more of the work on the input end.) Theorists who assert that   
simply “digitizing everything” eliminates the need for cataloging   
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evidently have minimal   
experience with the actual results produced by implementing their theory. Full-text   
searching is indeed extremely valuable in many situations; but if a researcher wishes to   
get an overview of the important works on a topic, that kind of searching is positively   
counterproductive–it cannot segregate whole books from fragments of books, nor can it   
separate substantial treatments from trivial. It buries high and low quality sources in huge   
sets without the discriminations that users need. Granular access precludes overview   
perspectives unless librarians also provide alternative search mechanisms that solve the   
problems created by granularity.   
G) The problem of keyword variations (see the list, above, of titles   
retrieved) would not have been solved by “throwing more keywords into the hopper”–i.e.,  
so that words which don’t “hit” within titles (appearing on brief catalog records) can  
nonetheless be found because they do indeed “hit” within larger digitized full texts. In  
addition to erasing the necessary conceptual boundaries for determining the relevance of  
English-language hits (again, Google Book Search: 674 hits), the same keyword searches  
of English terms would fail to retrieve the relevant French, German, and Greek texts.    
H) The catalog could assemble this group of highly-relevant resources, to   
begin with, because it makes direct use of the subject expertise of the professional   
catalogers who had previously brought about conceptual categorization of the relevant   
books in one grouping (under the standardized heading)–and done it at the level of the   
book as a whole–through vocabulary control. A retrieval system based on controlled   
conceptual categorization of sources is radically different from one that relies on   
relevance ranking of keywords done by machine algorithms. The latter can take the   
words specified by a researcher and change the display-order of the retrieved results   
according to various criteria for weighting the keywords; but such a system cannot find,   
to begin with, keywords other than those specified. (Claims for automated “query   
expansion” need to be examined skeptically; there is usually much “less there than meets  
the eye.” Demonstrations–as with this Peloponnesian example–are called for, rather than  
mere assertions lacking concrete examples.) We all need to be very skeptical of the  
phrase “relevance ranking”–“term weighting” would be more accurate–because it  
radically changes the very meaning of the word relevance. It entirely divorces its   
definition from the notion of conceptual appropriateness, across both variant expressions   
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and variant languages, and from the notion of substantial (rather than tangential)   
appropriateness.   
This point illustrates one of the major disconnects between theory and   
practice–or between competing paradigms–in our profession: some theorists dismiss the   
principle of vocabulary control (specifically LCSH) as outdated, apparently because it   
was developed under a technology (card catalogs) that could not provide granular-level   
access. The fact that thousands of professional catalogers created a system that solves the   
problems that today are created today by granularity, however, indicates concretely that   
the principles they developed (e.g., vocabulary control, scope-match indexing) are not   
outdated simply because technologies have changed in the meantime. Our professional   
forebears “created better than they knew”–or perhaps, more accurately, “better than many   
of us know today”–because the principles and practices they developed in the 20   
th   
century   
provide the best solution to a major, and growing, problem of the 21   
st   
century. If there is  
a problem of blinkered vision, it is not attributable to our predecessors; it lies with our  
own failure to recognize their genius, due to the constricting blinders of the digital library  
paradigm.  
Additional search options beyond the catalog: browsing classified shelves   
But there is much more to this Peloponnesian example. While the searcher was  
looking at the online catalog, I quickly inspected the reference collection=s volumes for  
those that might be shelved adjacent to The Oxford Classical Dictionary (at DE5.O9  
1996). Right nearby was another reference book: Ancient Greece: Social and Historical  
Documents from Archaic Times to the Death of Socrates (DF7.D55 1994); this contains  
full texts of relevant sources on the tribute payments, translated into English; and it also  
confirms that “the basic starting point for research on tribute” is same Athenian Tribute  
Lists work identified as “standard” by the Oxford source.  
Additional search options beyond the catalog: format searching for a literature   
review article   
While the researcher looked at this second reference book, I took yet another tack   
toward guiding him to an overview of “the shape of the elephant.” At this point he had  
already gained an excellent sense of what are the most important books to start with  
(without the cluttering presence of hundreds of irrelevancies, as in Google Book Search);  
but I wished to get him to a similar overview, if possible, of the relevant journal articles.   
There is a mechanism for doing precisely this, which no general researcher has ever heard   
of. It is the Web of Science database, which indexes 9,000 of the highest-quality   
academic journals worldwide, in all subject areas–i.e., not just “science” areas, as its title   
seems to indicate. (This is another source that most humanities researchers would not   
bother to open, even if they saw it listed, without a reference librarian=s intervention.)    
What I knew, in particular, was that Web of Science has a feature enabling searches to be   
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limited to “review” articles. These are not book reviews; rather, they are “state of the art”   
literature review articles written by knowledgeable scholars, to survey and summarize the   
entire literature of a topic, with extensive bibliographies–thus providing a more   
comprehensive and in-depth overview than that provided by encyclopedia articles. The   
Web database, searched initially by the Boolean combination “tribute AND   
Peloponnesian,” and limited to the “review” document type, immediately turned up the   
following citation:    
Title: Athenian finance, 454-404 BC    
Author(s): Blamire A    
Source: HESPERIA 70 (1): 99-126 JAN-MAR 2001    
Document Type: Review    
Language: English   
Cited References: 105 Times Cited: 0    
Abstract: This paper presents a survey of Athenian financial history from the   
transfer of the Delian Treasury in, probably, 454 to the end of the Peloponnesian   
War some fifty years later, in the hope that future research will profit from an   
overview of the achievements of 20th-century scholarship.   
KeyWords Plus: PARTHENON; TREASURY; TRIBUTE   
Addresses: Blamire A (reprint author), 5 Caulfield Close, Bury St Edmonds,  
Suffolk 1P33 2LA England   
Note that this “Document Type: Review” article has 105 footnotes. This is the desired   
overview source for relevant journal articles. With this, along with the reference-book   
articles and the LC catalog retrieval, the reader was beginning to get a very good   
overview of the whole shape of the elephant rather than just a hodge-podge of   
“something” having the right keywords and retrieved quickly. (Note further that this   
citation also provides a mailing address for contacting the author–a regular feature of this   
database [and one that I anticipated] that is frequently valuable even apart from other   
considerations.)    
All of the above steps were accomplished in less than fifteen minutes. It takes   
much more time to explain what is involved, and the reasons for doing one thing rather   
than another, than to just do it. (This, by the way, is the kind of “speedy” retrieval   
scholars really want, as opposed to another kind, discussed below [see II].)   
  
Additional search options beyond the catalog: related record searching   
There is still more: the citation retrieved by this Web database offered a clickable   
icon to “Find Related Records”; pursuing this link provided a list of other articles whose   
own footnotes overlap with the105 footnotes of the review article. Right near the top of   
this list (arranged in descending order by the number of overlapping footnotes) is the   
following reference:   
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Title: Epigraphic geography - The tribute quota fragments assigned to 421/0-   
415/4 BC    
Author(s): Kallet L   
Source: HESPERIA 73 (4): 465-496 OCT-DEC 2004   
Document Type: Article   
Language: English   
Cited references: 43   
* * *  
E-mail addresses: kallet@mail.utexas.edu   
This “related record” article (along with others) appears because it has six footnotes in   
common with the starting-point review article–i.e., related record searching identifies   
articles having shared footnotes. The important point here is that this latter article is   
indeed talking about tribute during the period of the Peloponnesian War (431-404   
B.C.)–but nowhere does its citation or abstract contain the keyword “Peloponnesian.”    
This directly-relevant source would have been missed entirely by a conventional keyword   
search; it was retrieved because it had shared footnotes rather than shared keywords with   
the starting-point source. (This citation, further, provided its author=s e-mail address!)   
Additional search options beyond the catalog: citation searching and published   
bibliographies   
The same Web database also provided a means to do not just keyword searches,   
and not just related record searches, but also citation searches: in this case, I could   
quickly show the reader that it provides a list of twenty-nine scholarly articles (since   
1997, the retrospective limit of LC=s subscription) that cite “the standard work” by Meritt   
in their footnotes, as follow-up discussions of it.   
Still more: while the reader was looking into the citation and related record search   
features that I brought to his attention, I also checked to see if there is a published subject   
bibliography on the topic, by searching Bibliographic Index Plus (yet another title not   
likely to draw any layperson’s attention). This proprietary database turned up the same   
“Epigraphic geography” article already found (above), because it has forty-three footnotes   
in its bibliography. (Although the existence of this citation was not “new” information at   
this point, it is a good sign when more than one search avenue leads to the same   
source–just as the two reference books independently agreed in identifying “the standard   
work.” Such convergence on the same sources is an excellent indication that one=s   
literature review is not missing the most important material—i.e., that important parts of  
“the elephant” are not being overlooked.)   
14  
More again: at this point the reader essentially said “Enough for now!”–he wanted  
to start with that literature review article. But I informed him of many additional  
proprietary databases (not on the Internet) that could provide still more citations: Digital   
Dissertations (which immediately turns up a thesis that explicitly disagrees with “the   
standard work”), Periodicals Index Online (an index of 4,720 periodicals in multiple   
languages from 1665-1995) , L’Anee Philologique (the best index to classical studies   
journals) , WilsonWeb (including Humanities Full Text, Humanities & Social Sciences   
Retrospective, Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, and Readers’ Guide   
Retrospective). All of these sources provide scores of additional references to works that   
are “right on the button” in discussing the tribute payments—but the titles of these   
databases, too are such that most would not draw attention to their relevance to the   
Peloponnesian topic.   
The need for multiple search techniques rather than one “seamless” search   
Note that as a reference librarian I could bring to bear on this question a whole   
variety of different search techniques, of which most researchers are only dimly aware of   
(or not aware at all): I used not just keyword searching, but subject category searching   
(via LC=s subject headings), shelf-browsing (via LC=s classification system), related   
record searching, and citation searching. (I also did some rather sophisticated Boolean   
combination searching, with truncation symbols and parentheses, discussed below.)  
Further, as a librarian I thought in terms of types of literature–specialized encyclopedia   
articles, literature review articles, subject bibliographies–whose existence never even   
occurs to most non-librarians, who routinely think only in terms of subject searches rather   
than format searches. And, further, one of the reasons I sought out the Web database to begin   
with was that I knew it would also provide people contact information–i.e., the mail and e-mail   
addresses of scholars who have worked on the same topic.    
The point here needs emphasis: a research library can provide not only a vast   
amount of content that is not on the open Internet; it can also provide multiple different  
search techniques that are usually much more efficient than “relevance ranked” and  
“more like this” Web searching. And most of these search techniques themselves are not   
available to offsite users who confine their searches to the open Internet.  
Results such as those achieved in this example cannot be duplicated by a “single  
search box” Google-type inquiry, no matter how much relevance-ranking, query   
expansion, post-Boolean probabalistic connecting, federated searching, and under-the-   
hood programming it brings to bear on the specified keywords. We are doing a very  
serious disservice to our patrons–and to our own library science students–if we encourage   
them to believe that “everything” they need can be provided by a “seamless, one-stop”   
inquiry in a single blank search box.   
15  
Differences between scholarship and quick information seeking   
The disservice consists in assuming that there are no differences between   
scholarship and quick information seeking, and, as a result, in failing to show patrons   
whole ranges of options that they would indeed pursue if they knew how to articulate   
their own desires in light of a better overview of available options. Scholars, especially,   
want more than they know how to ask for. Anyone who does reference interviews with   
them will find this to be true. These are the some of their major unarticulated   
concerns–the differences between scholarship and finding “something quickly”:   
I) Scholars seek, first and foremost, as clear and as extensive an overview of all relevant   
sources as they can achieve. They want to see “the shape of the elephant” of their   
topic–the full extent of its different important parts and how the parts fit together.   
Librarians who actually work directly with them can testify that they do in fact want this,  
even if they don’t articulate this desire explicitly in user surveys. Unintegrated  
information may be adequate for those who just want “something” quickly; it is not  
adequate for scholarship.   
II) Speed in cataloging is not the hallmark of quality service, especially if relevant books   
that are catalogued quickly at “minimal level” or in “batch processing” fail to show up   
within the conceptual categories and webs of cross-references that are defined by   
standard (and more time-consuming) cataloging practices. When the standardized   
category designations (i.e., LCSH headings) are lacking on minimal-level records, we are   
faced with having to deal with an utter wilderness of unpredictable keywords across   
multiple languages. Systematic retrievals, integrations of resources in conceptual  
categories, and overviews become impossible.    
Indeed, researchers who merely want “something” quickly will not seek lengthy   
and complex books to begin with when much shorter sources (Web sites, articles) are   
easily available. Books are for those who do not want just fast information. The   
difference in clienteles needs to be kept in mind. Scholars pursuing in-depth information   
or knowledge need something other than speedy retrieval.    
Patrons who call for “speedier cataloging operations” in user surveys have no idea   
that such requests are being interpreted by library managers as also calling for the   
elimination of the conceptual categorization mechanisms (vocabulary-controlled subject   
headings, cross-reference linkages, and classification numbers) that provide them with the  
overviews–at scope match conceptual levels–which they actually value much more than  
quick delivery of individual, isolated items. (Any scholar can ask him- or herself at this  
point: do I really want to publish something, which may be read widely by my peers, that   
completely overlooks many of the most important books that have already been done on   
my topic, just so that I can finish faster?) If survey questions spelled out the concealed   
trade-off, I strongly suspect they would produce markedly different views of the   
importance of using speed as “the gold standard of processing.”  
3  
  
16  
Another problem with surveys is that they ask only for what the users “want” at a   
point where most users do not know the extent of options available to them; once a   
librarian shows them what they are missing, as in this Peloponnesian example, they do   
indeed want a great deal more than they previously realized they could get.   
The more intellectual effort catalogers put into the system at the front end (in   
creating, defining the scope of, and linking [via cross-references and browse menus]   
conceptual categories), the less effort is required by researchers at the retrieval end, to   
achieve the overviews they want of “the shape of the elephant.” Cataloging systems that  
dis-integrate the cataloging information do not in fact “make the data work harder”–they   
make the users work harder, and take more steps, to reconstruct on their own the range of   
necessary relationships whose existence they cannot anticipate, and which they could   
otherwise have simply recognized. (Note, however, that cataloging itself, while   
necessary, is not sufficient by itself to provide all of the overview perspective that   
scholars need. Cataloging has a niche to fill, which must be supplemented by a variety of   
other search mechanisms created by people other than library catalogers, as the   
Peloponnesian example demonstrates.)    
  
III) Scholarship is necessarily iterative, proceeding in successive steps that change   
depending on feedback provided by previous steps; it cannot all be done simultaneously.   
Again, we need to get away from the advocacy of a single catalog (or Internet) search box  
providing “everything” in “seamless one-stop shopping.” (In the movies, such delusional  
behavior is dealt with by a glass of cold water to the face, or a vigorous shaking; in the  
library field, I’m not sure what is required to bring us to our senses on this point.) The  
world of informational resources is much too complex to be dumbed down to this level.   
There is much more to refining a search than simply typing more, or different, keywords  
into the same search box. Frequently an entirely different search technique is  
required—browsing book stacks, talking to experts, using published bibliographies, using   
controlled vocabularies and browse displays rather than keywords, using “limit” options,   
doing citation or related-record searches, thinking in terms of reference formats rather   
than just subjects—many of which searches cannot be reduced to any “box” on any  
computer screen.   
An experiential awareness of this fact signals another of the biggest disconnects in  
all of library science, between theorists who fantasize that “everything” can be retrieved  
through a single online search box, and practitioners who know that the real information   
universe is much too varied, too extensive, and too complex to be viewed all at once from   
any such single vantage point. No single window of access can possibly show the entire   
“shape of the elephant” in any scholarly field; indeed, it is the inadequacy of relying on   
any single vantage point that is the very point of the Six Blind Men fable.   
IV) Scholars are especially concerned that they do not overlook sources that are unusually   
important, significant, or standard in their field of inquiry. It does not do them any good   
if standard works are included but buried indistinguishably within huge retrievals.    
(Meritt’s Athenian Tribute Lists, for example, is indeed among the 674 hits retrieved by   
17  
Google Book Search–although its copyrighted full text is not digitized for online reading.    
But Google does not have the mechanisms available to reference librarians for singling   
out this work as the best starting point for research on the topic, amid all the chaff that   
gets retrieved at the same time. Neither, be it noted, does traditional cataloging single out   
this source as “the standard work”–which means, again, that cataloging is itself [like   
Google] only one avenue of access, among many others, to some [not all] resources, and   
that the several other search mechanisms are also important.)   
V) Scholars do not wish to duplicate prior research unnecessarily or to have to “re-invent   
the wheel.” This is just common sense; but it needs to be said, because simply finding   
“something quickly” does not even begin to solve this very serious problem. Indeed, if   
mechanisms that provide only “something quickly” replace (rather than supplement)   
those existing mechanisms (such as cataloging) that do provide systematic access, then   
the problem of scholars unnecessarily re-inventing the wheel will be enormously   
exacerbated rather than solved.  
VI) Scholars wish to be aware of cross-disciplinary and cross-format connections relevant  
to their work. Even though they may not articulate this desire explicitly, they are eager to  
pursue such connections if the avenues for doing so are pointed out to them by people  
(reference librarians and curators) who have a greater knowledge of the existence of those   
avenues. And most of the problems of cross-disciplinary searching are not solved by   
simple federated searches of multiple databases, especially when such inquiries dumb   
down the search possibilities to only keyword access, and when such keyword searching   
itself is likely to bury important sources within huge masses of irrelevancies.    
An exorbitant faith in federated searching is yet another of the major disconnects   
between theory and practice that plague our profession. Such searching does indeed serve   
a useful purpose in some situations–no one denies that–but it is not a panacea that   
eliminates the need for tailoring inquiries to the peculiar capabilities of individual   
databases. (See the further discussion below.)   
VII) Scholars wish to find current books on a subject categorized with the prior books on   
the same subject, so that the newer works can be perceived in the context of the existing   
literature–not just in connection with the much smaller subset of titles that happen to be   
currently in print. (Quick information seekers who do wish to see only current books can   
usually re-order their search displays to “most recent first” without radical changes to the   
cataloging content that is necessary for more in-depth searching.) This is one of the main   
reasons that we subsidize research libraries through taxes and endowments that shield   
them from market forces of supply and demand–so that they can provide free access to   
works not currently in general demand, and which profit-seeking bookstores would  
readily discard. (Second-hand bookstores that have some of the out-of-print sources do   
not make them freely available any more than the in-print stores do.) No one denies that   
research libraries need to be fiscally prudent; but there is a big difference between being  
fiscally responsible vs. allowing business concerns to determine the very goals of the  
18  
library (e.g. “increasing market share” over “promoting scholarship”). The “profits”   
generated by the research libraries that make their holdings freely available to all comers  
accrue to the individual authors and researchers who make use of them, not to the   
“bottom line” (or “market share”) of the libraries themselves.    
VIII) Advanced scholars also wish for similar categorization of English and foreign   
language books–i.e., they want subject-category searches to retrieve relevant materials in   
all languages together, so that a worldwide context of resources on their subject can be   
easily discerned. They do not wish to be straight-jacketed within retrieval systems that are   
good only for finding English-language sources. (Those who want sources in only one   
language can usually limit their searches to the language designation of their choice,   
again without destroying the additional capability [i.e., vocabulary control] of the system   
required for more extensive searching.)  
IX) Scholars particularly appreciate mechanisms that enable them to recognize highly   
relevant sources whose keywords they cannot think up in advance, to enter into a blank   
search box. (Such mechanisms are provided by subject heading searches, shelf-browsing  
[i.e., using the LC classification system], citation searches, related record searches, and  
published bibliographies–not by uncontrolled keyword searching. Putting readers in   
contact with knowledgeable people also gives them a way to find information whose  
exact characteristics they have trouble articulating. Keyword searching has wonderful   
advantages of its own–again, no one denies that–but its very real weaknesses need to be   
counterbalanced by many other, and different, search capabilities.)   
X) Although they are more cognizant of the need for diligence and persistence in   
research, and of the requirement to check multiples sources, and of the need to look   
beyond the “first screen” display of any retrievals, scholars also wish to avoid having to   
sort through huge lists or displays–from any source–in which relevant materials are   
buried within inadequately-sorted mountains of chaff having the right keywords in the   
wrong conceptual contexts. Even minimal experience with Google shows that its   
relevance-ranking software does not solve this problem; in fact, it creates the   
problem–which must then be solved by other search mechanisms.   
One hopes that the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control   
4  
will   
give serious attention to these concerns, because it is not enough to simply characterize   
the users of libraries’ resources as “consumers” and “managers” without a much better   
analysis of the peculiar needs of scholarly “consumers.” Indeed, among the “managers”   
today there are apparently many who believe that all, or even most, of the above   
difficulties can be overcome by a combination of (a) “digitizing everything” for full-text   
searching, which involves (b) increasing federated searching to that “all” databases can be   
searched simultaneously, and (c) relying on “under the hood” programming (with   
automatic relevance ranking), along with democratic tagging and folksonomy referrals, to   
provide adequate subject access to book collections—to the extent that controlled-   
19  
vocabulary cataloging can be eliminated in the library’s catalog and classified shelving   
can be done away with in the bookstacks.   
5  
  
In fact, however, it is not a solution to the problems of most scholars simply to  
give them more digitized full texts to search on the open Internet. Just putting more  
content online exacerbates rather than solves the problems of information overload if the  
mechanisms for finding that content are inadequate to sort, filter, categorize, organize,   
and display it.   
Keyword search problems  
  
Google-type retrievals will be especially disappointing, and off the mark, if the   
researcher types in the wrong keywords to begin with, or not enough of the right   
keywords. Uninstructed users routinely make such mistakes; but it is only reference  
librarians who are in a position to see how badly they=ve formulated most of their  
searches to begin with–it is when those searches fail, and the readers ask for help, that we  
can retrace the ground and find out what they actually typed in, in comparison to their  
actual goals as elicited by a reference interview. (User logs by themselves do not supply   
the latter information.) While it is often pointed out that readers don=t know how to do   
subject searches via LC subject headings, it is equally true that most researchers do not   
know how to do effective keyword searches either. The very same objection leveled   
against the use of LC subject headings also applies to most keyword searches themselves.   
Education is required all around. (See below.)    
The fact that LC headings are not used efficiently indicates that basic instruction  
is required–just as it is for efficient keyword searching–not that vocabulary control should   
be eliminated. The standardization of terms, and especially of subject strings at scope-   
match levels, with linkages of concepts through cross-references and browse displays,  
solves too many of the serious problems that are created by excessively-granular keyword  
searches in full-text databases to be cavalierly dismissed as no longer useful. The  
technologies have changed, but the principles of providing efficient access are still valid.   
And yet cataloging is indeed dismissed  
6  
–one can only conclude that those who do not  
recognize the solutions have, themselves, too little acquaintance with the serious  
problems scholars experience, which cry out for exactly the remedies that good cataloging  
provides.   
Indeed, in this same “tribute in the Peloponnesian war” example, the results   
actually produced by Google’s “single search box”–even in the separate Book and  
Scholar components of its site–are nothing short of a professional embarrassment   
compared to what a scholar can find when working with a skilled librarian, in conjunction   
with a real reference collection (shelved according to LC Classification), a good online   
catalog (using controlled LC Subject Headings), and an array of proprietary databases  
(not freely available to everyone on the Internet)–all backed up by an actual onsite  
20  
collection of book and journal volumes shelved in browsable order. With a combination  
of such onsite resources, a researcher can indeed be led to discern the overall “shape of  
the elephant” of the literature on his topic. In contrast, any direct search of huge full-text  
databases, with access only via keywords (regardless of how they are weighted) through a  
single search box, cannot even begin to show searchers “the shape” of the relevant  
literature, or the conceptual interrelationships of its various parts, or the relative  
importance of some parts over others.   
Relevance ranking is not conceptual categorization   
Term weighting–a.k.a. “relevance ranking”–of results is not at all the same as   
scope-match conceptual categorization via vocabulary control with cross-references to   
related categories (see F, G and H above). It improves, up to a point, the display of   
retrieved records having the specified keywords–that point being the first two screens and   
not much beyond–but it does nothing to retrieve, in the first place, alternative expressions   
for the same concept in either English or multiple foreign languages. Again, see the   
above list of related titles collocated under the LC subject heading “Finance,   
public–Greece–Athens,” a cataloger-assigned term that does indeed round up widely   
variant phrases for the same idea.    
  
Let’s not sweep this issue under the rug: how many of these books would have   
been brought to a researcher’s attention by term-weighted retrieval of the keywords   
“tribute” and “Peloponnesian”? A scholar in this area does not need merely something; he   
or she needs an overview of “what the library has” (in Cutter’s words). And here we have   
yet another disconnect in our profession: the knee-jerk dismissal of Cutter’s principles of   
cataloging overlooks the fact that scholars even in a “digital age” do need to know what   
their home library has, locally and easily available–rather than “everything anywhere”-   
because scholarship does indeed progress through a sequence of steps that start with the   
most readily available sources, and most scholarly books cannot be read online because of   
copyright restrictions.    
Further, would term-weighting segregate these few whole books on the   
subject—the structural parts of “the elephant”–from hundreds of others that merely have   
the right keywords in irrelevant contexts? Answer: demonstrably “No.” Look at the   
actual results. Term-weighting does not set conceptual “boundaries” that define the   
extent of the desired context, outside of which the right words become “noise.” While   
mechanisms such as Google’s PageRank system of counting links as “votes” of   
importance are useful, they (again) effectively change the very meaning of the word   
relevance. Re-arranging some of the right keywords in a particular order does nothing to   
find the many conceptually relevant works that are overlooked to begin with, or that have   
become buried within thousands of hits that are in fact irrelevant even though they share   
the specified keywords.    
21  
Limitations of tagging, and of breaking subject strings into separate facets  
“Tag” terms (i.e., keywords added by users) can be useful. Good results can  
indeed be brought up, in many situations, when untrained people contribute their own  
indexing suggestions to catalog records; but results will be negligible in relating seldom-  
used books (those that don’t attract many tags to begin with) to others on the same   
subject. Moreover, tagging by the general public in not an adequate replacement for   
vocabulary control (although it is indeed a good supplement, just as granular keyword   
searching is a good supplement to scope-match cataloging); numerous indexer-   
consistency studies have demonstrated repeatedly that untrained indexers attempting to   
come up with descriptive terms for a document agree in their choice of words only ten to   
twenty per cent of the time.  
7  
  
To keep this discussion grounded in reality, let’s look again at the Peloponnesian   
example, particularly at the variety of keywords other than “tribute” and “Peloponnesian”   
that would have to be specified to turn up the sources actually retrieved above:   
Assessment [singular], Assessments [plural], Athenian, Athena, Archais Athenas,   
Treasurers, Financial, Finances, Money, Expense, Power, Quota Fragments, Syndroma,  
Demosionomiko, Geldmittein, Staatseinkunst, Richesses, Fifth Century, Ve et IVe  
Siecles, 425 B.C., 421/0-415/4 BC, 454-404 BC, Thucydides, Poroi. Is it any wonder that  
untrained indexers do not arrive at the same keywords any more than authors themselves  
do?  
Further, tagging by non-librarians is not as good as standard cataloging in  
revealing the extent of a subject’s unanticipated aspects. For example, although this did  
not come up in the present Peloponnesian case, the LC subject heading “Finance,  
public–Greece–Athens” is actually part of a large catalog browse display that provides a  
greatly extended context of relationships–one that might well be relevant to other  
researchers with different questions in mind. A very small sampling of that catalog  
browse display includes the following:  
Finance, public  
Search also subdivision Appropriations and expenditures under names of  
countries, cities, government agencies, institutions, etc.  
Narrower Terms:  
Budget  
Claims  
Customs administration  
[etc.]  
Finance, public–Accounting  
Finance, public–Accounting–Law and legislation–Pakistan–Punjab   
Finance, public–Arab countries–Dictionaries, Arabic  
Finance, public–Dictionaries   
22  
Finance, public–Europe–History   
Finance, public–Germany–History  
Finance, public–Great Britain–History  
Finance, public–Greece–Athens  
Finance, public–United States–History–1801-1861–Sources   
Finance, public–United States–History–1801-1861–Speeches in Congress  
Finance, public–Yugoslavia–History  
Finance, public–Zimbabwe–Statistics  
The “democratic” addition of multiple uncontrolled keywords to a record cannot provide  
an overview map of relationships like this that “surround” the subject of the book being  
tagged. Tagging addresses only the subject of book in hand–not the relationships of that   
subject itself to other “outside” or “surrounding” topics that may well be of interest if   
they are recognizable in a menu display. Another major shortcoming of democratic   
tagging is that it will not systematically provide links to all of the little-used and foreign-   
language books that research libraries have a responsibility to collect.   
The shortcomings of tagging as a replacement for (rather than a supplement to)  
LCSH are particularly clear when we consider the contrasting advantages of  
precoordination of subject heading strings.   
The continuing need for precoordination in Library of Congress Subject Headings   
Why is the precoordination of LCSH strings highly desirable to maintain, in   
addition to our newer capacities to do post-coordinate combination of individual terms or   
facets? For several specific reasons:  
First, precoordination of terms is necessary to convey the very meaning of many  
subjects; for example:   
Motion pictures for women as a precoordinated string has a precise   
meaning that is not captured by the post-coordinate combination of   
(motion pictures AND women)  
Violence in women is not the same as (violence AND women)  
Women in development is not the same as (women AND development)   
Women-alcoholics is not the same as (women AND alcoholics)  
History–Philosophy is not the same as Philosophy–History  
Tens of thousands of such phrase headings would lose their meaning if broken up into  
their component words. (Of course thesauri for various subject disciplines do not have  
similar precoordination; but those disciplines do not require coverage of all subject  
simultaneously and their relations to each other, which is the universal field which LCSH  
must cover.)  
23  
Second, breaking up subject heading strings into individual words or facets, to be  
re-combined post-coordinately, drastically undermines researchers ability to recognize   
relevant aspects of a topic that they could not combine because it never occurs to them  
that such aspects exist until they see them listed (e.g., Accounting, Arab countries,  
Dictionaries, Law and legislation, Sources, Statistics, etc.). Separate groupings of faceted   
elements do not make the data work harder; they make the researcher work harder to see   
relationships that are no longer presented for easy recognition.    
Third, the precoordinated strings provides more focused conceptual contexts for   
the individual faceted elements, without which the scope-match level of cataloging is lost.    
Above all, it is the scope-match level of retrieval that is most necessary for a scholarly   
overview of the structural parts of “the elephant”–the whole books on the topic, not the   
ones that simply mention the desired topic. The retrieval becomes much more time-   
consuming and complicated if multiple individual terms have to be re-combined to  
achieve the scope-match level. Post-coordinate combinations to reach this level are all  
the more difficult to bring about if multiple different menus of terms (topical, geographic,  
chronological, form) have to be separately examined to see the array of terms that are   
available for the combinations.   
Fourth, it beggars common sense to believe that the use of multiple separate   
menus of facets is easier to work with than a browse display of all of them arrayed in a  
single roster. Separating subdivisions from the topics they subdivide can readily lead to  
confusing irrelevancies, and to entirely overlooking combinations that ought to be made.   
For example, in the string “Finance, public–United States–History–1801-1861–Sources"  
the individual facets lose their necessary conceptual context if they are separated from   
each other. Combining the form subdivision with the topical heading alone will produce   
confusing irrelevancies; the geographic and chronological facets must also be included   
for the retrieval results to be on target. Providing strings of interconnected subdivisions  
for easy recognition in browse displays–coupled with an explanation from reference  
librarians of how the displays work–is much more effective, and more easily teachable,  
than requiring multiple pointing/clicking operations among entirely separate menus for   
geographic, topical, chronological, and form aspects. (Note: these comments do not   
apply exactly to the Endeca system   
8  
, which does provide access to precoordinated subject  
headings, although not on the first screen of a retrieval. My concern here is more with the  
attitude expressed by Beacher Wiggins, the Director of Acquisitions and Bibliographic  
Access at the Library of Congress, which is LC’s cataloging department; Wiggins has   
openly questioned the practice of continuing precoordination at all.   
9  
His views, of course,  
have unusual weight in determining LC cataloging policies. They are all the more  
puzzling because Wiggins presided over the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic  
Control for the New Millenium only a few years ago [2001], which conference  
specifically considered and rejected the idea of abandoning precoordination in favor of  
faceting.  
10  
)  
24  
Fifth, the vertical browse displays of subject heading strings (as above) show the  
relationships not only of individual elements within any string, but also the relationships  
of whole strings themselves to each other, enabling researchers to recognize a wide  
variety of other aspects of their subject that are “outside” (but still related to) the subject  
defined by any single string. Moreover, these “surrounding” precoordinated strings are  
themselves at scope-match subject levels–i.e., they will not lead to excessively “granular”  
and irrelevant works having the right words in the wrong conceptual contexts; they, too,  
will lead efficiently to whole books on their subjects. .   
Sixth, the entire (and crucial) cross-reference structure of LCSH is dependent on  
linkages already established between tens of thousands of precoordinated headings, for  
example:  
Women–Psychology  
RT Women–Mental health  
NT Achievement motivation in women  
Animus (Psychology)  
Anxiety in women  
Assertiveness in women  
Body image in women  
Cooperativeness in women  
Helplessness (Psychology) in women  
Leadership in women  
Self-esteem in women  
Self-perception in women  
This entire network of relationships–the kind necessary for systematic and scholarly  
retrieval–would be lost if researchers could search Women AND Psychology only as  
individual “facet” terms. Without the network, researchers will be relegated to the  
condition of the Six Blind Men, enabled to grasp only isolated parts of “the elephant”  
without having any mechanism enabling them to perceive the connections of those parts  
to other structural elements of their subject.  
Seventh, tens of thousands of precoordinated subject strings are formally linked to  
specific LC classification numbers. Since the subject strings themselves are at scope-  
match conceptual levels, so too will be the classification areas to which they point. That  
is, researchers who go to the designated subject classes in the book stacks will be  
browsing in whole books on the topic of interest–not merely in snippets of text having the  
right words in the wrong contexts.  
11  
Cataloging and classification, once again, provide a  
solution to the problem of overly-granular retrieval. In order to find which areas of the  
bookstacks to browse, however, researchers need the subject headings in the library  
catalog to serve as the index to the class scheme. But the linkage between a subject  
25  
heading and a classification number is usually dependent on the precoordination of  
multiple facets within the same string. For example, notice the specific linkages of the  
following precoordinated strings:  
Greece–History–Peloponnesian War, 431-404 B.C.: DF229-DF230  
Greece–History–19  
th  
century: DF803  
Greece–History–Acarnanian Revolt, 1836: DF823.6  
Greece–History–Civil War, 1944-1949: DF849.5  
Such formal connections between LCSH and LC Classification (LCC) not only make  
browsing in large collections much more effective for researchers; the same  
linkages–already formally established between tens of thousands of precoordinated   
headings and class numbers–also make class number assignments themselves much easier   
for catalogers to do. (Note that thesauri in specific subject areas do not need to serve this  
extra purpose of indexing a classification scheme in addition to indexing documents  
directly. LCSH cannot be reduced to a conventional thesaurus because it has to do things   
that are beyond the latter’s scope.) And yet the elaborate webs of relationships between   
LCSH and LCC that have been created over the course of a century, by thousands of  
extremely perceptive professional catalogers, are not even noticed by “digital library”  
theorists. When we show no awareness at all of the very structure of our research  
libraries, our profession is effectively encouraging bulls to run rampant through china  
shops.  
Eighth, most of the standard subdivisions of LCSH terms are not recorded in the  
printed “red books” set of subject headings–the thousands of heading-subdivision  
combinations that have been created show up only on browse displays such as those  
above. Without these browse displays, there is no way to know in advance the array of  
combinations that are possible in a given subject area; naive researchers cannot specify  
beforehand even a fraction of combinations that have already been established. Without  
the vertical browse displays of the precoordinated headings arrayed in sequence, the  
catalog has lost most of its basic vocabulary control. Too many valid headings are not  
recorded at all in the red books because they follow pattern-rules without being  
individually listed. Without systematic access to those headings, too, the catalog does not  
have a controlled vocabulary–and systematic access in such cases is not provided either  
by the cross-reference structure or by outright guessing of which elements exist, as  
potential elements for postcoordinate combinations. Browse displays are an integral  
component of LCSH vocabulary control.  
Yet another “disconnect” in our profession needs emphasis here: just as many  
theorists have a knee-jerk aversion to the goal of aiming at scope-match cataloging levels