Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Monograph

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Library & Information Science

Supervisor

Campbell, D. Grant

Abstract

According to philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Dennett, “there is no such thing as philosophy-free science, only science that did not interrogate its philosophical assumptions” (Ouellette, 2024). Like any other field, Library and Information Science (LIS) has its own philosophical assumptions, which exert a shaping influence on Knowledge Organization and library cataloguing. Contemporary cataloguing developed out of a concern for guiding reliable practice. This pragmatic orientation has led contemporary cataloguing to adopt an essentialist philosophical foundation, which can be detected in standards like The Library Reference Model (LRM). The ‘Work’ is the core entity of LRM and represents an independent genesis of intellectual or creative effort that is uniquely identifiable and stands apart from all other texts. Having been codified, cataloguing practice now stands downstream of this essentialist conception of the ‘Work.’

A field’s philosophical foundations, or ontology, defines the entities, attributes, and relationships that are of concern. Contemporary cataloguing is primarily concerned with elements like books, subject headings, and author, with essentialist ‘Works’ as the core entity of concern. Phylomemetic Cataloguing Ontology is a non-essentialist conceptualization of texts. The development of the ontology of Biology from the essentialist paradigm of Linnaeus to the modern Phylogenetic Synthesis serves as an analogy for this change, and the Conceptual Engineering philosophical method provides the tools to enact it. In Phylomemetic Cataloguing texts are understood as being analogous to biological species, being composed of discrete components, textual memes, and sitting in a network of relationships with other texts, textual clades.

An ontology is then joined to a set of guiding principles, such as the primacy of shelf order, to create a cataloguing theory. Phylomemetic Cataloguing Theory challenges the traditional principles of cataloguing, such as shelf order, and replaces them with new guidelines, most notably the principle of consilience. Theory in turn is joined to a set of goals, such as the LRM User Tasks, to establish a cataloguing paradigm. Phylomemetic Cataloguing Paradigm introduces novel User Tasks in the form of Ethical Use, Visualization, Participation, and Infrastructure. Finally, Phylomemetic Cataloguing Practice is illustrated in the form of a small functional prototype Phylomemetic Cataloguing Environment.

Summary for Lay Audience

Books, movies, music, and other creations do not emerge in a vacuum. Every text draws upon those that came before, either directly or indirectly. Recording these connections has not been the focus of cataloguing historically. In this project I set out to create a new cataloguing paradigm that I call Phylomemetic Cataloguing for the purpose of illustrating the impact of cataloguing’s philosophical assumptions. This paradigm, which captures the lines of inheritance between texts, draws inspiration from biological phylogenetics, the literature concept of tropes, and the cultural concept of memes. A Phylomemetic Catalogue would allow users to create metadata links between the catalogue records, adding meaningful connections.

When a resource has better metadata in general it tends to be more valuable, but our theory guides what metadata we record. Current cataloguing theory conceives of individual texts as instances of essential ‘Works.’ However, just as organisms constantly change and inherit genes from their ancestors, texts actually inherit memes from their antecedents and are subject to constant reinterpretation and reappraisal. The transition from Linnaean to Phylogenetic taxonomy in biology suggests an analogous paradigm shift for library cataloguing.

By modeling meme-flow between texts, new forms of bibliographic arrangement and organization become possible. By collecting these connections library catalogues could include family trees or clades of texts. This opens the possibility of new types of visualizations and even novel user collaboration in catalogues. A catalogue based on a Phylomemetic paradigm could implement a level of consilience, allowing conflicting perspectives about a text to be productively unified.

Using this Phylomemetic model of texts, I have built a functional prototype of a Phylomemetic Catalogue that is based on semantic web technologies but grounded in traditional catalogue records. I explore some of the opportunities a Phylomemetic Catalogue creates, as well as look to the future for possible routes to improvement and implementation.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.

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