1During the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, several schools of librarianship were created in the United States. One of the most influential of these schools was founded in 1926 as the Graduate Library School (GLS) of the University of Chicago. It had a singular program for the doctoral degree. Its faculty was chosen from professors and researchers of several scientific disciplines, and was established to support a research program of the theoretical foundations of library science. Research conducted at the University of Chicago and specifically the GLS gave birth to various concepts that would become the foundations of library science. In this environment of research of major theories in the social sciences, Margaret Elizabeth Egan and Jesse Hauk Shera created their project of « social epistemology ».
2Margaret Elizabeth Egan (March 14, 1905 – January 26, 1959) was an American librarian and communication scholar. Originally employed at Cincinnati Public Library from 1933 to 1940, she obtained a B.A. from the University of Cincinnati in 1939. In 1940–1941, she did graduate work at Yale University and in 1941-46 at the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago (1941–43), where she was firstly employed as librarian and part-time lecturer, and then full-time assistant professor in 1946. She served as an associate editor of Library Quarterly under Leon Carnovsky from 1953 to 1955. Invited by Shera, she became first a research associate of the Center for Documentation and Communication Research (CDCR) in the School of Library Science at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (1955), and then an associate professor at the same school. Egan died prematurely at the age of 53, on January 26, 1956 (Furner, 2004).
3Jesse Hauk Shera (December 8, 1903 – March 8, 1982) was an American librarian and information scholar. Shera received a master’s degree in English language and literature from Yale University in 1927. Returning to Oxford, Ohio, his hometown, he secured a job as an assistant cataloguer at Miami University Library. He then moved to the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, Miami University, Ohio, under the directorship of Warren S. Thompson from 1927 to 1937, when he published five issues of the Age Factor in Employment — the Bibliography and around a dozen articles on librarianship. Following his employment at Miami University, Shera studied at the GLS of the University of Chicago from 1938 to 1940 and received his PhD in 1944. Probably because of his experience at Scripps, he was appointed head of the Metropolitan Library project of the Library of Congress and the federal Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. Returning to Chicago, Shera was appointed as the university associated director of libraries, while at the same time teaching part-time at GLS in 1944. Egan had preceded him in this same post since 1941, becoming full-time professor in 1946-1947-1947, when he and Egan began a strong intellectual partnership.
4Egan and Shera might have met before GLS, but it was in the periods 1944-1952 at the University of Chicago and 1952-1957 at Western Reserve University that they contrived their project of the discipline Egan called « social epistemology ». It was the strong scientific environment at GLS that originated and matured the idea of blending sociology of knowledge and traditional epistemology, the branch of philosophy focusing on the theory of collective knowledge countering the formerly prevailing individual epistemological studies. The idea of social epistemology might have been harvested through the interaction of these two pioneers with their peers and the whole faculty of social sciences schools at the University of Chicago.
5The Chicago School of Sociology of the University of Chicago is best known for the development of symbolic interactionism, notably through the work of George Herbert Blumer. It focused on human behavior as shaped by social structures and physical environmental factors, rather than genetic and personal characteristics, in opposition to the « superseded traditional philosophy of knowledge, which was dominated by the highly individualistic conception of the knowing subject » (Kilminster, 1991). Shera and Egan might have discussed also these ideas with students and professors.
6Egan and Shera felt that teaching, researching and living in this environment fertile from discussions with highly qualified social scientists and students at the GLS and other professors of the University of Chicago was a promising ground for seeding their creative ideas for the discovery of the foundations of library science. Although Egan’s contributions to « social epistemology » were essential, the literature on this topic has tended to highlight Shera’s authorship, even when Egan is listed as first author (Furner, 2004 : 792). These seeds began to lay the roots of social epistemology in the late 1940s, when Egan and Shera were planning the Conference of 1950 (Egan, Shera: 1951). This is shown in the small ten paragraph published in 1949 by Egan and Shera as an « announcement » for that conference. Despite the great importance of this little bibliographic unit, it is missing in Shera’s Bibliography, 1931–1982 (Rawski, 1973 : 354–371).
7The importance of the 1949 article authored by Egan and Shera is threefold. First, it set the general terms of the program for the imminent Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Graduate Library School on bibliographic organization. Second, the document stands as the « birth certificate » of bibliographic control, « the technical term that is apparently emerging in America for what Europeans call documentation », naming and describing bibliographic control with the same nature as the concept of « control »: « in mechanics, [for] a control is a device by means of which the energies of a machine can be directed to the achievement of a given end with a minimum of effort ». Finally, the document defines that « bibliographic controls [are] as those devices used to direct intellectual energy in extracting from the totality of recorded information those portions relevant to a particular task with the utmost speed and economy » (Egan, Shera, 1949).
8In the second paragraph of this brief document, Egan and Shera describe the « two modes in which bibliographic control can be considered – internally and externally ». From inside, « it may be examined from the standpoint of the librarian and the scholar who devise and use it – but in this case the examination will probably lead to no more than a series of disjointed observations concerning particulars ». This first view of bibliographic control briefly describes the mission of librarianship. « The other way is to view it, against its background of intellectual activities in general ». What follows announces the seed of « social epistemology », stating that « the sociologist might view it as one part of the more general problem of communication ». Egan and Shera describe precisely what they mean by « communication » – « (1) communication within a group of specialists, (2) communication between various groups of specialists, and (3) communication between specialist and lay public ». Afterwards, they state the outcome that this communication generates – « the sociologist’s approach [would seem] to be potentially fruitful in that it would tend to promote a generalized body of knowledge and set of operating principles closely related to the structure of scholarship and its techniques of transmission ». Finally, Egan and Shera infer that « bibliographic control is thus seen to be one of the instrumental devices in our modern system of graphic communication » (Egan, Egan, 1949). Thus, Egan and Shera clearly define the role of librarianship and information science. These two areas of study should take advantage of the discipline they will describe as « social epistemology » and are some of the foundations of the consolidation of social epistemology (Martínez-Ávila, Zandonade, 2020).
9The 1949 Prolegomena to Bibliographic Control by Margaret E. Egan and Jesse H. Shera, beyond its importance as the « birth certificate » of bibliographic control and as an «announcement » of the 1950 conference at GLC, can be seen as a « plan of action » for the whole intellectual and professional life of its authors. After describing and delimiting the newly identified and named area of library science – covering the devices that librarians had created and perfected since the keepers of the Library of Nineveh for the organization, storage, and preservation of the graphic records of humanity – this article classified the various tools under the umbrella of bibliographic organization.
10Egan and Shera state that « historically, the table of contents and the index to a single book were the first instruments for locating specific information within the covers of that book ». The book, as a bibliographic unit, is not circumscribed to a specific subject matter. Usually, a series of topics are linked together through the pages, especially in the case of scientific and technical books. Without the table of contents and the index, a book has to be scanned by reading it through to find the information unit needed by the user. By the mid-19th century, these two searching devices were fully consolidated as knowledge organizers inside every book. However, different cultures of printers and publishers did not take advantage of them. At best, the table of contents was published as a « general index ».
11Until around 1850, only the physical aspect of the growing number of journals and periodicals was considered by libraries, so that a researcher had to scan every volume of a periodical stored in the library by order of publication. Pioneer Frederick William Poole solved this major problem by creating the collective index of periodicals (Poole, 1848). This solution to cataloguing subject matter in a periodical article was not an easy task for a given library. To be efficient, this huge endeavor required « the development of large-scale cooperative centralization ». Being a huge task for individual libraries, it was taken up by institutions outside the library profession, resulting in fragmentation that caused duplication of indexing materials and omission of valuable bibliographic units not selected for analysis. The enterprise of analyzing, describing, and indexing every bibliographic unit of any format found success in the beginning of the twentieth century by the « documentation movement », understood mainly by the organization of scattered publications of the social sciences.
12With the increasing publication of research reports by government and corporate agencies, the problem of bibliographic control became more critical. The organization of this material was feasible only through the acquisition of a copy from the publishing agency, and the selection of the publications to acquire had to be made mainly by having access only to the publications catalogue of every institution. As a result of these developments, the accessibility to materials other than monographs was made viable by the development of two different and complementary stances, i.e., content and physical accessibility. Content accessibility required the full indexing of every document, with the entries representing the subject component of every information unit, so that users could search and find whatever data they were pursuing. Physical accessibility, on the other hand, is the discovery of any publication unit through the description of the physical characteristics allowing identification of a specific document in a collection. These two modes of pursuing information are defined by Patrick Wilson as the « two kinds of power » of bibliographic control, i.e., « exploitative control » and « descriptive control » (Wilson, 1968 : 20-40). Hans H. Wellisch (1980) explained the cybernetic implications of these two powers of bibliographic control.
13Some bibliographic control agencies relied upon « the shifting sands » of alphabetic subject indexing, not taking into account the deviation from semantic analysis that occur in working with the so called « natural languages ». It could be seen at the time that the subject analysis of bibliographical material for organization, storage and retrieval of information demanded substantial analysis in order to apply sound theoretical principles to these activities.
14Egan and Shera specified the three main aspects of the fundamental problem of classification for bibliographic organization:
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Classification of physical units of recorded information within a single collection, whatever physical form such units may take.
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Classification of subject content based upon adequate subject analysis and divorced from the physical unit either of book or of single library collection.
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Identification and description by code of small units of information, regardless of relationships. (Egan, Shera, 1949 : 19).
15The authors of Prolegomena to Bibliographic Control contended that the librarian is the most qualified person to lead the development of adequate tools for bibliographic control, due to his knowledge of graphic communication, experience with this specific problem, and connections with the different fields of knowledge. They conclude that the development of these devices requires immediate action for they will become the tools with which the librarian will be working from now on. This urgent demand required that library schools develop the needed research and education for this professional improvement.
16Considering the relevance of bibliographic control and its specific tools for professional library processes, it is important to analyze Egan and Shera’s body of work on this topic. Most certainly, the most influential event organized by Jesse H. Shera and Margaret E. Egan was the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Graduate Library School, July 24–29, 1950, at the University of Chicago, announced in the Prolegomena to Bibliographic Control published the previous year. This announcement gave the new area of Library Science the denomination of « bibliographic control ». Following the 1950 event, the conference papers were published in 1951 under « bibliographic organization ». However, despite the change of denominations, both titles remained in use in the subsequent library literature.
17This aforementioned conference’s purpose was « to clarify current thought concerning bibliographic organization, to recapitulate the attention it has recently received from many agencies... and to present the problems which must be solved before the need for an effective organization of the world of recorded materials can be met » (Shera, Egan, 1951 : v, Preface). The plan of the conference contributions is clear in its table of contents. After the inaugural presentation, as the central and substantive part of this conference, there were presentations classified into three approaches to bibliographic organization: the functional approach, the subject approach, and the management approach. During the session addressing the functional approach, speakers presented papers about the whole topic of bibliographic organization: bibliography; classification; bibliographic organization of the sciences; subject cataloguing; the problem of physical accessibility; and management, machines, and the bibliographic problems of the 20th century. Margaret Egan was responsible for the final synthesis and summary. Jesse Shera introduced a lecture on « Classification as the basis of Bibliographic Organization », during which he used the phrase « social epistemology ». This subject remained latent during the conference, and the minute index of the conference proceedings did not publish an entry for this term.
18The purpose of the conference was also to discuss the main problems needing solution before attaining an effective bibliographic organization. At the occasion, Jesse Shera reported that the essays presented had the purpose of updating conclusions and presenting the state of the art of bibliographic organization. However, the essays presented were mostly « concerned with the morphology of bibliographic organization ». The speakers at the conference enumerated the bibliographic enterprises that had developed since 1950. Shera recalled the warnings Margaret Egan gave to the Chicago audience in the Preface of the Proceedings of the conference. In that occasion, Egan had called attention to the fragmentation, inequitable distribution, and the complete lack in coordination, citations, and physical materials that bibliographies represented. Beyond that, Egan declared « bibliographic organization [to be] the very life blood of a system which is essentially unitary, which resists dismemberment ». Shera claimed that « the invasion and spread of a variety of automata within the library » had been « the most dramatic » innovation « for improving the availability of recorded knowledge » since 1950. He recalled that in 1950 only Vannevar Bush’s MEMEX and the ill-fated Rapid Selector were known (Shera, 1966: 704).
19Around the beginning of the third quarter of the 19th century, the creation of the American Library Association (ALA) revealed the nature and constitution of the area of Library Science in the American society by clearly defining the boundaries of this intellectual and professional area. In Philadelphia, one hundred and three librarians – ninety men and thirteen women – answered to a call for a « Convention of Librarians » to be held October 4–6, 1876 at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. At the end of the meeting, according W. A. Munford, on the last day of the congress, Friday 6 October 1876, those present were invited to append their signatures to the following: « For the purpose of promoting the library interests of the country and of increasing reciprocity of intelligence and good-sill among librarians and all interested in library economy and bibliographical studies, the undersigned form themselves into a body to be known as the AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION » (Munford, 1976 : 17, our emphasis).
20The association of library economy and bibliographical studies was sanctioned by ALA’s periodical, Library Journal, originally American Library Journal, created by Melvil Dewey in 1876. This periodical included, for around fifty years following its first printing, the phrase devoted to library economy and bibliography immediately under its title. The School of Library Economy founded by Melvil Dewey at Columbia University in 1887 had bibliography as one of the main courses. Bibliography was a different occupation from library economy, and was defined as « the science or knowledge of books » (Guild, 1937: 67).
21It is not surprising that Jesse Shera was convinced of bibliography’s appraisal as the main tool of bibliographic organization ever since Galen, the Greek-Roman physician, thought necessary to compose a listing of his own writings (Shera, Egan, 1953). Shera’s first formal job was as a bibliographer at the Scripps Foundation for ten years, when he produced several bibliographical works (Shera, 1931–1932; 1930a; 1930b; 1937a; 1937b; 1937c). As the American delegate to the UNESCO Conference on the Improvement of Bibliographic Services, held in Paris, UNESCO House, from 7 to 10 November 1950, Jesse Shera attended also as Assistant Professor of the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago and chairman of the Committee on Bibliography of the American Library Association. Shera wrote a preliminary report of this conference, published in 1950 by American Documentation and republished in 1951 by the U.S. Department of State Bulletin.
22The UNESCO had requested the American Library Association to prepare a statement concerning the present state of bibliographic services within the United States together with proposals for improvement at both national and international levels. Jesse Shera, as chairman of the Committee on Bibliography of the American Library Association, undertook the preparation of this report with the assistance of Margaret Egan. This report was divided into three parts: Part I. The present state of bibliography in the United States: Current National Bibliography; Retrospective Bibliography; and Current Subject Bibliography; Part II. Suggestions for a national program: Need for a Central organization; and Need for Research and Experimentation; Part III. Suggestions for an International Program: International functions; and Desirable Characteristics of International Agency.
- 1 Shera citing Herbert A. Simon. Administrative behavior: a study of the decision-making process in a (...)
23On a work on « Bibliographic Management » (Shera, 1951), Shera commented on Verner Warren Clapp’s assertion that « the complex problems of producing a current comprehensive international bibliographic service » required no more than technique and cooperation. This could mean that the problem of organizing effectively the graphic records of our civilization is almost wholly managerial. Bibliographic organization can be thought as a coin, with organization as heads and managerial competence as tails. Bibliographic management, as any other area of management, is the primary responsibility of those responsible for the human graphic record – both at the private and at the public level – and is an ability requiring choice before action, i.e., in first defining « what is to be done rather than the actual doing ».1 In summary, to be effective, bibliographic management requires a national coordinating body beyond the professional technique.
24Jesse Shera contributed a chapter on The Administration of the Library – Technical Operations to Margaret Elizabeth Egan’s Survey of the Saginaw Library System (1948: 103–127). In this educational article, Shera classified « the technical operations [as being] those processes of ordering, acquisition, classifying, cataloguing, binding, and otherwise caring for books as physical objects » (Shera, 1948: 103). On section one, he studied acquisitions, sources of book orders, ordering of periodicals, book-keeping, ordering of equipment, supplies, etc. To this section, he added a few practical recommendations relating to the acquisition procedures. On section two, he discussed cataloguing, of which he discusses staffing, sequence of operations, special operations, and official records maintained by the cataloging department. « On the Teaching of Cataloguing » (Shera, 1956) is a summary of a statement presented at a meeting of the New York Regional Catalog Group, December 2, 1955, in which Shera highlights « the outstanding characteristic of library cataloging... the widespread lack of enthusiasm for it ». Library cataloguers are generally criticized from all sides, not the least by themselves. Not only the cataloger has been criticized, but library education was also condemned, because « they don’t teach students how to catalog anymore! », meaning that « they don’t teach students how to catalog the way we do it in our library! » Library education should begin by teaching that the theory of cataloging is based on the general theory of bibliographic organization. Thus, library students should be reminded that cataloging, being part of bibliographic organization is also at the heart of librarianship. Jesse Shera and Margaret Egan, conscious that the catalog had a fundamental role as a tool for information retrieval, published the valuable handbook The Classified Catalog: Basic Principles and Practices (1956).
- 2 Norris, Dorothy M. A History of Cataloguing and Cataloguing Methods. London: Grafton, 1939, p. 195- (...)
25Still on cataloguing, during the ALA Resources and Technical Services Division (RTSD) / Reference Services Division (RSD) Book Catalogs Interdivisional Committee Program Meeting, on July 10, 1961, in Cleveland, Shera presented a paper titled « The Book Catalog and the Scholar – A Re-examination of an Old Partnership » (Shera, 1962). Shera partially contested Archibald MacLeeish’s statement that the card book catalog was « one of the great advances of American librarianship », by declaring that « the card catalog was not an American invention », and attributing to Dorothy Norris finding a reference to the French Code of 1791.2 Shera admitted that the American development may properly be regarded as a re-invention. Shera concluded that the revival of the interest in the book catalog signified a re-examination of the total problem of bibliographic organization, and recognition that there is no universal, no one best, instruments that will meet all the needs of the scholar.
- 3 Published as the Appendix I to the Library of Congress Information Bulletin, July 5-11, 1949.
26In the introduction to the 1950 conference of Chicago, Catherine Oliver Murra, Executive Secretary of the UNESCO / Library of Congress Bibliographical Planning Group, had spoken on the « history of some attempts to organize bibliography internationally ». As a member of the bibliographical staff of the Library of Congress, she produced the First Interim Report of the Library of Congress Bibliographical Planning Group, June 1949.3 She said that the point of view of the Library of Congress Bibliographical Planning Group was concerned with the devices and services which enable any investigator to discover, locate, and obtain whatever segment of man’s record of his thinking, activities, experiences, and knowledge (Murra, 1949a; 1949b).
27In 1965, Douglas John Foskett (June 27, 1918–May 7, 2004), a British librarian and library and information scientist, edited, introduced, and published a series of nineteen essays that Jesse Shera had authored since 1950 on the general outlook of libraries and the organization of knowledge, on classification and cataloguing, and on education for librarianship (Shera, 1966). The second part of this book encompasses the following six essays:
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Classification as the Basis of Bibliographic Organization (originally published in 1951);
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Classification – Current Functions and Applicability to the Subject Analysis of Library Materials (originally published in 1953, and reprinted in 1973);
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Pattern, Structure and Conceptualization in Classification (originally published in 1957);
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What Lies Ahead in Classification (originally published in 1960);
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The Dignity and Advancement of Bacon (originally published in 1962); and
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The Book Catalog and the Scholar – a Reexamination of an Old Partnership (originally published in 1962 and republished in 1963).
28In 1958, Shera issued a report on the International Study Conference on Classification for Information Retrieval, held in a retreat near Dorking, in Surrey, England, May 13–17, 1957. This conference originated with the meeting on scientific information held in 1948 by the Royal Society of London. The conference organizing committee was composed of these seven members: D. J. Campbell, J. E. L. Farradane, D. J. Foskett, Barbara Kyle, Mary Piggott, B. C. Vickery, and Leslie Wilson. This conference had the cooperation of the School of Librarianship and Archives of the University College, University of London, and the British Classification Group.
29S. R. Ranganathan, W. C. Berwick Sayers’ pupil, delivered the main talk, Library Classification as a Discipline, citing the rising importance of classification. During the evening session, Shera presented the paper, Pattern, Structure, and Conceptualization in Classification for Information Retrieval. The following days of the conference proceeded in the same manner with the presentation of three papers and the opportunity for discussion with several notable specialists. Shera also reported the approval of twelve conclusions and recommendations and composed a lengthy evaluation of the conference.
30Furthermore, Shera (1969) published the short paper The Changing Philosophy of Bibliographic Classification, stating that librarians distinguish between the organization of knowledge and the classification of books, believing in error that they are concerned only with the latter. The whole world of man’s knowledge is evolutionary, and the boundaries between the disciplines are fluid. Bibliographic classifications used to partition neatly bibliographic units, as though scientific disciplines were firmly stabilized. The Dewey Decimal Classification was structurally transformed by the Universal Decimal Classification by introducing a system of new symbols that made possible the unification of knowledge. S. R. Ranganathan postulated a faceted classification system in which coordinate classes or array of classes, composite classes, subordinate classes or chain of classes and combination of classes had to be provided by a bibliographic classification where knowledge could be expressed in terms of five fundamental categories: time, space, energy or action, matter, and personality, but, in words of Shera, librarians insisted in preferring an alphabetical catalogue, and closed the door to innovation. (Shera, 1960: 50)
31In this sense, bibliographic organization, and what we know today as knowledge organization in the form of classification, is one of foundational brick of Social Epistemology. Shera’s main work, The Foundations of Education for Librarianship dealt with « the classification of knowledge » (1972 : 119–128), especially in the fourth chapter, where he studied « An Epistemological Foundation for Library Science ». In 1965, in another monograph titled Library Science Today: Ranganathan Festschrift, edited by P. N. Kaula, Shera had also co-authored the article « Changing Concepts of Classification: Philosophical and Educational implications » making it patent in his philosophy.