Bibliography, from the Ancient Greek words biblion (meaning "book") and graphía (meaning "writing"), is the academic study of books as physical and cultural objects. This field is also called bibliology, which comes from the Greek word logía (meaning "study of"). English author John Carter explains that the word "bibliography" has two meanings. First, it can refer to a list of books used for research or by an author, known as enumerative bibliography. Second, it can describe the study of books as physical items, including their appearance and materials, which is called descriptive bibliography. This second meaning is especially important for people who collect books.
Etymology
The Greek word "bibliographia" was used by writers between the first and third centuries CE to describe the process of copying books by hand. In the 12th century, the term began to refer to the mental work of writing books. By the 17th century, it came to mean the practice of describing books. Today, the field of bibliography includes the study of books as physical objects. Bibliography is a method of learning about the past and present by examining written and printed materials. Bibliographers focus on comparing different versions of texts instead of explaining their meanings or judging their importance.
Field of study
Bibliography is a specific part of library science (or library and information science, LIS) and documentation science. It was created by a Belgian man named Paul Otlet (1868–1944), who started the field of documentation as a part of information sciences. He wrote about "the science of bibliography." Recently, some people have said that "the bibliographical paradigm" is no longer useful, and it is not often used in LIS today. Hjørland (2007) defended the idea of the bibliographical paradigm.
The study of bibliographies using numbers is called bibliometrics. This is now an important area in LIS and is used to make major decisions, such as whether to stop large agreements, by using tools like Unpaywall Journals for data analysis.
Branches
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Bibliography is a two-part scholarly field. The first part is called enumerative bibliography, which is the organized listing of books. The second part is called descriptive bibliography, which is the systematic description of books as physical objects. These two areas have different purposes and reasons for being used. Important people who helped start and develop the field include W. W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, Philip Gaskell, and G. Thomas Tanselle.
Bowers (1949) describes enumerative bibliography as a process that identifies books in "specific collections or libraries," within a certain subject, by an author, printer, or time period (3). He describes descriptive bibliography as the systematic description of a book as a physical object. Analytical bibliography, which is the most important part of descriptive bibliography, looks at the printing and all physical features of a book that help show the book's history and how it was made (Feather 10). This is the first step in describing a book and gives the language, rules, and methods that descriptive bibliographers use to describe books.
Descriptive bibliographers follow certain rules and classifications when they describe books. Titles and title pages are written in a style that looks like a copy of the original. Illustrations, typeface, binding, paper, and other physical parts of a book are described using standard methods, as Bowers explained in his important book, The Principles of Bibliographic Description. At its core, analytical bibliography is about the objective study of a book's physical features and its history, while descriptive bibliography uses all the information from analytical bibliography to create a detailed description of the book that best represents the printer's original idea and intention.
In addition to seeing bibliography as having four related areas (enumerative, descriptive, analytical, and textual), Bowers also mentions two other types of research: historical bibliography and aesthetic bibliography. Historical bibliography looks at printing practices, tools, and related documents, while aesthetic bibliography studies the art of designing type and books. These are often used by analytical bibliographers.
D. F. McKenzie expanded on earlier ideas about bibliography as described by Greg, Bowers, Gaskell, and Tanselle. He describes bibliography as "the study of texts as recorded forms and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception" (1999 12). This idea makes the field of bibliography broader by including "non-book texts" and looking at their material form, structure, and differences in text, as well as the technical and production processes that relate to social and cultural contexts. McKenzie's view connects textual objects or artifacts with social and technical factors that affect how they are made, shared, and how the ideal version of a book is determined (2002 14). In general, bibliography is about the material conditions of books and other texts, including how they are designed, edited, printed, shared, reprinted, and collected.
Bibliographic works vary in the amount of detail they provide, depending on their purpose. Generally, they can be divided into two categories: enumerative bibliography (also called compilative, reference, or systematic), which gives an overview of publications in a particular category, and analytical or critical bibliography, which studies the production of books. In the past, bibliography mostly focused on books. Now, both categories include works in other media, such as audio recordings, motion pictures, videos, graphic objects, databases, CD-ROMs, and websites.
An enumerative bibliography is a list of books and other works, such as journal articles. Bibliographies can range from "works cited" lists at the end of books and articles to complete and independent publications. A well-known example of a complete, independent publication is Gow's A. E. Housman: A Sketch, Together with a List of His Classical Papers (1936). As separate works, they may be in bound volumes, like those shown on the right, or in computerized bibliographic databases. A library catalog, although not called a "bibliography," is still considered bibliographic in nature. Bibliographic works are usually considered tertiary sources.
Enumerative bibliographies are based on a unifying principle, such as the creator, subject, date, topic, or other characteristic. An entry in an enumerative bibliography includes the main elements of a text resource, such as the title, the creator(s), the publication date, and the place of publication. Belanger (1977) distinguishes an enumerative bibliography from other types of bibliographies, such as descriptive, analytical, or textual bibliography, by saying that its purpose is to record and list, rather than to describe a source in detail or to mention the source's physical nature, materiality, or how the text was transmitted. An enumerative list can be either comprehensive or selective. One example is Tanselle's bibliography, which thoroughly lists topics and sources related to all forms of bibliography. A more common example is an enumerative bibliography that includes specific sources used in preparing a scholarly paper or academic term paper.
Citation styles vary. An entry for a book in a bibliography usually includes the following elements:
An entry for a journal or periodical article usually includes:
A bibliography may be arranged by author, topic, or some other system. Annotated bibliographies give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author when constructing a paper or argument. These descriptions, usually a few sentences long, provide a summary of the source and describe its relevance. Reference management software may be used to keep track of references and generate bibliographies as needed.
Bibliographies differ from library catalogs by including only relevant items rather than all items in a library. However, the catalogs of some national libraries effectively serve as national bibliographies, as these libraries own almost all the publications from their countries.
Fredson Bowers described and created a standardized practice for descriptive bibliography in his book, The Principles of Bibliographic Description (1949). Scholars today still consider Bowers' guide to be an authoritative work. In this classic text, Bowers describes the basic function of bibliography as, "[providing] sufficient data so that a reader may identify the book described, understand the printing, and recognize the precise contents" (124). Descriptive bibliography "is a form of biographical, and thus historical, scholarship."
They usually include information on the book as a material object:
This part of the bibliographic field examines the physical features of a textual artifact—such as type, ink, paper, format, impressions, and states of a book—to recreate the conditions of its production. Analytical bibliography often uses collateral evidence—such as general printing practices, trends in format, and responses to design—to examine the historical conventions and influences behind the physical appearance of a text. The bibliographer uses knowledge gained from studying physical evidence in the form of a descriptive bibliography or textual bibliography. Descriptive bibliography is the close examination and cataloging of a text as a physical object, recording its size, format, binding, and so on, while textual bibliography (or textual criticism) identifies variations and the causes of these variations.
Bibliographers
A bibliographer is someone who describes and lists books and other printed materials, paying attention to details like who wrote the book, when it was published, which edition it is, and how it is printed. A subject bibliographer focuses on a specific area, such as science or history, when listing books.
In a technical sense, a bibliographer is anyone who writes about books. However, since the 18th century, the term has meant someone who creates a complete description—sometimes just a list, sometimes more detailed—of all books written about a specific topic. Today, bibliography is not usually a full-time job, and most bibliographies are written about very narrow subjects by experts in those areas.
The word "bibliographer" is sometimes used today to describe certain roles in libraries and systems that organize book information.
One of the earliest known bibliographers was Conrad Gessner, who tried to list all books printed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in his work Bibliotheca Universalis (1545). Julius Petzholdt and Theodore Besterman also made efforts to create complete lists of books.
Non-book material
Organized lists of other types of media can be called by names that are similar to the word "bibliography" :