[WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)

[phoebe ayers]

On 12/22/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

<snip>

> The fact that mistakes might happen doesn't make it OR.  You have
> to show how looking up a library catalogue is fundamentally
> different from looking up something in a book.  I don't think you
> have done that.  I think that an error in a library catalogue is not
> really a different problem from an error in a book, and an error in
> consulting the library catalogue is no different from an error in
> consulting the book.
>
> To me, these are logically indistinguishable:
> 1. "Joe Blow died in 1923. [Franky: Joe Blow, A worthless life]"
> 2. "Library of Congress has the 1923 edition. [LofC catalogue]


And for both these cases, cite as finely as you can: down to the page number
of the exact edition for the book, and with the LoC card number (it'll be
found in the full record, next to the ISBN if one exists) for the other.

I think these negative assertions are indistinguishable too:
> 1. "Franky's biography of Joe Blow doesn't say when he died
>     [Franky: Joe Blow, A worthless life]"
> 2. "Library of Congress doesn't have the 1923 edition.
>     [LofC catalogue]"


There is one fundamental difference: unless you're writing *about* the
biography or the LoC itself, why on earth would you include such a statement
in an article? IMHO, the absence of information in the few sources you may
have consulted doesn't constitute a useful statement for a global
encyclopedia. (And the fact that your sources were few is not a negative
judgement on your research skills; it's simply a fact of life -- it's likely
*none* of us will be able to consult all the potential useful sources of
information on any given topic unless the topic is so small as to be
basically NN in its own right. Hence the usefulness of collaboration).

As far as "the ultimate truthfulness" of these two statements: you're
totally right, they both depend on your skills as a researcher. For the book
statement, it depends on your reading comprehension abilities and ability to
search an index/read the complete book. For the LoC statement, it depends on
your ability to search. In general, we trust people's abilities to read, and
we may be able to trust their abilities to search, as well, but there seems
to be some confusion about what a library catalog is.

A catalog is not like a book (format aside) because it is a continually
updated series collection of collated and indexed metadata about other
works, whereas a book (except for other collections of information or
printed databases, like the phonebook) is usually a narrative about some
particular topic. A library catalog serves three major purposes: discovery
(what are some books about serial killers?); identification (what is the
name of the book about serial killers written by Brown?); and location (does
the LoC have the book by Brown about serial killers, and if so, where is
it?) Mistakes can enter at any of these stages, information can come from a
variety of places at any of these stages, and you have to be entirely clear
that you've got the right edition at stages 2 & 3. That's not to say that
for your statement (LoC doesn't have the 1923 edition) I wouldn't take your
word for it -- modern catalogs have been designed so that it's easy to find
things, just like it's easy to find web pages in the catalog of them we
affectionately call Google (though I think we all know how hard it is to
track down one rare snippet of information on the web, and try finding a
rare non-English title in LoC sometime).

However! There is one major caveat: not everything in a library is cataloged
and present in their online catalog. Not even (especially?) in the LoC.
Every library I have *ever* run across in my short career has a cataloging
backlog of some sort. Cataloging is hard and tedious and manually done by
trained professionals who take a lot of care in making sure they have the
right book, which is why catalogs are generally accurate, and irregardless
of this particular question or references in Wikipedia that's worth
remembered if one is trying to be comprehensive in one's researches :) And,
as Jayig and I have pointed out, holdings change, and sadly there is no
"permanent link" or "compare diffs" in most library catalogs; the best you
can do is cite a date. *No* library catalog will claim that "this is a full
and accurate record of everything we have," and if they do, they're either
very small or lying.
-- phoebe

p.s. the LoC catalog *is* peer-reviewed, because their records are
downloaded into worldcat and may be checked by many other people. Mistakes
are reported and fixed :)