Bibliocentrism, Cultural Warrant, and the Ethics of Resource Description: A Case Study

We have not properly studied the uses to which catalogs are put by their users, nor have we attempted until recently to consider empirical evidence in the construction of cataloging rules. The result is an oddly rationalized sort of pragmatism inherent in generations of rules for resource description. This lack of theoretical commitment in resource description has ethical implications for all of information organization because it leads to poorly served users of catalogs. One particularly egregious ethical issue is bibliocentrism. Beghtol challenges us to engage in applications research to affirm a theoretical basis, contrasting cultural warrant with ethical warrant. The importance of cultural warrant in the ethics of knowledge representation follows closely on Hjørland’s emphasis on activitytheoretic and domain-specificity. The present study asks whether schemas for resource description restrict access by constraining objectivity. The objective is to discover empirically, via case-study method, some of the ways in which standards for resource description might present threats to information ethics. The analysis of a set of specific cases uses bibliographic records analyzed using the aforementioned lenses: bibliocentrism, activity theory and use, cultural warrant, and exploitative power. Results show a paradigm of description that has little reference to potential uses of resources, raising a specter of unfulfilled expectations. We see the ethical limits of just this one aspect of resource description.We look toward design of an ethical, culturally focused, information retrieval paradigm