Session 8: Selective
Bibliography--Finding Aids analogous to
Knowledge-level Content
Introduction to Selective
Bibliography
Comparable to the "upper" level of Content in
the new simplified model we are using is the right side cell that focuses
on bibliographic tools that present their users with a view of those
resources (both literature and bibliography) which are "best" or "better."
The user of one of these selective bibliography tools does not have to
contend with reading through the whole corpus of past literature about a
topic; she just has to be able to find an expert's recommendations in one
of these selective bibliography tools of the best or most representative
books or articles or reports about a topic. Judgments are make by
authorities at this top level of bibliography; we, the readers, are told
what is best by eminent scholars and respected subject experts.
Just as we noted that recent textbooks in a
field are wonderful content sources of summary overview of a discipline or
aspect of a discipline's work, we will here note that finding a guide to
the literature, a particular form of selective bibliography, is a very
efficient method of starting out a research project. The user of
such a selective bibliography is actually "consulting" with a scholar of
the field (the compiler of the guide to the literature) for advice about
what the best resources are, how to use them, etc.
One more feature of all these bibliographic
tools talked about under Selective Bibliography is worth repeating too:
these tools are all retrospective, a word librarians use to
indicate the opposite of recurrent. Recurrent is
something done over and over again, periodically. Retrospective has
the sense of being done once, looking back on everything that was
published previously or made accessible at some time in the past. A
retrospective bibliography is essentially a one-time product, although as
you will see, the publication record of some of these products has
included updating them into various, irregularly published editions.
The Selective Bibliography cell contains what
we are labeling as research & subject guides (online or
print-based tools), selective & didactic bibliographies
(usually print resources, but not necessarily so), and subject directories
(again, usually online, but may be print-based too).
Research & Subject Guides
Research guides and subject
guides were known as guides to the literature a few decades ago, before
the presence of online, Internet-based resources. Guides to the
literature are, according to Freides, are
. . . works that present in
systematic fashion the over-all information system of a field.
Ordinarily this encompasses the basic pattern of organization of the
literature, and the major publications and retrieval tools. It
sometimes includes other matters as well, such as sources of data relevant
to the field (statistics, laws, etc.), organizations acting as sources of
information, descriptions of major library collections and archives.
Many guides identify the classic or landmark books in their fields, or
include basic bibliographies . . . . (Freides, p. 239)
With the advent of the Web, of
course, the format of some bibliographic tools began to change (and, to a
certain extent, still is changing). The printed form of the guide to
the literature began to see online compliments that are being called
either research guides or subject guides. Instead of quibbling about
the name given these tools, it makes sense to concentrate on the core
feature of Freides' definition above as indicative of what these, so far,
nameless bibliographic tools attempt to do: present in systematic
fashion the over-all information system of a field.
Indeed, the
online social science subject
guides that we are still in the process of building for you and your
colleagues in OU Advanced Programs graduate degree programs are all examples
of guides to the literature in a newer, online format. If you think
about it, the revised Freides model of literature and bibliography is what
a guide to the literature speaks to, and these social science subject
guides will give their users advise about the "best" in each category of
the model of literature and bibliography for each social science
discipline.
Currently, we cite four items
in our General Social Science guide under the Selective
Bibliography category, Research & Subject Guides:
First of all, a format
feature: notice the format of each of the four entries above, because that
format is used consistently throughout the set of 16 subject guides we are
building and maintaining for your use.
-
Resources that are owned or
accessible through OU Libraries are preceded with the
 symbol.
-
Resources that are available
on the Web, outside of the control of OU, are preceded with a small globe
of the world, a representation of the World Wide Web:
-
For OU material (),
if the item has a catalog record (Webcat), we give you the call number and
provide a link for you to look at that record (H61.S76
2002).
-
For OU material (),
if the item's content is accessible online, we also underline the title of
the record, and build into it a direct link to the content.
The first title in the list of
four items, The Social Sciences: A Cross-Disciplinary Guide to
Selected Sources, is a published (not an online resource)
guide to the literature of each of the social sciences:
Herron, Nancy L.
The Social Sciences: a cross-disciplinary guide to selected sources.
3rd ed. Engelwood, Colo: Libraries Unlimited, 2002.
This is a recent work (2002)
that brings together subject guides put together by 11 contributing
authors under the direction of a general editor (Nancy Herron); those 11
contributing authors are academic librarians at Penn State, the University
of Washington and the University of Maine. Fairly consistent in their
outline, these 16 subject guides begin with a narrative "essay" that
covers the nature of the discipline being covered, its subdivisions, and
how it fits into the social sciences. That essay is followed by a
number of different sections laying out categories like guides,
bibliographies, catalogs, review, dictionaries, encyclopedias, indexes and
abstracts, directories, handbooks, etc.
(Note: if you are
serious about knowing your way around the literature, bibliographic
mechanism, and reference tools of the social sciences and its associated
disciplines and professional areas, you need to consider purchasing the
most current paperback edition of Herron's huge, discipline-by-discipline,
cross-disciplinary guide to the social sciences.
Here is the Amazon.com entry for that book. It costs $60, and is
well worth it.)
The last two items in the list
of four sources above are both open Web resources:
Syracuse
University Library Subject Guides: Social Science
Penn
Library Research subject areas
You must be careful in your
use of these twp examples, however, because they may provide links to some
resources that only members of their own academic communities can actually
have access to. In other words, just as OU Libraries makes databases
available to use IF you know the appropriate authentication (4+4 and
password), so too other academic libraries make specific resources
available to only those who have the right authentication to do so.
However, we think you might find it helpful to see other ways of
organizing disciplinary resources, so use these guides with that in mind.
Selective & Didactic
Bibliography
If you recall, Freides
described the types of retrospective bibliography as being either
research-oriented (whose intent is to "open new routes to the
literature") or "didactic" or teaching --bibliography which
attempts to summarize what is thought to be known and to point out the
"best" to you. Research-oriented bibliography points the way
to the creation of new knowledge, while didactic bibliography aids
"the reader in selecting from a plethora of available materials." (Freides
231)
We have put selective and
didactic bibliography together because both words denote the intention of
aiding the student or other user in selecting only the best resources to
use. Time is of the essence; you aren't looking for all of
the relevant resources on a topic, you are looking for the absolutely best
resources to go to first.
For Selective &
Didactic Bibliography we will use the example of our
History subject guide's section on Selective & Didactic Bibliography:
As an example of this category
of bibliographic resource, we are including an annotation for the second
item in the list above,
Bibliographies in American History, 1942-1978: Guide to Materials for
Research. (Indeed, we are going
to give you an annotation of this item from the guide to the literature we
just finished introducing to you, Herron's work)
Bibliographies in American History, 1942-1978: Guide to Materials for
Research. Woodbridge, CT: Research
Publications, 1982.
A "comprehensive listing of
bibliographic materials in U.S. history from the nineteenth century
through 1978. Material coverage includes monographs; individual
articles as well as periodical indexes; U.S. and foreign government
documents; and guides to serials, archives, and manuscript collections.
All periods of history are included. Individual subjects covered
include cultural, diplomatic, military, and social history, as well as
works dealing with special topics such as race, religion, and genealogy.
Regional and local history of individual states, possessions, and
territories are covered." [Herron, p. 177]
Subject
Directories
Subject directories are, of
course, like large commercial subject directories, but focused on some
specific social science discipline, set of disciplines, or
multi-disciplinary areas within the social sciences. They should be,
however, academic in scope, just like the "academic directories" which
were already pointed out to you that are located on the
Searching / Browsing
tab of the Find It on the Web site. These subject
directories, however, will be more focused by subject.
Exercise 8: None. Work
on your pathfinder's Print Resources section instead
Project: Beginning a Draft of
Your Pathfinder's Print Resources section
While this
pathfinder section on print resources does not exactly follow on naturally from
the content of Session 8, it is time to get you at least started moving in the
direction of actually making some decisions about books and monographs that your
pathfinder audience should know about, and you already know have experience with
the two features of OU's catalog that will allow you to work on print resources:
-
You know about
Library of Congress Subject Headings
-
You have seen
examples of how to use the OU catalog, and have used it.
We have not yet
focused a session on recurrent disciplinary bibliography for you (ERIC,
PAIS, etc.) which will also contain information about books that will
turn out to be important to you, but you should at least get yourself going on
by looking through OU's Webcat catalog, and maybe even other
collections' catalogs through Worldcat, to see what seems to be
available on your pathfinder's topic.
Before putting
together your choices for the citations to books that should be added to your
pathfinder, however, remember
that information about different sections of the pathfinder, and what they
should contain, is found in the "Criteria for the Evaluation of Pathfinders"
that we have put together for you. You need to look at
4. Print Resources on that page. That
page is located at . . .
http://www.ou.edu/ap/lis5703/pathfinders/gradingcriteria.htm
. . . and is
formally linked to from the course's public site at (http://www.ou.edu/ap/lis5703/),
under the category labeled "Criteria for Pathfinder Evaluation."
As noted
above, we have always labeled a separate section of these pathfinders Print
Resources. And in our "Criteria for the Evaluation of Pathfinders," we give
four criteria for our assessment of your pathfinder's print resources section:
4. Print
Resources
-
Rationale for each title's inclusion is stated
(informative annotations are not required, but it is important to at least
note briefly why each title was selected for inclusion in your list)
-
List
is selective and appropriate for the topic
-
Titles
are scholarly or research in focus
-
Titles
are clearly organized into categories that are defined & logical
One special
procedural note for you to keep in mind for your annotations for each title:
Remember,
we know that it is impossible for you to have scanned or perused or read
through, in person, each of the books or reports or documents that you end up
deciding to include in your pathfinder's print resources section. So,
although annotations tell the user of your pathfinder about the item and its
contents, we understand that you, as distance students, simply don't have the
time or the ability to get copies of each potentially relevant book in front
of you for such an analysis. So, for you we are dropping this usual
expectation of the compiler of a pathfinder, allowing you instead to simply
indicate why an item is appearing in your pathfinder's selective list of print
resources. If the annotation is written by an important author, say so; if
the annotation appeared in a bibliography that is considered important, say
so. You get the idea.
Please
note, however, that if you find that another source that has supplied an
annotation to an item you are citing in your pathfinder, you may use it--but
with this very important stipulation: use quotation marks to indicate
that the words are not your own, or use paraphrasing; and
ALWAYS be explicitly
clear about indicating the source of
the words that you are using in your annotation. Attribution of intellectual
content is an academic responsibility that must be followed, and we
will fail the work of any student who is found to have plagiarized (used the
content of others without attribution), and report the incident to our
academic department, to the College of Arts and Sciences, and to the Graduate
College for their subsequent action concerning the student's standing as a
student of the University of Oklahoma.
As before,
even though you will be continuing to work on this print resources section of
your pathfinder for several weeks yet, you may submit your draft of what you get
done this week for feedback from me (as always, by way of
email at
jgoodson@ou.edu).
Be sure to put "Print Resources" in the subject line to help me give you credit
for completing the exercise. I'll provide feedback to you on what you submit,
what questions you have, etc.
You have one week to get this admittedly partial draft
of your final print resources section turned in.
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