Cruising the Library by Adler Melissa;

Author:Adler, Melissa; [Adler, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415903875
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Figure 13. Library of Congress. Alterations to the Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Cellar floor plan. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress). Reproduction number: LC-USZ62–109565. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002719566/.

Figure 13 is a representation of the Library of Congress’s cellar floor as drafted in an architectural plan. The reading room floor above this shares the same basic outlines, with the seat of authority at the center, surrounded by the books and patrons. Libraries of virtually all sizes and shapes imitate the panoptic design of the Library of Congress, as they map knowledge in nearly identical sequences along their shelves. Large universities will have multiple library buildings specializing in particular disciplines spread across campuses, and variations on floor plans abound. Still, the critical disciplinary mechanism at work is the Library of Congress Classification, which structures the possibilities for assigning works to a location. More important, though, is how these architectures delimit and support the relationships among cataloged works. The diagram is repeated across localities, with some variation in form and content. In function, however, these replications of the abstract machine organize and discipline knowledge, operating as sites in the network where normative sexualities are distributed to the public. They are in every sense local extensions of the state and cultural apparatus.

Bibliographic classifications, subject headings, other classificatory techniques, and their attendant /enabling technologies operate in concert, by way of particularly insidious architectures that reside beneath the hood of the library catalog at the level of the database, and these techniques also govern how the books are displayed to the eye. The panoptic eye is simultaneously inside the system, disciplining and correcting subjects and seeing to it that authority headings and classes are in control, and outside looking in. Although the authority records do not perform the surveillance function in the way that algorithms and big data on the web do, authority control is happening at a series of levels, from inside the catalog, in the cataloging department, and at the Library of Congress, where the classifications and terms are designed and decided upon by the Policy and Standards Office. And though the control happens at every local point, the overarching control mechanism is far from localized: This function is repeated worldwide, and every instance is connected to the other through library networks. Standards ensure continuity across every system, but their deployment may vary from library to library, as each has its own multiplicity—its own collection, its own lines of shelves, its own purposes for which decisions about where to place materials may happen on a book-by-book basis. In other words, “among the discursive elements there are also whole families or formations of statements, whose catalogue is open-ended and subject to constant change.”36 The overall effect is to enforce equivalent statements about social norms through a vast network of knowledge organization systems.

A single catalog record is distributed and copied across a gigantic library network called WorldCat. The 72,000 member libraries can download to local systems complete catalog records produced by other member libraries.

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