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Elaine Svenonius. The intellectual foundation of information organization. Cambridge, Mass., London: MIT Press, 2000. xvi, 255 pp. 24.50. 0 262 194333.
This book synthesises, explains, and comments on the intellectual foundation of information organisation in terms of the state-of-the-art research into the topic within library and information science (LIS).
The author's intention is to synthesise the literature about information organisation in a non-technical language in order to make it accessible and intelligible for people outside LIS. Svenonius claims that much of the literature on the intellectual foundation of information organisation is inaccessible to those not acquainted with the discourse of cataloguing, classification and indexing. The reason for this is, among other things, that it uses a technical vocabulary, and knowledge about it is scattered in various sources. This is indeed a good objective. LIS is not a discipline known for its export of ideas or knowledge to other disciplines or domains, as shown by, for instance, Lindholm-Romantschuk in terms of book reviews [1]. But why the author finds it necessary to write a book about this topic for people outside LIS is not stated. And after having read the book, this reviewer still feels that the answer is blowing in the wind.
The book is organised into two main parts of five chapters each. It ends with an afterword expressing the author's view on the further theoretical and practical development of information organisation.
According to the author, the first part of the book is '... an analytic discussion of the intellectual foundation of information organisation' (p. xi). The five chapters constituting Part 1 are kept on a general level of discussion. The second part concentrates on the various bibliographic languages used in the organisation of information.
Chapter I explains what is meant by `intellectual foundation'. The chapter also covers a discussion of the concepts of information and document, and a very brief presentation of the conceptual framework in a historico-philosophical context consisting of systems philosophy, the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. In addition, the purposes, principles and problems of information organisation are presented and discussed.
The second chapter deals with the bibliographic objectives. This is done partly by giving a brief overview of the objectives as they have been formulated and reformulated...