Bibliographic Relationships, Citation Relationships, Relevance Relationships, and Bibliographic Classification: An Integrative View

In the interests both of theoretical consistency and of practical potential, it is suggested that citation relationships and relevance relationships of certain kinds --ordinarily considered separately from (topic-oriented) bibliographic classification in general, and from bibliographic relationships in particular --would more profitably be treated by the classification-research community as (in Tillett's terminology) shared-characteristic relationships. On this basis, designers of library catalogs should work to offer users the opportunity to exploit, in an integrated manner, all sources of evidence of document relatedness.