The Function of Bibliography

LIBRARIANS ARE COMMON USERS of enumerative bibliographies and check lists, but they are not so likely to take full advantage of descriptive bibliographies and of the more detailed and accurate information that these contain. The reason for this neglect is perhaps threefold: (1) many librarians have little or no acquaintance with analytical bibliography and thus do not understand the revolution that this method has caused in the techniques of differentiating, arranging, and describing books; (2) wanting this knowledge, they do not comprehend the relatively simple technical language in which descriptive bibliography (based on analytical) is written, and so do not try to cope with the valuable information offered in such works; (3) the result is to lead librarians to treat scholarly descriptive bibliographies as if they were only more diffusely written check lists and thus to ignore their full potential value in the normal identification and cataloging process by which books are prepared for scholarly users. Since many scholars, these days, require more information about the characteristics and status of books they are working with than librarians may always have the training to provide, an increasingly serious split is developing between the very two groups that should be most closely joined in mutual concerns. Any divergence of interests here is' wrong. Moreover, the practical effects may have serious consequences because of the non-bibliographical scholar's dependence upon the librarian to catalog books correctly and to provide the final authoritative word on the significance of the variant forms of books used as primary research sources, such as editions, issues, impressions. When the librarian's catalog entries conceal information, or provide positive misinformation, serious harm may follow. The question of the librarian's understanding of modern analytical bibliography and its purposes goes much farther than catalog entries