BIBLIOGRAPHY

the systematic study and description of books. The field acquired special importance in the 20th century because of the need for effective organization of the records of human communication in the face of the enormous growth of publishing activity and the need, especially in undeveloped countries, for informed access to the world's scientific and technical information. It has been said that without bibliography, the records of civilization would be an uncharted chaos of miscellaneous contributions to knowledge, unorganized and inapplicable to human needs. The word bibliography, in its literal sense, derived from the Greek bibliographia (2nd century AD), means the writing of books, and it was so defined in the 17th century; since the 18th century, it has been used to denote the systematic description and history of books. It is now commonly used in two widely divergent, though basically connected senses: (1) the listing of books, arranged according to some system (in this sense it is called enumerative, systematic, or descriptive bibliography); and (2) the study of books as material objects; i.e., the study of the material of which books are made and the manner in which they are put together (in this sense commonly called critical bibliography). It is the function of bibliography to provide useful information for the student, in the one case supplying him with information about material for study, in the other helping him to establish the place of a book (or a piece of writing) in an author's production and its quality and authenticity as a text for study. the systematic study and description of books. Bibliography is either (1) the listing of books according to some system (descriptive, or enumerative, bibliography) or (2) the study of books as tangible objects (critical, or analytical, bibliography). The word is also used to describe the product of those activities: bibliographies may take the form of organized information about a particular author's works, about all (or selected) works on a given subject, or about a particular nation or period. A bibliography may also consist of meticulous descriptions of the physical features of a number of books, including the paper, binding, printing, typography, and production processes used. These bibliographies are then used by students and scholars to gain access to information about material for study in a given area and to help establish such facts about a book as printing date, authenticity, and its value for textual study. Descriptive, or enumerative, bibliography. The primary purpose of descriptive bibliography is to organize detailed information, item by item, culled from a mass of materials in a systematic way so that others can have access to useful information. In the earliest bibliographies, the organizing principle was simply that of compiling all the works of a given writer, either a writer's list of his own works (autobibliography) or a biographer's lists of his subjects' writings. Early Western autobibliographies are those by the 2nd-century-AD Greek physician Galen and the Venerable Bede (included in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 731). One of the first biographers to include bibliographies in his lives of church writers was St. Jerome in his De viris illustribus (Concerning Famous Men), in the 4th century. Bibliography was manageable when books were still manuscripts copied out in the scriptoria of the medieval European monasteries. After the invention of printing in the 15th century, however, books proliferated, and organizing information about them became both more necessary and more practical. As early as 1545 the idea of a universal bibliography aroused the German-Swiss writer Conrad Gesner to compile his Bibliotheca universalis of all past and present writers. Part of his plan, completed in 1555, was to divide entries into categories of knowledge. His attempts at both universality and classification earned him the title the father of bibliography. The vast numbers of books published as part of the modern knowledge explosion require elaborate methods of classification. Widely used systems are the Dewey Decimal Classification; the Library of Congress Classification, based on its collection; and the Universal Decimal Classification. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the widespread use of computers in processing this systematized information revived the possibility of creating a universal bibliography, including articles in periodicals. The problems threatening its implementation, besides those of worldwide standardization of cataloging entries and programming multilanguage materials, are the usual modern ones of cost, labour, and storage. What is meeting the need for comprehensive banks of recorded bibliographic data are the published catalogs of the great comprehensive libraries such as the British Museum and Bibliothque Nationale de France and the practice of producing and distributing information about newly published materials in machine-readable form, notably by the Library of Congress. Additional reading Theodore Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography, 2nd ed. rev. (1936); A. Esdaile, A Student's Manual of Bibliography, 3rd rev. ed. (1954); L.N. Malcles, Les Sources du travail bibliographique, 3 vol. (195058); Georg Schneider, Handbuch der Bibliographie, 4th ed. (1930, reprinted 1969); J.H. Shera and M.E. Egan (eds.), Bibliographic Organization (1951); Ronald Staveley, I.C. McIlwaine, and John H. St. McIlwaine, Introduction to Subject Study (1967); R. Stokes, The Function of Bibliography (1969); Curt F. Buhler et al., Standards of Bibliographical Description (1949); J.D. Cowley, Bibliographical Description and Cataloguing (1939); R.B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927); F.T. Bowers, Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1964) and Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949); O.M. Brack, Jr. and W. Barnes (eds.), Bibliography and Textual Criticism: English and American Literature, 1700 to the Present (1969); Robert B. Harmon, Elements of Bibliography (1981).