The intellectual foundation of information organization
The intellectual foundation of information organization
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The major concern of this paper is the cultural ramification of the bibliographic conception of "authorship." Beginning with Foucault's question "what is an author" and his notion of an author as a cultural phenomenon, the paper proceeds to examine the treatment of authorship in cataloging practices of two ancient cultures, the Greek and the Chinese, as well as in the modern Anglo-American cataloging standards from Panizzi's 91 rules to the draft of Resource Description and Access (RDA). An author, as the study shows, is constructed as part of the recognition of "a work" as an essential communicative social entity. All cataloging practices and standards examined, east or west, ancient or modern, exhibit a similar obsessive attitude toward the imposition of an author, be it only a name or a culturally identified entity responsible for the work. In fact, the study demonstrates that as far as cataloging is concerned authorship is the role that is represented rather than any true intellectual responsibility.