Here is one of the notes I wrote during lgbtq* history month last year (well
during, isn't quite true, after):
The LISA case
This note will concern itself with three elements, the organisation of
knowledge as an institution building activity; the role of new information
and communication technologies; and the concept homosexuality.
The institutions with which we are concerned is Library and Information
Science Abstracts and those which surround it as knowledge making and
organising.
Library and Information Science Abstracts exists both as a paper based
subscription service published monthly and an electronic version accessible
via Cambridge Scientific Abstracts.
Kingston University does not have a subscription, neither does any public
library of which I know? I donıt even know how to find out which does?
The British Library however does.
Along with many other subscriptions such as Dissertations Abstracts and
Index to Theses.
Further, the British Library gained the library of the Library Association
in a way the story of which I do not know. What was an open access
collection in the basement of Ridgemount St. is now a closed access
collection within the vastness of St.Pancras. This has changed quite
fundamentally its nature. There is a collection on library and information
science at UCL, nearby.
The material of the collection within the British Library is catalogued
within the integrated catalogue. There is no access to this except the
electronic version and this is the mandatory method for ordering documents
from closed access to the reading rooms.
Library and Information Science Abstracts contains what it contains. The
British Library contains what it contains. Some of the documents abstracted
within LISA will lie within the British Library. I doubt there is any way
in telling the proportion.
Accessing the electronic version of LISA presents you with a very simple
client, into which you type a ³keyword². I presume a keyword means a string
which appears anywhere in a record. Entering ³homosexuality² gives 77
records. The paper version gives an alphabetic ordered subject index which
includes the term ³homosexuality² with a pointer to a record number, and
these are organised annually.
The catalogue of the British Library gives you a search client which gives a
bit over 2000 records, in February 2005, for the term ³homosexuality². For
comparison purposes, the library of the University of Toronto gives about
the same number, the Index to Theses 56, Dissertations Abstracts about 1200.
I email the LISA results to myself from the British Library. This message
I then print out, without reformatting, which gives me 16 pages. This I can
now read. Most of the articles cited are very short, less than five pages.
Though I am not sure what conclusions I may draw from this, after all much
of what I write is short. Iım going to work on the basis though that
reports of substantial pieces of research have to take more than ten pages
to be reported.
I also do a year count of records. This makes the 21st century the equal of
all others together on the literature, or nearly. Certainly if we count in
the last five years of the 20th, and we exclude Libraries for Social Change,
there appears almost nothing in the professional literature.
Let us state that we recognise, in case it isnıt clear, that we donıt know
what homosexuality is about, and we donıt know what terms might be used to
account for what we are calling homosexuality. This is after all one of the
points of the case.
Five of the records look as if they account for research which will be
relevant. Now we have to return to the British Library Integrated
Catalogue, this time as an ordering device.
How do we enter the records we have in machine form from LISA, but
fortunately printed off.
I havenıt a clue. I spend time wandering around this virtual engine of
social change, getting completely lost and irritated. At at I go to the
enquiry desk and a patient man comes over to where I am logged in, and shows
me what to do, a series of actions which I would never have worked out for
myself and I suspect will never learn, or possibly even ever execute
correctly.
Now we come to a problem which seems to be one of catalogue and document
storage rather than of the client. Journals appear to be organised as
volumes and years. I end up with three volumes of Library Quarterly but
twelve parts, in order to find three articles. One other journal comes with
about six parts, bound with tape, and within one of these I find the one I
seek. The two other journals also bound with tape do not include the parts
I seek. Is this because the holdings are incomplete, or because I failed
correctly to enter?
I will now retreat to inter library loan. this was accessible to me from
the record level of LISA, through Kingston University, and would be
available to anyone, though payment is involved, covered by my department.
The machine form of the records requires however re-entering into a client
within my Kingston University network.
They will take time to arrive. But I can then check the referenced
documents in the bibliography and see whether they contain ones not found in
the LISA search? I could have done this from those in the British Library
but I canıt write over everything again so prefer a print.
Of the articles read, two are by the same author, dealing with much the same
material, one simply a few years after the other. These deal with what is
called books for ³young adults². This seems to be a category created by and
for this particular institution, a section of the American Library
Association. This seems to me a challenged category. Who decides what
books are for young adults? I was a lot younger than a young adult when I
read Corydon, and it proved formative. Had I discovered Genet once I could
read, or Baldwin, I canıt imagine the impact, or rather I can. I did read
Renault at some time, and du Maurier, though not one particular text until
last year, yet none of these are included within her lists.
One text seems to deal essentially with what I am concerned, on how the
concept ³homosexuality² is dealt with in the mastersı level dissertation.
How many of these I wonder are within the 1200 of Dissertation Abstracts?
This seems to me an important area, what is being taught and worked on by
trainees will inform professional practice.
Now to return to the 2,000 plus articles in the British Library catalogue,
though this is to stray beyond the LISA case? Working through this number
isnıt the same scale as 77. Or to return to the Index of Theses, none of the
56 seemed to deal with my concept from the information perspective, though I
recognise I am now troubling us further. Whereas the Dissertations
Abstracts took us back to the scaling problem.
This amount of work so far has taken us about two half days, to find one
piece of research twice reported on a challenging category, and one piece
which might prove genuinely useful. Is this the total of two hundred years,
at least, of professional practice?
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